“It’s probably the most interesting presidential election I’ve seen in my lifetime,” I said to an American friend the moment I arrived to Washington. My friend was upset. “For you it’s interesting,” he said. “For us it’s painful.”

“What you’ve just said rings a bell,” I said. “This is exactly, word for word, what I keep saying to foreign journalists who come to Israel to write a story.” Covering politics in Israel is like covering a professional wrestling fight: the rivals exchange numerous hits, shout at each other, humiliate each other, disregard every rule, but in most cases the outcome is known in advance.

Covering politics in Israel is like covering a professional wrestling fight...in most cases the outcome is known in advance.

Americans are supposed to play their political game in a cooler way. At least, this is the impression a foreign correspondent get when he lands here, directly from the boiling quarrels of the Middle East. 

I had the opportunity to cover almost all the U.S. presidential campaigns since Jimmy Carter’s victory over Gerald Ford in 1974. I loved it—I loved the town halls and the rallies in remote places, where people are kind and willing to answer every clueless question from a foreign reporter; I loved the access to the candidates, weeks and months before the secret service builds a wall between them and real life; I loved the hectic atmosphere, described so well in the “Making of the President” books by Theodore H. White; I loved to see how little-known candidates like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama evolve, grow, and flourish; and I enjoyed every chapter: the spins, the buzz, the role played by big money.

The election campaign seems to be different this time: It looks different; it sounds different. The key word is anger—anger dominated the selection process in both parties. Angry voters elected angry candidates. If a candidate was not angry enough—e. g. Jeb Bush—the voters judged him unfit for the job.

The election campaign seems to be different this time: It looks different; it sounds different. The key word is anger.

An accidental tourist like me pauses here for a long list of questions: how do we quantify anger? Is it limited to the ballots or can it evaporate at some point and turn into violent acts, as Donald Trump has insinuated time and again? Is it a reflection of the bitterness of specific, limited constituencies or is it something much more widespread, an outrage of a generation or a class of Americans who feel that they were betrayed by the political and business elite, by the establishment? How to explain the Trump phenomenon, the Sanders phenomenon? 

The obvious answer is the economic collapse of 2008: the people who fell victim to the 2008 crisis, who lost a home or a job or had to give up college for their children are now in revolt. Why now and not earlier? Because four years ago they were struggling to survive; they were busy. Politicizing emotions is a long process; sometimes it takes years.

Tip O'Neill, speaker of the house in the second half of the previous century, taught us that all politics is local. There is a lot of truth in it even today, but is it the whole truth? In the flat world of 2016, local politics are executed in a global way. All politics are local and global at the same time. Political actions spread from country to country like the Zika virus, using social media as carriers.

The young Sanders supporters I met in Brooklyn, during the last Democratic debate, were not much different from the young Israelis I met in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2011, when hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets. Those Israelis complained about similar things: high prices, loss of employment security, difficulty getting a decent job, and the ever-growing gap between expectations and reality. They were promised to live in the land of opportunity; the opportunity was not there—not for them.

Politicizing emotions is a long process; sometimes it takes years.

They complained bitterly about the banks and the major corporations. They became so big that the government has no choice but to subsidize them when they lose money. And the people who run them get huge salaries and bonuses on the expense of the shareholders and the general public. Israel used to be a social democratic society, with a strong middle class and a relatively narrow gap between rich and poor. Now the rich are very rich and get richer, and the less fortunate are left behind.

The protest was fueled by social media: another similarity between Tel Aviv and the young voters in Brooklyn and elsewhere. The brazenness, the bluntness, the rudeness of the social media culture affected the political discourse. It became less cordial and more personal. 

Israelis were not alone. The Arab Spring predated the Israeli Summer. Greece and Spain followed. Occupy Wall Street, a smaller, more radical protest movement, appeared on the streets of major American cities in the fall of 2011. It was inspired by the protests in the Arab countries and in Spain. The demonstrators faded away after a while, but they left their mark: political agendas have changed dramatically, governments fell, conventions were shuttered. It remains to be seen if and how they will contribute to social justice and equality.

In Israel, the demand for social justice captured a prominent place on the national agenda; several activists in the protest movement were elected to the Knesset; the rhetoric has changed, priorities didn't. Not really. Most Israelis were not prepared for a revolution, not even a moderate revolution, Bernie Sanders-style. 

I have no way to know what lies ahead for the American society. What I can see so far is a unique electoral season, characterized by unusual, almost bizarre candidates, their qualification for the job questionable, and a long, destructive battle over votes. For many Americans it is painful. People in other countries can only wonder: is it the best America is able to produce? 

       

       

Event Information

A conversation with French Minister of Defense Jean-Yves Le Drian

On July 20 and 21, defense ministers from several nations will gather in Washington, D.C. at the invitation of U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. The meeting will bring together representatives from countries working to confront and defeat the Islamic State (or ISIL). French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian will be among those at the summit discussing how to accelerate long-term efforts to fight ISIL in Iraq and Syria. The close relationship between France and the United States has provided a solid base for security cooperation for decades, and in recent years, France has become one of America’s strongest allies in fighting terrorism and a prominent member of the international coalition to defeat ISIL.

On July 20, the Foreign Policy program at Brookings hosted Minister Le Drian for a discussion on French and U.S. cooperation as the two countries face multiple transnational security threats. Since becoming France’s defense minister in 2012, Le Drian has had to address numerous new security crises emerging from Africa, the Middle East, and within Europe itself. France faced horrific terrorist attacks on its own soil in January and November 2015 and remains under a state of emergency with its armed forces playing an active role in maintaining security both at home and abroad. Le Drian recently authored “Qui est l’ennemi?” (“Who is the enemy?”, Editions du Cerf, May 2016), defining a comprehensive strategy to address numerous current threats.

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Video

• Introduction and featured speaker
• Discussion
• Introduction et conférencier invité
• Débat

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20160720_france_defense_transcript

       

President Obama should be congratulated for highlighting the growing links between U.S. national security and climate change in his address before the U.S. Coast Guard Academy’s graduation ceremony earlier this week. The president’s speech drew upon earlier administration documents (the Third National Climate Assessment, the White House’s 2015 National Security Strategy, the Department of Defense’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, and the 2014 Department of Homeland Security’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review) to highlight the numerous challenges posed to our nation and the world by climate change, including:

• Threats to the world’s coastal infrastructure
• Rising temperatures and extreme weather
• Creation of failed states
• Degradation to the marine environment and critical ecological regions around the globe
• Threats to our energy production and delivery systems
• The devastating impact on native Arctic inhabitants

While these issues are important and deserve attention, the president was singularly silent on how best to manage threats, posed to the Arctic and the global environment by the rush to develop or utilize its resources (including energy, minerals, fish, and tourism) as the region opens with the melting of sea ice. I raise none of these issues to disagree with the president’s policies, or to suggest we should not develop the region’s resources or allow enhanced international maritime trade through our waters. In fact, I have often called for the economic development of Alaska with high safety standards for oil and gas production. If we allow these activities to proceed, we must be willing to provide the resources for infrastructure of all kinds: pipelines, onshore and offshore, and including ports, airfields, housing, etc., in order to be prepared for all contingencies.

Additionally, the president did not make any mention of the financial demands posed to the country to even meet the challenges in our own Arctic region of Alaska, let alone the many commitments we have already made in the Arctic Council, vis-à-vis instituting a true search and rescue capability and an oil spill prevention and response mechanism. The sad reality is that for all intents and purposes the United States has one heavy icebreaker to patrol our entire Arctic region. With cruise ships now sailing into very dangerous areas without adequate sea mapping, the prospect of a disaster occurring at least 800 miles from our nearest port in the Aleutians looms large. Were a cruise ship to run into ice, there is no logistical infrastructure in Northwest Alaska even to off lift passengers to on shore by helicopter. With icebreakers likely to cost at least $800 million to $1.5 billion each and take many years to build, where is the president's clarion call to the Congress on the need for more revenue for our Coast Guard to deal with the challenges highlighted in his speech?

Likewise, with many Asian nations interested in the fish resources of the Arctic, where are the funds both to determine what fish exist in Arctic waters including fish migrating from the Pacific as well as their volumes and assessments of how to insure their sustainability? If the president is serious about the threat of climate change on America’s front door to the Arctic, where are the U.S. Coast Guard and the State of Alaska as well as the myriad of federal agencies responsible for various activities in Alaska going to get the requisite resources to carry out their mandates?

Lacking preparedness and response

As a result of the administration’s commendable recent decision, Shell will be allowed to proceed with drilling several wells in the Chukchi Sea, allowing for development that benefits not only Alaskans but also the entire United States. While Shell will be subject to stringent regulatory oversight, Russia also plans to drill in its area of the Chukchi as well. What would happen if the Russians had an accident and the current brought oil into Alaskan waters? Would the United States, in concert with the Russians have the capability to contain it? Similarly, if there were a major maritime disaster in the Bering Strait where a South Korean ship literally disappeared several years ago, what response capability would we have if a ship containing hazardous cargo sank? While I applaud the decision of the administration to allow Shell to drill in the Chukchi, I am apprehensive of the U.S. commitment and ability to respond to any matter of national security in the Arctic, in part due to the severe lack of federal funds going to support this region.

Consequently, while recognizing that the American and broader Arctic is only a small part of the myriad of issues you identified in your Coast Guard address, I would urge that you begin to inform Congress and the American people of the large costs we may have to incur to protect ourselves against the forthcoming economic and social ravages of climate change.

Recommendations for Arctic funding

As a first step to begin to prepare for the direct “existential” challenges posed to Alaska and our broader responsibilities as chair of the Arctic Council, I would recommend the following:

1. A request to Congress for $1.2 billion dollars a year for 10 years to build a new fleet of ice worthy ships to deal with various contingencies in the Arctic (as defined by the Coast Guard) financed by an overall increase in the gasoline tax of $0.20/gallon of which $0.02 would go for Arctic infrastructure development;
2. As an interim step before these ships can be built, the appropriation of funds for the leasing of two Arctic worthy vessels per year;
3. An increase in alcohol and tobacco taxes (or perhaps a tax alongside the legalization of marijuana at the federal level) totaling $500 million dollars a year for 10 years for ancillary infrastructure development of ports, airfields, roads, etc. in Alaska to improve our ability to responds to climate contingencies both in  Alaska and throughout the circumpolar north;
4. A surcharge of one percent on all adjusted federal taxable incomes in excess of $200,000 and two percent on incomes above $500,000.

While there will be hews and cries by climate deniers and other opponents of any tax increase if as the president says the changing climate poses graves threat to our own and other nations security, these are modest proposals (particularly in comparison to an outright price on carbon) and should be passed with the greatest urgency.

       

The growth of suburban poverty over the past two decades raises questions about the ability of nonprofit organizations to adapt to this relatively new geography of metropolitan poverty. These organizations play multiple roles, including providing basic safety net services, connecting residents to new opportunities, and serving as advocates (and sometimes as organizers) for low-income communities.

Although federal, state, and local governments are often the primary funders of nonprofits, governments do not often take the lead in creating new organizational capacities or in coordinating capacity across political jurisdictions. In many regions, the local philanthropic community has become aware of these gaps in services for the poor and has sought to assist the nonprofit community in building capacity and expanding activities. Local foundations are experimenting with various strategies to address the growing dispersion of poverty.

This analysis combines an original data set of foundation grants for social services with in-depth interviews to assess the role of foundations in supporting the suburban social safety net in the Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, and Detroit regions. It finds that:

Suburban community foundations in the four regions studied are newer and smaller than those in core cities, despite faster growth of suburban poor populations. In the regions studied, most suburban community foundations began operating in the 1990s, and have not accumulated significant asset bases. Some larger city-based foundations have taken a regional approach, but face restrictions on the extent to which they can address growing need in poor suburban communities.

The share of foundation dollars targeted to organizations serving low-income residents varies widely across regions, but relatively few of those dollars are devoted to building organizational capacity in the suburbs. Chicago saw the largest share of foundation grant dollars go to organizations serving low-income people (60 percent), while Atlanta posted the lowest share (19 percent). Detroit was the only region where total grants to suburban-based human service providers were relatively comparable to their city-based counterparts.

Suburbs with high rates of poverty have substantially fewer grantees and grant dollars per poor person than either central cities or lower-poverty suburbs. Though metropolitan Atlanta has the highest rate of suburban poverty among the regions studied, it has the lowest rate of suburban grant-making per poor person. Denver’s results are a mirror image of Atlanta’s, with the lowest poverty rate and highest suburban grant-making per poor person.

Four types of strategies to build and strengthen the capacity of the suburban safety net are showing promise in these regions. Each region is engaging in four types of capacity building strategies: supporting existing regional organizations, creating new regional organizations, supporting regional networks, and establishing new suburban community foundations.

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In a rare Kumbaya moment, the nation's leaders of both parties have decided that rebate checks and a flurry of other short-term measures are needed to help stave off an economic slowdown.

Unfortunately, but predictably, we're hearing far less from Capitol Hill and the campaign trail about the bigger picture and the long-term challenges facing the American economy.

Increasing competition from nations like China and India, the impending retirements of the baby boomers, and the highly unequal distribution of benefits from the recent expansion all signal the potential for slower U.S. economic growth in the future.

These challenges, and our responses, will resonate throughout the Puget Sound region.

Already, the region is one of America's economic juggernauts. According to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan area is the fourth-most productive in the world. And the ports of Seattle and Tacoma together form the eighth-largest gateway for foreign goods nationwide.

In that strength — and the strength of other metropolitan areas around the country — are the seeds of solutions.

Like the call for "three T's" in the stimulus debate — measures that are timely, targeted and temporary — policies to improve our nation's long-run economic performance and address its overhanging challenges would instead do well to focus on the "three I's" — innovation, intellect and infrastructure.

Innovation has always served to propel economic growth. Here, Puget Sound companies lead the world in the fields of aerospace, software and retailing, developing new ideas and products that trump the labor-cost advantages of offshoring.

Yet as a nation, we have fallen behind European competitors in innovative new-growth fields like alternative energy, where none of the world's 10 largest solar-cell manufacturers, and only one of the world's 10 largest wind-turbine manufacturers, is a U.S. company.

Intellect — the knowledge and skills of our people — translates into economic growth by raising worker output and incomes and creating more of the first "I," innovation.

Yet, while the United States sends the highest share of its young people to college worldwide, our rank falls to 16th when you measure who actually graduates. And though the Puget Sound region boasts one of the most-educated adult populations in the nation, the feeder system (especially Seattle's public schools) loses too many young people along the pathway to higher education.

Infrastructure supports long-term economic growth in many ways. High-quality transportation infrastructure — roads, transit, rail and ports — speeds the movement of goods and people within and across markets.

Yet, the Seattle area succeeds economically despite the real hurdles it faces on this front. Even taking into account high performers like Sea-Tac Airport and King County Metro, rising congestion highlights the lack of cogent plans for key corridors like Highway 520 and the Alaskan Way Viaduct, as well as the need for a renewed commitment to rail transit.

To its credit, the Puget Sound region, like other metropolitan areas around the country, has tried to tackle some of these issues on its own.

But, because the route to resolving our long-term challenges runs through areas like Seattle, its issues demand national attention.

For instance, shouldn't the federal government — through direct investments in scientific research and favorable tax treatment for corporate investment in research and development — help put innovative regions like Puget Sound ahead of the curve in cutting-edge "green" industries?

To upgrade our nation's intellectual capacity, shouldn't the federal government partner with states, localities and the private sector to support the diffusion of successful, entrepreneurial urban education models for districts like Seattle?

And on infrastructure, shouldn't the federal government deploy its roughly $50 billion in annual transportation expenditures in smarter ways to help relieve congestion and promote sustainability in key trade corridors like the Seattle-Tacoma area?

Once we get past the stimulus frenzy, let's have a real debate about the blueprint for bolstering America's long-term economic growth.

Building on the strengths, and addressing the challenges, of the "three I's" in regions like Seattle ought to be another strategy leaders in our nation's capital can agree upon.

Alan Berube is research director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. David Jackson is a policy analyst with the program.

      

       

       

       

This post originally appeared in the opinion page of the Boston Globe on October 1, 2015.

As they ratchet up a campaign for backdoor access to information on iPhones and other devices with encryption, some law enforcement leaders paint a dark vision of technology. Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance suggests that passcodes on smartphones blocked identification of a murderer. British Prime Minister David Cameron sees a “safe haven” for terrorists “in dark places.” FBI Director James Comey alludes to phones buzzing devilish messages in the pockets of ISIS recruits and says widespread encryption “threatens to lead us to a very, very dark place.”

Sure, it’s the job of law enforcement officers to look on the dark side, and to focus on protecting people and catching criminals. But evil lies with terrorists and criminals — not the phones or apps they use. Cellphones are targets simply because they have become such rich new sources of evidence for law enforcement. Chief Justice John Roberts called them windows into our entire lives.

Comey acknowledges the benefits of strong encryption may outweigh the costs, but says “part of my job is make sure the debate is informed by a reasonable understanding of the costs.” Part of my job at the Commerce Department a few years ago was to make sure government debate on security and law enforcement issues was informed by a reasonable understanding of costs to security and privacy, innovation, economic growth, and democratic values in the world.

With backdoors, these costs are real. Leading cryptologists have detailed how backdoors would create “grave security risks.” Comey has suggested to Congress that tech companies can solve this problem if only they spend enough time on it. Yet no amount of magical thinking can undo the contradiction between promoting strong encryption as a defense against the barrage of identity theft, espionage, and other cybercrimes while opening up new vulnerabilities.

There is an acute need to strengthen data security everywhere, and no realistic way to leave a door open for good guys and democracies that have rigorous checks and balances but not for cybercriminals or authoritarian states.

Backdoors undermine not only security, but also the competitive position of US companies that are trying to strengthen global trust in their brands and correct perceptions of “direct access” for US intelligence and law enforcement left by the Snowden leaks.

If backdoors are adopted for US products, people intent on keeping information secure, whether for benign or nefarious reasons, will turn to alternatives like cheap burner phones, devices sold in other countries, and encryption applications.

The United States would face a choice of whether to join the ranks of countries that try to block devices and services. That dilemma shows another important cost of backdoors — they undermine America’s position in the world.

The United States has promoted technologies that help democratic activists avoid surveillance by repressive governments, objected to measures in India and China that imply backdoors or block imports of encrypted devices like Blackberries, and taken unprecedented steps to provide transparency and limits on foreign intelligence collection. If the United States adopts backdoor requirements, though, no matter how constrained by checks and balances, it will face cries of hypocrisy.

In the backdrop of President Obama’s discussions with Chinese President Xi Jinping about cybersecurity are concerns about Chinese measures that require “secure and controllable” information technology and assert “Internet sovereignty.” It is hard to picture our president making headway on such concerns if his own government is contemplating backdoors.

In the end, the president himself likely will have to decide where his administration comes out on backdoors. When he does, he will have to pick sides.

The choices are less stark than the law enforcement meme “going dark” implies. Even so, it may be, as Chief Justice Roberts has written, that “Cellphones have become important tools in facilitating coordination and communication among members of criminal enterprises” but “Privacy comes at a cost.” So do security and trust.

The time has come for the president to shut the door on backdoors and send a clear message to the world that American technology is a trusted instrument of freedom.

       

       

       

Executive Summary

At the invitation of President George W. Bush, the G20 leaders met on November 15, 2008, in Washington, DC, in response to the worldwide financial and economic crisis. With this summit meeting the reality of global governance shifted surprisingly quickly. Previously, major global economic, social and environmental issues were debated in the small, increasingly unrepresentative and often times ineffectual circle of G8 leaders. Now, there is a larger, much more legitimate summit group which can speak for over two-thirds of the world’s population and controls 90% of the world’s economy.

The successful first G20 Summit provides a platform on which President-elect Obama can build in forging an inclusive and cooperative approach for resolving the current financial and economic crisis. Rather than get embroiled in a debate about which country is in and which country is out of the summit, the new U.S. administration should take a lead in accepting the new summit framework for now and focus on the substantive issues. Aside from tackling the current crisis, future G20 summits should also drive the reform of the international financial institutions and address other major global concerns—climate change, poverty and health, and energy among others. With its diverse and representative membership of key countries and with a well-managed process of summit preparation and follow-up the new G20 governance structure would allow for a more inclusive deliberation and more effective response to today’s complex global challenges and opportunities.

Policy Brief #168

A Successful G20 Summit—A Giant Step Forward

Once announced, there was speculation that the G20 Summit would be at best a distraction and at worst a costly failure, with a lame duck U.S. president hobbled by a crisis-wracked economy and a president-elect impotently waiting at the sidelines, with European leaders bickering over seemingly arcane matters, and with the leaders of the emerging economies sitting on the fence, unwilling or unprepared to take responsibility for fixing problems not of their making.

As it turned out, the first G20 Summit was by most standards a success. It served as a platform for heads of state to address the current financial turmoil and the threats of the emerging economic crisis facing not only the U.S. and Europeans, but increasingly also the rest of the world. The communiqué unmistakably attributes blame for the crisis where it belongs—to the advanced countries. It lays out a set of principles and priorities for crisis management and an action plan for the next four months and beyond, and it promises to address the longer-term agenda of reform of the global financial system. Very importantly, it also commits the leaders to meet again in April 2009 under the G20 umbrella. This assures that the November G20 Summit was not a one-off event, but signified the beginning of a new way of managing the world economy. The U.S. Treasury, which apparently drove the decision to hold the G20 rather than a G8 summit and which led the brief preparation process, deserves credit for this outcome.

A Long Debate over Global Governance Reform Short-circuited

With this successful summit a number of unresolved issues in global governance were pushed aside virtually overnight:

• The embarrassing efforts of past G8 summits to reach out to the leaders of emerging market economies with ad hoc invitations to join as part-time guests or through the well-meaning expedient of the “Heiligendamm Process”—under which a G8+5 process was to be institutionalized—were overtaken by the fact of the G20 summit.
• A seemingly endless debate among experts about what is the optimal size and composition for an expanded summit—G13, G14, G16, G20, etc. —was pragmatically resolved by accepting the format of the already existing G20 of finance ministers and central bank presidents, which has functioned well since 1999. With this, the Pandora’s Box of country selection remained mercifully closed. This is a major accomplishment, which is vitally important to preserve at this time.
• The idea of a “League of Democracies” as an alternative to the G8 and G20 summits, which had been debated in the U.S. election, was pushed aside by the hard reality of a financial crisis that made it clear that all the key economic players had to sit at the table, irrespective of political regime.
• Finally, the debate about whether the leaders of the industrial world would ever be willing to sit down with their peers from the emerging market economies as equals was short circuited by the picture of the U.S. president at lunch during the G20 Summit, flanked by the presidents of two of the major emerging economies, Brazil and China. This photograph perhaps best defines the new reality of global governance in the 21st Century.

Is the G20 Summit Here to Stay?

The communiqué of the November 15, 2008 Summit locked in the next G20 summit and hence ordained a sequel that appears to have enshrined the G20 as the new format to address the current global financial and economic crisis over the coming months and perhaps years. Much, of course, depends on the views of the new U.S. administration, but the November 2008 Summit has paved the way for President Obama and his team to move swiftly beyond the traditional G8 and to continue the G20 format.

In principle there is nothing wrong with exploring options for further change. However at this juncture, we strongly believe that it is best for the new U.S. administration to focus its attention on making the G20 summit format work, in terms of its ability to address the immediate crisis, and in terms of subsequently dealing with other pressing problems, such as global warming and global poverty. There may be a need to fine-tune size and composition, but more fundamental changes, in our view, can and should wait for later since arguments about composition and size—who is in and who is out—could quickly overwhelm a serious discussion of pressing substantive issues. Instead, the next G20 Summit in the United Kingdom on April 2, 2009 should stay with the standard G20 membership and get on with the important business of solving the world’s huge financial and economic problems.

One change, however, would be desirable: At the Washington Summit in November 2008 two representatives for each country were seated at the table, usually the country’s leader and finance minister. There may have been good reasons for this practice under the current circumstances, since leaders may have felt more comfortable with having the experts at their side during intense discussions of how to respond to the financial and economic crisis. In general, however, a table of 40 chairs undoubtedly is less conducive to an open and informal discussion than a table half that size. From our experience, a table of 20 can support a solid debate as long as the format is one of open give and take, rather than a delivery of scripted speeches. This is not the case for a table with 40 participants. The G8 format of leaders only at the table, with prior preparation by ministers who do not then participate in the leaders level summits, should definitely be preserved. To do otherwise would dilute the opportunity for informal discussion among leaders, which is the vital core of summit dynamics.

What Will Happen to the G8 Summit and to the G7 and G20 Meetings of Finance Ministers?

As the world’s financial storm gathered speed and intensity in recent months, the inadequacy of the traditional forums of industrial countries—the G8 group of leaders and the G7 group of finance ministers—became obvious. Does this mean that the G8 and G7 are a matter of the past? Most likely not. We would expect these forums to continue to meet for some time to come, playing a role as caucus for industrial countries. In any event, the G20 finance ministers will take on an enhanced role, since it will be the forum at which minister-level experts will lay the ground on key issues of global financial and economic management to ensure that they are effectively addressed at summit level by their leaders. The G20 Summit of November 15 was prepared by a meeting of G20 finance ministers in this fashion.

It may well be that the dynamics of interactions within the G20 will cause coalitions to be formed, shifting over time as issues and interests change. This could at times and on some issues involve a coalition of traditional G7 members. However, with increasing frequency, we would expect that some industrial countries would temporarily team-up with emerging market country members, for example on agricultural trade policies, where a coalition of Argentina, Australia, Brazil and Canada might align itself to challenge the agricultural protection policies of Europe, Japan and the United States. Or in the area of energy, a coalition among producer states, such as Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and Saudi Arabia might debate the merits of a stable energy supply and demand regime with an alliance among energy users, such as China, Europe, Japan, South Africa and the United States. It is this potential for multiple, overlapping and shifting alliances, which creates the opportunities for building trust, forcing trade-offs and forging cross-issue compromises that makes the G20 summit such an exciting opportunity.

What Should Be the Agenda of Future G20 Summits?

The communiqué of the November 2008 G20 Summit identified three main agenda items for the April 2009 follow-up summit: (1) A list of key issues for the containment of the current global financial and economic crisis; (2) a set of issues for the prevention of future global financial crises, including the reform of the international financial institutions, especially the IMF and World Bank; and (3) a push toward the successful conclusion of the Doha Round of WTO trade negotiations.

The first item is obviously a critical one if the G20 is to demonstrate its ability to help address the current crisis in a meaningful way. The second item is also important and timely. The experience with reform of the global financial institutions in the last few years has demonstrated that serious governance changes in these institutions will have to be driven by a summit-level group that is as inclusive as the G20. We would hope that Prime Minister Gordon Brown, as chair—with his exceptional economic expertise and experience in the international institutions, especially the IMF—will be able to forge a consensus at the April 2 summit in regard to reform of the international financial institutions. The third agenda item is also important, since the Doha Round is at a critical stage and its successful conclusion would send a powerful signal that the world community recognizes the importance of open trade relations in a time of crisis, when the natural tendency may be to revert to a protectionist stance.

However, we believe three additional topics should be added to the agenda for the April 2009 G20 Summit:

• First, there should be an explicit commitment to make the G20 forum a long-term feature of global governance, even as the group may wish to note that its size and composition is not written in stone, but subject to change as circumstances change.
• Second, the communiqué of the November summit stated that the G20 countries are “committed to addressing other critical challenges such as energy security and climate change, food security, the rule of law, and the fight against terrorism, poverty and disease”. This needs to be acted upon. These issues cannot be left off the table, even as the global financial and economic crisis rages. If anything, the crisis reinforces some of the key challenges which arise in these other areas and offers opportunities for a timely response. The U.K.-hosted summit should launch a G20 initiative to develop framework ideas for the post-Kyoto climate change agreement at Copenhagen.
• Third, assuming the April 2009 summit commits itself—as it should—to a continuation of the G20 summit format into the future, it must begin to address the question of how the summit process should be managed. We explore some of the possible options next.

How Should the G20 Summit Process Be Managed?

So far the G7, G8 and G20 forums have been supported by a loose organizational infrastructure. For each group the country holding the rotating year-long presidency of the forum takes over the secretariat function while a team of senior officials (the so-called “sherpas”) from each country meets during the course of the year to prepare the agenda and the communiqué for leaders and ministers. This organization has the advantage of avoiding a costly and rigid bureaucracy. It also fosters a growing level of trust and mutual understanding among the sherpas.

The problem with this approach has been two-fold: First, it led to discontinuities in focus and organization and in the monitoring of implementation. For the G20 of finance ministers, this problem was addressed in part by the introduction of a “troika” system, under with the immediate past and future G20 presidencies would work systematically with the current G20 presidency to shape the agenda and manage the preparation process. Second, particularly for the countries in the G20 with lesser administrative capacity, the responsibility for running the secretariat for a year during their country’s presidency imposed a heavy burden.

For the G20 summit, these problems will be amplified, not least because these summits will require first-rate preparation for very visible and high-level events. In addition, as the agenda of the G20 summit broadens over time, the burden of preparing a consistent multi-year agenda based on strong technical work will be such that it cannot be effectively handled when passed on year to year from one secretariat in one country to another secretariat in another country, especially when multiple ministries have to be engaged in each country. It is for this reason that the time may have come to explore setting up a very small permanent secretariat in support of the G20 summit.

The secretariat should only provide technical and logistical support for the political leadership of the troika of presidencies and for the sherpa process, but should not run the summit. That is the job of the host member governments. They must continue to run the summits, lead the preparations and drive the follow-up. The troika process will help strengthen the capacity of national governments to shoulder these burdens. Summits are the creatures of national government authorities where they have primacy, and this must remain so, even as the new summits become larger, more complex and more important.

Implications for the Obama Administration

The November 2008 G20 Summit opened a welcome and long-overdue opportunity for a dramatic and lasting change in global governance. It will be critical that the leaders of the G20 countries make the most of this opportunity at the next G20 Summit on April 2. The presence of U.S. President Obama will be a powerful signal that the United States is ready to push and where necessary lead the movement for global change. President-elect Obama’s vision of inclusion and openness and his approach to governing, which favors innovative and far-reaching pragmatic responses to key national and global challenges, make him a great candidate for this role.

We would hope that President Obama would make clear early on that:

• He supports the G20 summit as the appropriate apex institution of global governance for now;
• He may wish to discuss how to fine-tune the summit’s composition for enhanced credibility and effectiveness but without fundamentally questioning the G20 framework;
• He supports cooperative solutions to the current financial crisis along with a serious restructuring of the global financial institutions;
• He will look to the G20 summit as the right forum to address other pressing global issues, such as climate change, energy, poverty and health; and
• He is ready to explore an innovative approach to effectively manage the G20 summit process.

These steps would help ensure that the great promise of the November 2008 G20 Summit is translated into a deep and essential change in global governance. This change will allow the world to move from a governance system that continues to be dominated by the transatlantic powers of the 20th century to one which reflects the fundamentally different global economic and political realities of the 21st century. It would usher in a framework of deliberation, consultation and decision making that would make it possible to address the great global challenges and opportunities that we face today in a more effective and legitimate manner.

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Policy Brief #174

A nation’s education system is a pillar of its economic strength and international competitiveness. The National Bureau of Economic Research analyzed data from 146 countries, collected between 1950 and 2010, and found that each year of additional average schooling attained by a population translates into at least a two percent increase in economic output. A 2007 World Bank policy research working paper reported similar results. Based on these findings, if the United States increased the average years of schooling completed by its adult population from the current 12 years to 13 years—that is, added one year of postsecondary education—our gross domestic product would rise by more than $280 billion.

The story also can be told by focusing on the returns to education for individuals. The difference in income between Americans who complete high school and those who drop out after 10th grade exceeds 50 percent. Large income differentials extend throughout the continuum of education attainment, with a particularly huge gap occurring between an advanced degree and a four-year college degree.

Although education clearly pays, the education attainment of the nation’s youth has largely stagnated, falling substantially behind that of countries with which we compete. In 1960, the United States led the world in the number of students who graduated from high school. Today young adults in many countries, including Estonia and Korea, exceed their U.S. counterparts in education attainment.

	RECOMMENDATIONS
	America’s economic productivity and competitiveness are grounded in education. Our public schools and our higher education institutions alike are falling behind those of other nations. Four policy proposals offer substantial promise for improving American education, are achievable and have low costs: Choose K–12 curriculum based on evidence of effectiveness. Evaluate teachers in ways that meaningfully differentiate levels of performance. Accredit online education providers so they can compete with traditional schools across district and state lines. Provide the public with information that will allow comparison of the labor market outcomes and price of individual postsecondary degree and certificate programs.

The problem of low education attainment is particularly salient among students from low-income and minority backgrounds. The graduation rate for minorities has been declining for 40 years, and majority/minority graduation rate differentials have not converged. Hispanic and black students earn four-year or higher degrees at less than half the rate of white students.

The economic future of the nation and the prospects of many of our citizens depend on returning the United States to the forefront of education attainment. Simply put, many more of our students need to finish high school and graduate from college.

At the same time, graduation standards for high school and college must be raised. Forty percent of college students take at least one remedial course to make up for deficiencies in their high school preparation, and a test of adult literacy recently given to a random sample of graduating seniors from four-year U.S. institutions found less than 40 percent to be proficient on prose and quantitative tasks.

Barriers to Innovation and Reform

Our present education system is structured in a way that discourages the innovation necessary for the United States to regain education leadership. K-12 education is delivered largely through a highly regulated public monopoly. Outputs such as high school graduation rates and student performance on standardized assessments are carefully measured and publicly available, but mechanisms that would allow these outputs to drive innovation and reform are missing or blocked. For example, many large urban districts and some states are now able to measure the effectiveness of individual teachers by assessing the annual academic growth of students in their classes. Huge differences in teacher effectiveness are evident, but collective bargaining agreements or state laws prevent most school district administrators from using that information in tenure or salary decisions.

Further complicating K-12 reform is the fact that authority for education policy is broadly dispersed. Unlike countries with strong national ministries that can institute top-down reforms within the public sector, education policy and practice in the United States are set through a chaotic network of laws, relationships and funding streams connecting 16,000 independent school districts to school boards, mayors, and state and federal officials. The lack of central authority allows the worst characteristics of public monopolies to prevail—inefficiency, stasis and catering to interests of employees—without top-down systems’ offsetting advantage of being capable of quick and coordinated action.

The challenges to reforming higher education are different. The 6,000-plus U.S. postsecondary institutions have greater flexibility to innovate than do the public school districts—and a motive to do so, because many compete among themselves for students, faculty and resources. However, while output is carefully measured and publicly reported for public K-12 schools and districts, we have only the grossest measures of output for post secondary institutions.

Even for something as straightforward as graduation rates, the best data we have at the institutional level are the proportion of full-time, first-time degree-seeking students who graduate within 150 percent of the normal time to degree completion. Data on critical outputs, including labor market returns and student learning, are missing entirely. In the absence of information on issues that really matter, postsecondary institutions compete and innovate on dimensions that are peripheral to their productivity, such as the winning records of their sports teams, the attractiveness of their grounds and buildings, and their ratio of acceptances to applications. Far more information is available to consumers in the market for a used car than for a college education. This information vacuum undermines productive innovation.

Examining Two Popular Reforms

Many education reformers across the political spectrum agree on two structural and governance reforms: expanding the public charter school sector at the expense of traditional public schools and setting national standards for what students should know. Ironically, the evidence supporting each of these reforms is weak at best.

Charter schools are publicly funded schools outside the traditional public school system that operate with considerable autonomy in staffing, curriculum and practices. The Obama administration has pushed to expand charter schools by eliminating states that don’t permit charters, or capping them, from competition for $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funding. Both President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have proposed shuttering poorly performing traditional public schools and replacing them with charters.

What does research say about charter schools’ effects on academic outcomes? Large studies that control for student background generally find very small differences in student achievement between the two types of public schools.

For example, on the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (the “Nation’s Report Card”), white, black and Hispanic fourth graders in charter schools performed equivalently to fourth-graders with similar racial and ethnic backgrounds in traditional public schools. Positive findings do emerge from recent studies of oversubscribed New York and Boston area charter schools, which use lotteries to determine admission. But these results are obtained from children whose parents push to get them into the most popular charter schools in two urban areas with dynamic and innovative charter entrepreneurs.

What about common standards? Based on the belief that high content standards for what students should know and be able to do are essential elements of reform and that national standards are superior to individual state standards, the Common Core State Standards Initiative has signed up 48 states and 3 territories to develop a common core of state standards in English-language arts and mathematics for grades K-12. The administration has praised this joint effort by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, made participation in it a prerequisite for Race to the Top funding, and set aside $350 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding to develop ways to assess schools’ performance in meeting common core standards.

Does research support this approach? The Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings examined the relationship between student achievement outcomes in mathematics at the state level and ratings of the quality of state content standards in math. There was no association. Some states with strong standards produce high-achieving students, such as Massachusetts, while other states with strong standards languish near the bottom in terms of achievement, such as California. Some states with weak standards boast high levels of achievement, such as New Jersey, while others with weak standards experience low levels of achievement, such as Tennessee.

Four Ideas

For every complex problem there is one solution which is simple, neat, and wrong. — H. L. Mencken

I will avoid Mencken’s approbation by proposing four solutions rather than one. Although education has far too many moving parts to be dramatically reformed by any short list of simple actions, we can start with changes that are straightforward, ripe for action and most promising, based on research and past experience.

Link K-12 Curricula to Comparative Effectiveness

Little attention has been paid to choice of curriculum as a driver of student achievement. Yet the evidence for large curriculum effects is persuasive. Consider a recent study of first-grade math curricula, reported by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance in February 2009. The researchers randomly matched schools with one of four widely used curricula. Two curricula were clear winners, generating three months’ more learning over a nine-month school year than the other two. This is a big effect on achievement, and it is essentially free because the more effective curricula cost no more than the others.

The federal government should fund many more comparative effectiveness trials of curricula, and schools using federal funds to support the education of disadvantaged students should be required to use evidence of effectiveness in the choice of curriculum materials. The Obama administration supports comparative effectiveness research in health care. It is no less important in education.

Evaluate Teachers Meaningfully

Good education outcomes for students depend on good teachers. If we have no valid and reliable system in place to identify who is good, we cannot hope to create substantial improvements in the quality of the teacher workforce.

A substantial body of high-quality research demonstrates that teachers vary substantially in effectiveness, with dramatic consequences for student learning. To increase academic achievement overall and address racial, ethnic and socioeconomic achievement gaps, we must enhance the quality of the teacher workforce and provide children from poor and minority backgrounds with equitable access to the best teachers.

Despite strong empirical evidence for differences in teacher performance—as well as intuitive appeal, demonstrated when we remember our own best and worst teachers—the vast majority of public school teachers in America face no meaningful evaluation of on-the-job performance. A recent survey of thousands of teachers and administrators, spanning 12 districts in four states, revealed that none of the districts’ formal evaluation processes differentiated meaningfully among levels of teaching effectiveness, according to a 2009 report published by The New Teacher Project. In districts using binary ratings, more than 99 percent of teachers were rated satisfactory. In districts using a broader range of ratings, 94 percent of teachers received one of the top two ratings, and less than one percent were rated unsatisfactory. In most school districts, virtually all probationary teachers receive tenure—98 percent in Los Angeles, for example—and very small numbers of tenured teachers are ever dismissed for poor performance.

Conditions of employment should be restructured to recruit and select more promising teachers, provide opportunities for them to realize their potential, keep the very best teachers in the profession, and motivate them to serve in locations where students have the highest needs. The precondition for these changes is a valid system of evaluating teachers.

The federal government should require school districts to evaluate teachers meaningfully, as a condition of federal aid. Washington also should provide extra support to districts that pay substantially higher salaries to teachers demonstrating persistently high effectiveness and serving in high-needs schools. But, because many technical issues in the evaluation of on-the-job performance of teachers are unresolved, the federal government should refrain, at least for now, from mandating specific evaluation components or designs. The essential element is meaningful differentiation—that is, a substantial spread of performance outcomes.

Accredit Online Education Providers

Traditional forms of schooling are labor-intensive and offer few economies of scale. To the extent that financial resources are critical to education outcomes, the only way to improve the U.S. education system in its current configuration is to spend more. Yet we currently spend more per student on education than any other country in the world, and the appetite for ever-increasing levels of expenditure has been dampened by changing demographics and ballooning government deficits. The monies that can be reasonably anticipated in the next decade or two will hardly be enough to forestall erosion in the quality of the system, as currently designed. The game changer for education productivity will have to be technology, which can both cut labor costs and introduce competitive pressures.

Already, at the college level, online education (also termed “virtual education” or “distance learning”) is proving competitive with the classroom experience. Nearly 3.5 million students in 2006—about 20 percent of all students in postsecondary schools and twice the number five years previously—were taking at least one course online, according to a 2007 report published by the Sloan Consortium.

In K-12, online education is developing much more slowly. But, the case for online K–12 education is strong—and linked to cost control. A survey reported on page one of Education Week (March 18, 2009) found the average per-pupil cost of 20 virtual schools in 14 states to be about half the national average for a traditional public school.

Local and state control of access to virtual schooling impedes the growth of high-quality online education and the competitive pressure it contributes to traditional schooling. Development costs are very high for virtual courseware that takes full advantage of the newest technologies and advances in cognitive science and instruction—much higher than the costs for traditional textbooks and instructional materials. These development costs can only be rationalized if the potential market for the resulting product is large. But, states and local school districts now are able to determine whether an online program is acceptable. The bureaucracy that may be most disrupted by the introduction of virtual education acts as gatekeeper.

To overcome this challenge, K-12 virtual public education would benefit from the model of accreditation used in higher education. Colleges and universities are accredited by regional or national bodies recognized by the federal government. Such accrediting bodies as the New England Association of Schools and Colleges and the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools are membership organizations that determine their own standards within broad federal guidelines. Once an institution is accredited, students residing anywhere can take its courses, often with the benefit of federal and state student aid.

Federal legislation to apply this accreditation model to online K-12 education could transform public education, especially if the legislation also required school districts to cover the reasonable costs of online courses for students in persistently low-performing schools. This approach would exploit—and enhance—U.S. advantages in information technology. We are unlikely to regain the international lead in education by investing more in business as usual; but we could leapfrog over other countries by building new, technology-intensive education systems.

Link Postsecondary Programs to Labor Market Outcomes

On a per-student basis, the United States spends two and one-half times the developed countries’ average on postsecondary education. Although our elite research universities remain remarkable engines of innovation and are the envy of the world, our postsecondary education system in general is faltering. The United States used to lead the world in higher education attainment, but, according to 2009 OECD data, is now ranked 12th among developed countries. We have become a high-cost provider of mediocre outcomes.

Critical to addressing this problem is better information on the performance of our postsecondary institutions. As the U.S. Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education concluded in 2006:

Our complex, decentralized postsecondary education system has no comprehensive strategy, particularly for undergraduate programs, to provide either adequate internal accountability systems or effective public information. Too many decisions about higher education—from those made by policymakers to those made by students and families—rely heavily on reputation and rankings derived to a large extent from inputs such as financial resources rather than outcomes. Better data about real performance and lifelong working and learning ability is absolutely essential if we are to meet national needs and improve institutional performance.

Ideally, this information would be available in comparable forms for all institutions through a national system of data collection. However, achieving consensus on the desirability of a national database of student records has proved politically contentious. One of the issues is privacy of information. More powerful is the opposition of some postsecondary institutions that apparently seek to avoid accountability for their performance.

The way forward is for Congress to authorize, and fund at the state level, data systems that follow individual students through their postsecondary careers into the labor market. The standards for such state systems could be recommended at the federal level or by national organizations, to maximize comparability and eventual interoperability.

The public face of such a system at the state level would be a website allowing prospective students and parents to compare degree and certificate programs within and across institutions on diverse outcomes, with corresponding information on price. At a minimum, the outcomes would include graduation rates, employment rates and average annual earnings five years after graduation. Outcomes would be reported at the individual program level, such as the B.S. program in chemical engineering at the University of Houston. Price could be reported in three ways: advertised tuition,average tuition for new students for the previous two years, and average tuition for new students for the previous two years net of institutional and state grants for students eligible for federally subsidized student loans. These different forms of price information are necessary because institutions frequently discount their advertised price, particularly for low-income students. Students and families need information about discounts in order to shop on the basis of price.

Many states, such as Washington, already have data that would allow the creation of such college search sites, at least for their public institutions. The primary impediment to progress is the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which makes it very difficult for postsecondary institutions to share data on individual students with state agencies, such as the tax division or unemployment insurance office, in order to match students with information on post-graduation employment and wages. Congress should amend FERPA to allow such data exchanges among state agencies while maintaining restrictions on release of personally identifiable information. To address privacy concerns, Congress also should impose substantial penalties for the public release of personally identifiable information; FERPA currently is toothless.

Creating a higher education marketplace that is vibrant with transparent and valid information on performance and price would be a powerful driver of reform and innovation. Easily addressed concerns about the privacy of student records and political opposition from institutions that do not want their performance exposed to the public have stood in the way of this critical reform for too long. America’s economic future depends on returning the United States to the forefront of education attainment. Simply put, many more of our students need to finish high school and graduate from college. Investments in improved data, along with structural reforms and innovation, can help restore our leadership in educational attainment and increase economic growth.

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Policy Brief #181

The new normal for local, state and federal governments is fiscal austerity. Although President Obama supported education during his State of the Union address and in his budget proposal to Congress, cash-strapped localities and states—which foot most of the bill for educating America’s children—may have to balance their budgets with cuts to schools and teachers. The recession exposed a long-developing structural imbalance between public expenditure versus raising the revenue for public services. Especially on education, reality has set in, with a vengeance.

Cutting public expenditure is not necessarily a bad thing. There are, however, some activities that have become so fundamentally governmental and so critically important to the nation’s future that they require special care during a period of severe budget trimming. Education is one such example.

The Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings has recently developed proposals to ensure that federal investments in education have impact. These proposals present the dual advantage of low costs of implementation at the federal level coupled with the promise of considerable leverage at the state and local level. Two of those proposals are presented in this brief: increasing digital and virtual education and expanding consumer information on higher education.

	RECOMMENDATIONS
	One important path to individual opportunity is higher levels of educational attainment. The U.S. economy is marked by an increasing economic divide between those who are educated and those who are not. In a time of fiscal austerity, every federal dollar invested in education must have a return. Congress should: Increase digital and virtual education. In reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act, provide that parents of economically disadvantaged students who are eligible for federal Title I funding should be able to direct that the funding associated with their child be spent to cover the costs of enrolling their child in virtual courses or in a virtual school.   Expand consumer information in higher education. Amend the Higher Education Act (HEA) to require that states that receive federal funds for statewide longitudinal data systems provide information on completion rates, employment levels, and annual earned income for each degree or certificate program and for each degree-granting institution that operates in the state. This information could be disseminated on the Internet.

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After years of warnings from the public health community about the growing threat of antibiotic resistance, yesterday the White House announced a national strategy to combat the growing problem of antibiotic resistance within the U.S. and abroad. The administration’s commitment represents an important step forward, as antibiotic-resistant infections are responsible for 23,000 deaths annually, and cost over $50 billion in excess health spending and lost productivity.  The administration’s National Strategy on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria includes incentives for developing new drugs, more rigorous stewardship of existing drugs, and better surveillance of antibiotic use and the pathogens that are resistant to them.  President Obama also issued an Executive Order that establishes an interagency Task Force and a non-governmental Presidential Advisory Council that will focus on broad-based strategies for slowing the emergence and spread of resistant infections. 

While antibiotics are crucial for treating bacterial infections, their misuse over time has contributed to a rather alarming rate of antibiotic resistance, including the development of multidrug-resistance bacteria or “super bugs.” Misuse manifests throughout all corners of public and private life; from the doctor’s office when prescribed to treat viruses; to industrial agriculture, where they are used in abundance to promote growth in livestock. New data from the World Health Organization (WHO) and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirm that rising overuse of antibiotics has already become a major public health threat worldwide.

The administration’s announcement included a report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) titled “Combatting Antibiotic Resistance,” which includes recommendations developed by a range of experts to help control antibiotic resistance. In addition, they outline a $20 million prize to reward the development of a new rapid, point-of-care diagnostic test. Such tests help health care providers choose the right antibiotics for their patients and streamline drug development by making it easier to identify and treat patients in clinical trials.  

The Need for Financial Incentives and Better Reimbursement

A highlight of the PCAST report is its recommendations on economic incentives to bring drug manufacturers back into the antibiotics market. Innovative changes to pharmaceutical regulation and research and development (R&D) will be welcomed by many in the health care community, but financial incentives and better reimbursement are necessary to alleviate the market failure for antibacterial drugs. A major challenge, particularly within a fee-for-service or volume-based reimbursement system is providing economic incentives that promote investment in drug development without encouraging overuse.

A number of public and private stakeholders, including the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform and Chatham House’s Centre on Global Health Security Working Group on Antimicrobial Resistance, are exploring alternative reimbursement mechanisms that “de-link” revenue from the volume of antibiotics sold. Such a mechanism, combined with further measures to stimulate innovation, could create a stable incentive structure to support R&D. Further, legislative proposals under consideration by Congress to reinvigorate the antibiotic pipeline, including the Antibiotic Development to Advance Patient Treatment (ADAPT) Act of 2013, could complement the White House’s efforts and help turn the tide on antibiotic resistance. Spurring the development of new antibiotics is critical because resistance will continue to develop even if health care providers and health systems can find ways to prevent the misuse of these drugs.

       

While much of the outside world has focused on the current wave of violence in Israel and the West Bank, far less attention is paid to the causes behind it and the context in which it is occurring. In meetings last month in Ramallah and Jerusalem with a range of Palestinian politicians, journalists, and analysts, as well as with senior U.S. officials, it was clear that the attacks reflect the deepening anger and despondency among Palestinians.

The current violence is largely despair-driven, but remains individualistic and politically directionless. Palestinians use different terms to describe the current violence. Popularly, and in most local media, it is known as the “Jerusalem Intifada.” But unlike previous Palestinian uprisings, this latest wave of violence lacks both political organization and clear political demands. 

The fact that so many young Palestinians are willing to risk almost certain death in order to carry out otherwise ineffective stabbing attacks on Israelis points to a deep sense of hopelessness and despair. It’s not only that Israeli settlement expansion, home demolitions, land confiscations, and movement restrictions continue to rob Palestinians of their land, livelihoods, and dignity; it’s that Palestinians now must endure Israel’s seemingly endless occupation without any of the “safety nets” they traditionally have fallen back on: the peace process is dead, Arab regional support and solidarity has evaporated, and their political leaders (both secular and Islamist) are ineffective and increasingly discredited. 

In short, Palestinians feel a deep sense of abandonment by the international community, their fellow Arabs, and even their own leaders. Although domestic political considerations as well as Abbas’ own waning credibility have constrained the leadership’s ability to disavow the violence outright, the Palestinian Authority (PA) continues to work quietly with the Israelis to keep the situation under control. The main question now, particularly for U.S. officials, is how long this PA security coordination with Israel can continue given mounting public opposition and the precipitous decline in international aid, which according to the World Bank is down by roughly 60 percent.

As confidence in Abbas’ leadership declines, Palestinian political stagnation and dysfunction is likely to continue. Since a public opinion poll published last September found that an unprecedented two-thirds of Palestinians wanted Abbas to resign, popular frustration with the Palestinian leader seems only to have grown. Many Palestinians lament what they see as the transformation of their national movement from groups and leaders dedicated to national liberation to a ruling class with special privileges (VIP status, travel, etc.) and a stake in the status quo. Even American officials seemed alarmed by the extent to which the PA is now perceived as a “collaborationist” government by ordinary Palestinians. 

At the same time, Abbas’ leadership style and decision-making are also alienating much of the political elite, including within his own Fatah movement. Several Palestinian officials were privately critical of Abbas. Others have been more open in their criticism, including former West Bank security chief Jibril Rajoub, who recently railed against Abbas and his inner clique in a lengthy interview on Palestinian TV. 

Much of the internal frustration with Abbas has to do with recent leadership appointments as well as what many see as his growing paranoia and personal vendettas against perceived rivals like Salam Fayyad, Yasser Abed-Rabbo, and his arch-nemesis, Mohamed Dahlan, the now-exiled former Gaza security chief. Both of these underscore the growing anxiety over the lack of clarity regarding a future succession process (on which I will have more to say in a subsequent post). Many also voiced skepticism about Abbas’ current diplomatic strategy, which is focused on building support for an international peace conference. While most Palestinians support internationalization, and virtually no one supports a return to U.S.-led peace negotiations, there are doubts as to whether Abbas’ international efforts are rooted in a broader strategy. 

The lack of strategic thinking is also fueling frustration over the ongoing stalemate with Hamas in Gaza. Indeed, many view Abbas as the primary obstacle to Gaza reconstruction and progress toward reconciliation with Hamas. Despite Hamas’ clear weakness since 2013, Abbas has been loath to give Hamas anything it could claim as a political concession and is equally reluctant to inherit responsibility for Gaza’s myriad social, economic, and security problems, for which he currently has no solutions. 

[T]here is a growing feeling, both within Fatah and beyond, that things are unlikely to change internally (and perhaps even diplomatically) until Abbas has left the scene.

Consequently, there is a growing feeling, both within Fatah and beyond, that things are unlikely to change internally (and perhaps even diplomatically) until Abbas has left the scene. At the same time, despite the growing frustration with Abbas, most are not eager to accelerate his departure. As I have written elsewhere, the absence of credible alternatives has given Abbas a sort of “legitimacy by default.” This may explain Abbas’ otherwise inexplicable complacency and his sense, as I was repeatedly told, that time is on his side.

Gaza’s Hamas rulers face their own set of equally daunting political, economic, and security challenges. Although I did not visit Gaza or meet with any Hamas representatives, both figured prominently in most of my discussions. Hamas continues to face serious financial problems as a result of the virtual elimination of its tunnels network and the closure of the Rafah border crossing. The scarcity of resources, a major factor in Hamas’ decision to pursue reconciliation with the PA in 2014, is also fueling tensions within the movement. Whereas Hamas’ military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, seeks to rebuild its military capabilities and restore its ties with Iran, its political leadership is equally keen to avoid another military confrontation with Israel and hopes to capitalize on diplomatic openings with Turkey and Saudi Arabia. 

The main security threat to Hamas rule comes from jihadi groups, most notably Jaysh al-Islam in the Gaza Strip and the Sinai-based Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, both of which have pledged allegiance to ISIS and regard Hamas (as well as its parent, the Muslim Brotherhood) as apostates. Despite occasional tit-for-tat attacks, at the moment neither Hamas nor the jihadis appear eager for a major fight. The potential for escalation remains, however, particularly if jihadi groups decide to exploit internal discontent within Hamas or force its hand militarily by launching rocket attacks on Israel. Such internal instability, along with the slow pace of reconstruction and already abysmal economic and humanitarian conditions in Gaza, highlights the ever-present danger of yet another devastating war between Israel and Hamas. 

In the end, while the outside world’s preoccupation with the current wave of violence is understandable, merely condemning ad hoc violence by Palestinians while failing to address the deeper, institutionalized violence of the Israeli occupation is both morally dishonest and politically untenable.

      

Breakthrough therapy designation (BTD) is the newest of four expedited programs developed by the U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to accelerate the development and review of novel therapies that target serious conditions. The public response to the program has been largely positive, and dozens of drugs have successfully received the designation. However, the FDA denies many more requests than it grants. In fact, as of March 2015, less than one in three of the BTD requests submitted have been granted. By contrast, roughly 75 percent of the requests for fast track designation (another of the Agency’s expedited programs) were granted between 1998 and 2007. This discrepancy suggests ongoing uncertainty over what exactly constitutes a “breakthrough” according to the FDA’s criteria.

On April 24, the Center for Health Policy at Brookings will host an event, Breakthrough Therapy Designation: Exploring the Qualifying Criteria, that will discuss qualifying criteria for the BTD program using real and hypothetical case studies to explore how FDA weighs the evidence submitted. Below is a primer that describes the definition, value, and impact of BTD.

What is BTD?

BTD was established in 2012 under the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act, and is intended to expedite the development and review of drugs that show signs of extraordinary benefit at early stages of the clinical development process. However, BTD is not an automatic approval. The drug still has to undergo clinical testing and review by the FDA. Rather, BTD is designed to facilitate and shorten the clinical development process, which can otherwise take many years to complete.

What criteria does FDA use to evaluate potential breakthroughs?

In order to qualify for the designation, a therapy must be intended to treat a serious or life-threatening illness, and there must be preliminary clinical evidence that it represents a substantial improvement over existing therapies on at least one clinically significant outcome (such as death or permanent impairment).

In considering a request for BTD, FDA relies on three primary considerations:

1) the quantity and quality of the clinical evidence being submitted;

2) the available therapies that the drug is being compared to; and

3) the magnitude of treatment effect shown on the outcome being studied.

In practice, however, it can be difficult to define a single threshold that a therapy must meet. The decision depends on the specific context for that drug.  In some cases, for example, the targeted disease has few or no treatments available, while in others there may be several effective alternative treatments to which the new therapy can be compared. The request may also be made at different stages of the clinical development process, which means that the amount and type of data available to FDA can vary. In some cases, early evidence of benefit may disappear when the drug is tested in larger populations, which is why FDA reserves the right to rescinded the designation if subsequent data shows that the therapy no longer meets the criteria.

How many therapies have received the designation?

As of March 2015, FDA had received a total of 293 requests for BTD. Of these, 82 received the designation, and 23 have since been approved for marketing. Ten of these approvals were new indications for already approved drugs, rather than novel therapies that had never before received FDA approval.

What are the benefits of BTD?

For drug manufacturers, it is about the intensity and frequency of their interactions with FDA. Once the designation is granted, the FDA takes an “all hands-on-deck” approach to providing the manufacturer with ongoing guidance and feedback throughout the clinical development process. Products that receive BTD are also able to submit portions of their marketing application on a rolling basis (rather than all at once at the end of clinical trials) and BTD can also be used in combination with other expedited programs in order to further reduce the product’s time to market.

For patients, the potential benefits are straightforward: earlier access to therapies that may significantly improve or extend their lives.

How does BTD relate to the other three expedited programs?

The other three expedited review and development programs—fast track designation, priority review, and accelerated approval—are also geared at facilitating the development and approval of drugs for serious conditions. These other programs have been in place for over 15 years, and have played a significant role in accelerating patient access to new therapeutics (Table 1). In 2014 alone, 66 percent of the 41 drugs approved by FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research used at least one of these four pathways, and 46 percent received at least two of the designations in combination.

Table 1: Overview of FDA’s Expedited Review Programs

 Adapted from FDA's Guidance for Industry: Expedited Programs for Serious Conditions - Drugs and Biologics

      

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Established by the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act of 2012, breakthrough therapy designation (BTD) is one of several programs developed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to speed up the development and review of drugs and biologics that address unmet medical needs. In order to qualify for this designation, the treatment must address a serious or life-threatening illness. In addition, the manufacturer (i.e., sponsor) must provide early clinical evidence that the treatment is a substantial improvement over currently available therapies. The FDA is working to further clarify how it applies the qualifying criteria to breakthrough designation applications.

On April 24, under a cooperative agreement with FDA, the Center for Health Policy convened a public meeting to discuss the qualifying criteria for this special designation. Using examples from oncology, neurology, psychiatry, and hematology, the workshop highlighted considerations for the BTD application process, the evaluation process, and factors for acceptance or rejection. The discussion also focused on key strategies for ensuring that the qualifying criteria are understood across a broad range of stakeholder groups.

Video

• Breakthrough therapy designation: Two and a half years in
• Applying the breakthrough therapy criteria: Oncology
• Applying the breakthrough therapy criteria: Neurology
• Applying the breakthrough therapy criteria: Anti-infective/psychiatry/hematology
• Summary and discussion of lessons learned

Event Materials

• Breakthrough Therapy Designation_final
• Breakthrough therapy slide deck

      

Many proposals to accelerate and improve medical product innovation and regulation focus on reforming the product development and regulatory review processes that occur before drugs and devices get to market. While important, such proposals alone do not fully recognize the broader opportunities that exist to learn more about the safety and effectiveness of drugs and devices after approval. As drugs and devices begin to be used in larger and more diverse populations and in more personalized clinical combinations, evidence from real-world use during routine patient care is increasingly important for accelerating innovation and improving regulation.

First, further evidence development from medical product use in large populations can allow providers to better target and treat individuals, precisely matching the right drug or device to the right patients. As genomic sequencing and other diagnostic technologies continue to improve, postmarket evidence development is critical to assessing the full range of genomic subtypes, comorbidities, patient characteristics and preferences, and other factors that may significantly affect the safety and effectiveness of drugs and devices. This information is often not available or population sizes are inadequate to characterize such subgroup differences in premarket randomized controlled trials.

Second, improved processes for generating postmarket data on medical products are necessary for fully realizing the intended effect of premarket reforms that expedite regulatory approval. The absence of a reliable postmarket system to follow up on potential safety or effectiveness issues means that potential signals or concerns must instead be addressed through additional premarket studies or through one-off postmarket evaluations that are more costly, slower, and likely to be less definitive than would be possible through a better-established infrastructure. As a result, the absence of better systems for generating postmarket evidence creates a barrier to more extensive use of premarket reforms to promote innovation.

These issues can be addressed through initiatives that combine targeted premarket reforms with postmarket steps to enhance innovation and improve evidence on safety and effectiveness throughout the life cycle of a drug or device. The ability to routinely capture clinically relevant electronic health data within our health care ecosystem is improving, increasingly allowing electronic health records, payer claims data, patient-reported data, and other relevant data to be leveraged for further research and innovation in care. Recent legislative proposals released by the House of Representatives’ 21st Century Cures effort acknowledge and seek to build on this progress in order to improve medical product research, development, and use. The initial Cures discussion draft included provisions for better, more systematic reporting of and access to clinical trials data; for increased access to Medicare claims data for research; and for FDA to promulgate guidance on the sources, analysis, and potential use of so-called Real World Evidence. These are potentially useful proposals that could contribute valuable data and methods to advancing the development of better treatments.

What remains a gap in the Cures proposals, however, is a more systematic approach to improving the availability of postmarket evidence. Such a systematic approach is possible now. Biomedical researchers and health care plans and providers are doing more to collect and analyze clinical and outcomes data. Multiple independent efforts – including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Sentinel Initiative for active postmarket drug safety surveillance, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute’s PCORnet for clinical effectiveness studies, the Medical Device Epidemiology Network (MDEpiNet) for developing better methods and medical device registries for medical device surveillance and a number of dedicated, product-specific outcomes registries – have demonstrated the potential for large-scale, systematic postmarket data collection. Building on these efforts could provide unprecedented evidence on how medical products perform in the real-world and on the course of underlying diseases that they are designed to treat, while still protecting patient privacy and confidentiality.

These and other postmarket data systems now hold the potential to contribute to public-private collaboration for improved population-based evidence on medical products on a wider scale. Action in the Cures initiative to unlock this potential will enable the legislation to achieve its intended effect of promoting quicker, more efficient development of effective, personalized treatments and cures.

What follows is a set of both short- and long-term proposals that would bolster the current systems for postmarket evidence development, create new mechanisms for generating postmarket data, and enable individual initiatives on evidence development to work together as part of a broad push toward a truly learning health care system.

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The breakthrough therapy designation (BTD) program was initiated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2012 to expedite the development of treatments for serious or life-threatening illness that demonstrate “substantial improvement” over existing therapies. The program has since become a widely supported mechanism for accelerating patient access to new drugs. As of March 2015, FDA has received a total of 293 requests for BTD. However, it has granted just  82 (28%), which indicates an ongoing lack of clarity over what exactly meets the criteria for the designation.

On April 24, the Center for Health Policy at Brookings convened a public meeting to explore the designation’s qualifying criteria and how FDA applies those criteria across therapeutic areas. Panelists used real-world and hypothetical case studies to frame the discussion, and highlighted major considerations for the application process, the FDA’s evaluation of the evidence, and the key factors for acceptance or rejection. The discussion also identified strategies to ensure that qualifying criteria are well understood. Here are the five big takeaways:

1.  The BTD program is viewed positively by drug companies, researchers, advocates, and others 

Across the board, participants expressed enthusiasm for the BTD program. Industry representatives noted that their experience had been extremely positive, and that the increased cooperation with and guidance from FDA were very helpful in streamlining their development programs. Receiving the designation can also raise a drug company’s profile, which can facilitate additional investment as well as clinical trial patient recruitment; this is particularly important for smaller companies with limited resources.

Patient and disease advocates were likewise supportive, and expressed hope that the early lessons learned from successful breakthrough therapy approvals (which have been mostly concentrated in the oncology and antiviral fields) could be translated to other disease areas with less success. However, while BTD is an important tool in expediting the development of new drugs, it is just one piece of broader scientific and regulatory policy landscape. Accelerating the pace of discovery and development of truly innovative new drugs will depend on a range of other factors, such as developing and validating new biomarkers that can be used to measure treatment effects at an earlier stage, as well as establishing networks that can streamline the clinical trial process. It will also be important to develop effective new approaches to collecting, analyzing, and communicating information about these treatments once they are on the market, as this information can potentially be used by FDA, providers, and patients to  further improve prescription drug policy and medical decision-making.

2.  BTD requests far outnumber those that actually meet the qualifying criteria

Since the program began, less than 30 percent of requests have received BTD designation. A substantial majority were denied at least in part due to either a lack of data or problems with the quality of the data, or some combination of the two. For example, some sponsors requested the designation before they had any clinical data, or submitted the request using clinical data that was incomplete or based on flawed study designs. Many requests also failed to meet the Agency’s bar for “substantial improvement” over existing therapies.

One reason for the high denial rate may be a lack of a clear regulatory or statutory bar that could be used as a definitive guide for sponsors to know what is needed to qualify for the designation. BTD denials are also confidential, which means that sponsors effectively have nothing to lose by submitting a request. Going forward, manufacturers may need to exercise more discretion in deciding to request the designation, as the process can be resource- and time-intensive for both sides.

3.  There is no single threshold for determining what defines a breakthrough therapy

About 53 percent of the 109 total BTD denials were due at least in part to the fact that the drug did not represent a substantial improvement over existing therapies. During the day’s discussion, FDA and sponsors both noted that this is likely because the criteria for BTD are inherently subjective. In practice, this means there is no clear threshold for determining when a new therapy represents a “substantial improvement” over existing therapies. Designation decisions are complex and highly dependent on the context, including the disease or condition being targeted, the availability of other treatments, the patient population, the outcomes being studied, and the overall reliability of the data submitted. Given the multiple factors at play, it can be difficult in some cases to determine when a new product is potentially “transformational” as opposed to “better,” especially for conditions that are poorly understood or have few or no existing treatments. In making its determinations, FDA considers the totality of the evidence submitted, rather than focusing on specific evidentiary requirements.

4.  Early communication with FDA is strongly recommended for BTD applicants

Roughly 72 percent of the BTD denials related at least in part to trial design or analysis problems, which led several people to suggest that sponsors engage with FDA prior to submitting their request. Though there are several formal mechanisms for interacting with the agency, informal consultations with the relevant review division could help sponsors to get a better  and much earlier sense of what kind of data FDA might need. This early communication could both strengthen viable BTD requests and reduce the number of frivolous requests.

5.  FDA may need more resources for implementing the BTD program

Drugs that receive breakthrough designation are subject to much more intensive FDA guidance and review. However, when the program was established in 2012, Congress did not allocate funding to cover its costs. There have been ongoing concerns that the program is exacting a significant toll on FDA’s already limited resources, and potentially affecting the timeline for other drug application reviews. These concerns were reiterated during the day’s discussion, and some suggested that Congress consider attaching a user fee to the BTD program when the Prescription Drug User Fee Act comes up for reauthorization in 2017.

      

Despite the undeniable benefits of education to society, the educational needs, particularly in the world’s poorest countries, remain strikingly great. There are more than 67 million children not enrolled in primary school around the world, millions of children who are enrolled in school but not really learning, and too few young people are advancing to secondary school (van der Gaag and Adams 2010). Consider, for instance, the number of children unable to read a single word of connected text at the end of grade two: more than 90 percent in Mali, more than 50 percent in Uganda, and nearly 33 percent in Honduras (USAID n.d.).

With more young people of age 12 to 24 years today than ever before who are passing through the global education system and looking for opportunities for economic and civic participation, the education community is at a crossroads. Of the 1.5 billion young people in this age group, 1.3 billion live in developing countries (World Bank 2007). The global community set the goal of achieving universal primary education by 2015 and has failed to mobilize the resources necessary, as UNESCO estimates that $16.2 billion in external resources will be need to reach this goal.

Read the full report »

Read the executive summary »

Results from this report were presented at an April 6 Center on Universal Education event at the Brookings Institution.

Learn more about the launch event »

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Cutting-edge technology has led to medical breakthroughs, the information age, and space exploration, among many other innovations. The growing ubiquity of advanced technology, however, means that almost anyone can harness its power to threaten national, international, and individual security. In their new book, The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones—Confronting a New Age of Threat (Basic Books, 2015), Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum explore the potential dangers of modern technology when acquired by hostile groups or individuals.

On March 11, Governance Studies at Brookings hosted a book event to discuss the new threats to national security and the developing framework for confronting the technology-enabled threats of the 21^st century. In order to manage the challenges and risks associated with advanced technology, governments, organizations, and citizens must reconsider the intersection of security, privacy, and liberty. What does this mean for domestic and international surveillance? How will the government protect its citizens in an age of technology proliferation?

After the program, panelists will take audience questions.

Audio

• Confronting national security threats in the technology age

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• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

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• 20150311_national_security_technology_transcript

      

Good morning and welcome to the "future." At approximately 4:29 p.m. Hill Valley time on Oct. 21, Doc Brown and Marty McFly arrive at the present day. For many millennials especially, the 1985 film series Back to the Future represented the far-flung fantastical future that many dreamed would come. But how does the Reagan-era vision of a future where we don't need roads compare to our daily lives today?

Sadly, you probably came to work today on the same street you may have trodden as a child back in 1985 without a hover board. But our future is still pretty fantastic, and many of the outlandish futuristic devices you saw in the 1989 film Back to the Future II are closer than you think—or already here. Here are three predictions that the film made that today might actually turn the head of an ‘80s time traveler

Drone proliferation

When Doc Brown and Marty McFly arrived in 2015, the sky was filled with more flying cars than the drones that sometimes dot our skies, but the film did point to some potential uses for unmanned remote flying devices. In the future, the film envisioned drones for walking the dog and even remote photography drones reporting on the day's news. While drones today don't exactly fill these roles, that future is perhaps closer than you think.

"Private actors will soon operate drones in equal if not greater numbers than the government," Brookings Fellow Wells Bennett wrote in a report on civilian use of drones last year. Amazon has tested drones to aid in home and business delivery. CNN has been given clearance by the government to explore the use of drones for reporting. Even law enforcement and public safety officials have used drones to aid in policing and fighting fires.

The widespread use of drones in daily life is probably still part of our future rather than our present in 2015, but regulations for this future are being written today. Federal regulators just this week announced that recreational drones will need to be registered. Last year as part of our project on civilian robotics, Gregory McNeal offered his own suggestions for federal and state regulators on how best to tackle civilian drone regulations.

Cybernetic humans and wearable technology

In the 1989 film, Marty faces off against his son's cybernetic bully, Griff Tannen. The bullies of the present don't exactly resemble Griff or Locutus of Borg, but cybernetics is closer than you think—even resting in your palm right now.

Taking a walk through Hill Valley in the real 2015, a time traveler might see several pedestrians immersed in their smartphones or glancing at notifications on their wearable devices. In our homes, virtual reality is becoming more prominent as well. Systems like Oculus and Google Cardboard resemble very closely the remote television visors worn by Marty's kids in the future.

"The proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude that [cell phones] were an important feature of human anatomy," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2014 opinion referencing the cybernetic future we are living today. Benjamin Wittes and Jane Chong acknowledge in their report on the emerging cyborg future that the connection we have with technology is becoming more personal. While surveillance laws of the past might make distinctions between human tissue and the devices we use in our daily lives, Wittes and Chong argue that perhaps the separation between the human being and technology in some cases is no longer there—and the law should adapt to acknowledge this.

Flying cars and the transportation of the future

The most-often panned prediction of the film is admittedly the most disappointing—there are no flying cars in our future. This has been a fantasy for even Baby Boomers who were thrilled by the Jetsons' view of the 21st Century. Flying cars do exist in a limited form, but they are more accurately described as ultra-portable planes that require a pilot’s license to fly. However, the future of transportation is even better than Marty or Doc Brown ever realized; they just needed to travel a few more years in the future to see it happen.

Driverless cars have the potential to be the biggest seismic shift in transportation that many of us will experience in our lifetime. Numerous automotive makers and even Google are preparing for the autonomous future. Imagine your vehicle circling the parking lot to pick you up after a film; traversing rush hour traffic to deliver your daughter to softball practice; even serving as designated driver on Friday night after drinks at the bar.

The future seems like a fantasy, but liability concerns about whom to sue when an automated vehicle gets in a fender bender—or worse—clouds this would-be future.

"While liability will always be important with respect to motor vehicle operation, automation will dramatically increase safety on the highways by reducing both the number and severity of accidents," writes John Villasenor in his report on how to tackle liability in the driverless era. Despite many reservations about driverless cars, Villasenor argues that current liability law frameworks would be well equipped to address concerns.

Of course, whether the DeLorean Motor Company will come out of mothballs and produce a driverless DeLorean remains to be seen.

Discuss the future's impact on the modern workforce

At least according to Robert Zemeckis, we've arrived in the future. Not that you’re here, join us at 2 p.m. Oct. 26 when we'll discuss one of the important consequences of all of this technological automation: its impact on the workforce and the availability of social benefits.

       

       

“If the Americans and their regional allies want to pass through the Strait of Hormuz and threaten us, we will not allow any entry,” said deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Hossein Salami, last Wednesday. Iran has a long history of making threats against this critical waterway, through which some 17 million barrels of oil exports pass daily, though it has not carried them out. But multiple regional security threats highlight threats to energy transit from and through the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)—and demand new thinking about solutions.

Weak spots

Hormuz attracts attention because of its evident vulnerability. But recent years have seen severe disruptions to energy flows across the region: port blockades in Libya; pipeline sabotage in Egypt’s Sinai, Yemen, Baluchistan in Pakistan, and Turkey’s southeast; attacks on oil and gas installations across Syria and Iraq; piracy off Somalia. Energy security is threatened at all scales, from local community disturbances and strikes, up to major regional military confrontations.

Of course, it would be best to mitigate these energy security vulnerabilities by tackling the root causes of conflict across the region. But while disruption and violence persist, energy exporters and consumers alike should guard against complacency.

A glut of oil and gas supplies globally—with low prices, growing U.S. self-sufficiency, and the conclusion of the Iranian nuclear deal—may seem to have reduced the urgency: markets have hardly responded to recent flare-ups. But major economies – even the United States – still remain dependent, directly or indirectly, on energy supplies from the MENA region. Spare oil production capacity is at unusually low levels, leaving the balance vulnerable to even a moderate interruption.

Most concern has focused on oil exports, given their importance to the world economy. But the security of liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipments is an under-appreciated risk, particularly for countries such as Japan and South Korea which are heavily dependent on LNG. A disruption would also have severe consequences for countries in the Middle East and North Africa, depriving them not only of revenues but potentially of critical imports.

Doing better 

There are three broad groups of approaches to mitigating the risk of energy transit disruptions: infrastructure, institutions, and market. 

1. Infrastructure includes the construction of bypass pipelines avoiding key choke-points and strategic storage.
   
   Existing bypass pipelines include SUMED (which avoids the Suez Canal); the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline in the UAE (bypassing Hormuz); and the Saudi Petroline, which runs to the Red Sea, hence offering an alternative to the Gulf and Hormuz. Proposed projects include a link from other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to Oman’s planned oil terminal at Duqm on the Indian Ocean; new or rehabilitated pipelines from Iraq across Jordan and Turkey; an expansion of Petroline; and a new terminal in southern Iran at Jask.
   
   Strategic storage can be held by oil exporters, by importers, or a combination (in which exporters hold oil close to their customers’ territory, as with arrangements between Saudi Arabia and Japan, and between Abu Dhabi and Japan and India).


2. Institutional approaches include mechanisms to deal with disruptions, such as cooperative sharing arrangements.
   
   More analysis has focused on infrastructure than on institutional and market mitigation. Yet these approaches have to work together. Physical infrastructure is not enough: it has to be embedded in a suitable framework of regulation, legislation, and diplomacy. Cross-border or multilateral pipelines require agreements on international cooperation; strategic storage is most effective when rules for its use are clear, and when holders of storage agree not to hoard scarce supplies. 
   
   The effective combination of infrastructure and institutions has a strategic benefit even if it is never used. By making oil exporters and consumers less vulnerable to threats, it makes it less likely that such threats will be carried out.
   
   Alliances can be useful for mutual security and coordination. However, they raise the difficult question of whom they are directed against. Mutually-hostile alliances would be a threat to regional energy security rather than a guarantor. Organizations such as the International Energy Agency (IEA), the International Energy Forum (IEF), Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Gulf Cooperation Council, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) could all have roles, but none is ideally placed. Rather than creating another organization, reaching an understanding between existing bodies may be more effective.


3. In general, markets cope well with the task of allocating scarce supplies. Better and timelier data, such as that gathered by the IEF, can greatly improve the functioning of markets. Governments do have a role in protecting the most vulnerable consumers and ensuring sufficient energy for critical services, but price controls, rationing, and export bans have usually been counterproductive, and many of the worst consequences of so-called energy crises have come from well-meaning government interference with the normal market process of adjustment.
   
   However, it is generally difficult or impossible for a single company or country to capture all the benefits of building strategic infrastructure—which, as with a bypass pipeline, may only be required for a few months over a period of decades. International financing, perhaps backed by a major energy importer—mostly likely China—can help support such projects, particularly at a time of fiscal austerity in the Middle East.

Energy exporters within the MENA region may often find their interests divergent. But the field of energy security is one area for more fruitful cooperation—at least between groups of states, and some external players, particularly their increasingly important Asian customers. If regional tensions and conflicts cannot be easily solved, such action at least alleviates one of the serious risks of the region’s turmoil.

For more on this topic, read Robin Mills’ new analysis paper “Risky routes: Energy transit in the Middle East.”

      

Renewable energy is an important source to tackle against climate change, as the latest IPCC report has pointed out. However, due to the existence of multiple market failures such as negative externalities of fossil fuels and knowledge spillovers of new technology, government subsidies are still needed to develop renewable energy, such as solar photovoltaic (PV) cells. In the United States, there have been various forms of subsidies for PV, varying from the federal level to the state level, and from the city level to the utility level. California, as the pioneer of solar PV development, has put forward the biggest state-level subsidy program for PV, the California Solar Initiative (CSI). The CSI has planned to spend around $2.2 Billion in 2007–2016 to install roughly 2 GW PV capacity, with the average subsidy level as high as $1.1/W. How to evaluate the cost-effectiveness and incentive pass-through of this program are the two major research questions we are pursing.

Our cost-effectiveness analysis is based on a constrained optimization model that we developed, where the objective is to install as much PV capacity as possible under a fixed budget constraint. Both the analytical and computational results suggest that due to a strong peer effect and the learning-by-doing effect, one can shift subsides from later periods to early periods so that the final PV installed capacity can be increased by 8.1% (or 32 MW). However, if the decision-maker has other policy objectives or constraints in mind, such as maintaining the policy certainty, then, the optimally calculated subsidy policy would look like the CSI.

As to the incentive pass-through question, we took a structural approach and in addition used the method of regression discontinuity (RD). While in general, the incentive pass-through rate depends on the curvature of the demand and supply curve and the level of market competition, our two estimations indicate that the incentive pass-through for the CSI program is almost complete. In other words, almost all of the incentive has been enjoyed by the customer, and the PV installers did not retain much. Based on the RD design, we observe that PV installers tend to consider the CSI incentive as exogenous to their pricing decision.

The relative good performance of the CSI in terms of both the cost-effectiveness and the incentive pass-through aspect are tightly related to its policy design and program management. International speaking, the biggest challenge for the design of any PV subsidy program is the quick running out of the budget, and in the end, it looks like customers are rushing for the subsidy. Such rushing behavior is a clear indication of higher-than-needed incentive levels. Due to the policy rigidity and rapid PV technological change, the PV subsidy policy may lag behind the PV cost decline; and as a result, rational customers could rush for any unnecessarily high subsidy.

Due to the high uncertainty and unpredictability of future PV costs, the CSI put forward a new design that links the incentive level change and the installed capacity goal fulfillment. Specifically, the CSI has designed nine steps to achieve its policy goal; at each step, there is a PV capacity goal that corresponds to an incentive level. Once the capacity goal is finished, the incentive level will decrease to the next lower level. Furthermore, to maintain the policy certainty, the CSI regulated that every step-wise change in the incentive level should not be higher than $0.45/W, nor smaller than $0.05/W, together with other three constraints.

A good subsidy policy not only requires flexible policy design to respond to fast-changing environment, but also demands an efficient program management system, digitalized if possible. For the CSI, the authority has contracted out a third-party to maintain a good database system for the program. Specifically, the database has documented in detail every PV system that customers requested. Key data fields include 22 important dates during the PV installation process, customers’ zip code, city, utility and county information, and various characteristics of the PV system such as price, system size, incentive, PV module and installer. All information is publicly available, which to some extent fills in the information gap held by customers and fosters the market competition among PV installers. For customers to receive the incentive, their PV systems have to pass the inspection of the local government, and also to be interconnected to the grid. On the supply side, the CSI has also certified and created a list of PV installers that every customer can choose from.

Although the CSI has ended in 2014 due to fast PV cost reduction starting from 2009, its experience has been transferred to other areas in the United States and in Europe. It is highly possible that other similar new technologies and products (e.g. the electric car and the battery) can adopt the CSI policy design, too. In summary, a good and successful policy may need to be simply, clear, credible, foreseeable, flexible, end-able, and incentive-compatible. The PV subsidy policy in China still has a long way to go when compared to the CSI.

       

       

Event Information

A conversation with French Minister of Defense Jean-Yves Le Drian

On July 20 and 21, defense ministers from several nations will gather in Washington, D.C. at the invitation of U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. The meeting will bring together representatives from countries working to confront and defeat the Islamic State (or ISIL). French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian will be among those at the summit discussing how to accelerate long-term efforts to fight ISIL in Iraq and Syria. The close relationship between France and the United States has provided a solid base for security cooperation for decades, and in recent years, France has become one of America’s strongest allies in fighting terrorism and a prominent member of the international coalition to defeat ISIL.

On July 20, the Foreign Policy program at Brookings hosted Minister Le Drian for a discussion on French and U.S. cooperation as the two countries face multiple transnational security threats. Since becoming France’s defense minister in 2012, Le Drian has had to address numerous new security crises emerging from Africa, the Middle East, and within Europe itself. France faced horrific terrorist attacks on its own soil in January and November 2015 and remains under a state of emergency with its armed forces playing an active role in maintaining security both at home and abroad. Le Drian recently authored “Qui est l’ennemi?” (“Who is the enemy?”, Editions du Cerf, May 2016), defining a comprehensive strategy to address numerous current threats.

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• Introduction et conférencier invité
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• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

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• 20160720_france_defense_transcript

         

France has been struck by an unprecedented three terror attacks in the last 18 months. In what’s called Operation Sentinelle, 13,000 French military personnel now patrol streets and protect key sites across the country, assisting police and other security agencies. “The fact that the armed forces are visible,” said French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian at a Brookings event on July 20, “help to reassure the French people that they are safe both at home and abroad.”

Do the challenges facing France today mean that it should reduce its engagement overseas, focusing instead on security at home? Le Drian doesn’t think so, and I agree. In a new book titled "Who is the Enemy?," he particularly emphasizes the multifaceted ISIS threat. As he said at Brookings: 

"Every war [has] two enemies…[Today’s] war [with ISIS] also sets in place two concepts of the “enemy” that are radically different: From a strategic point of view, we are dealing with a proto-state; at the heart of this entity, there is a terrorist army." 

It only further complicates matters, of course, that France faces ISIS threats on several fronts: in Syria and Iraq, on the one hand, and also on its own territory. This, Le Drian stressed, means “we must seek coherence in our military action.” It also helps explain why France remains one of the most active countries in the fight against the so-called Islamic State, as well as other extremist groups in the Middle East and in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2013 and 2014, France intervened in Mali in order to prevent jihadi groups from taking over the country. The French military also has a presence in Djibouti, Lebanon, Côte d’Ivoire, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Senegal, as well as in the Pacific (in French Polynesia and New Caledonia)—not to mention Syria, where France uses the Mediterranean Sea-based Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier to strike ISIS targets. 

France is not a warmongering country—rather, it is responding to the fact that overseas threats come to it. Although it remains unclear to what extent the Nice attacker had connections with foreign terrorist networks, it has been established that the November 2015 Paris attacks were planned and orchestrated from Syria. This, among other considerations, has prompted France to engage further in Iraq and Syria. The rationale, as Minister Le Drian explained, is: 

“[T]rading our peace by reducing our military involvement doesn’t make sense. The more we let ISIS consolidate its presence on the Middle East, the more it will gather resources, attract fighters, and plan more attacks against us.” 

Team player

French policy isn’t just about ensuring its own security—rather, its many contributions are integrated within global efforts, including U.S.-led ones. As Le Drian said at Brookings: “I am convinced that the French-American relationship is stronger and better than ever.” France is a prominent participant of the 66-member international coalition against ISIS, and in that capacity participated in the first joint meeting of that group’s foreign and defense ministers in Washington this month. 

France remains a key member of the joint military operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq and Syria, which has damaged or destroyed over 26,0000 ISIS-related targets since August 2014. The Charles de Gaulle carrier—with 26 aircrafts on board—has been an essential part of that coalition mission. Following specific instructions from U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter and his counterpart in Paris, Minister Le Drian, French and U.S. intelligence agencies cooperate closely in intelligence-sharing. And just last week, President François Hollande announced that France will soon be supplying artillery to Iraq to support its fight against ISIS. Beyond the Iraq-Syria theater, France is cooperating with the United States and other partners in Libya, another country that is both a victim and source of extremist threats. 

The French Defense Ministry’s efforts to double-down on protecting French citizens within France, therefore, has not reduced its overseas role. Particularly now that the United Kingdom will leave the European Union, France’s military role has never been so important. France—along with Germany, which recently suggested it would raise its defense spending significantly—should continue to play a leading role as one the top defense actors in the West. 

         

Summary

At the Gleneagles Summit in 2005, leaders of the G8 group of nations committed to increase aid to poor nations by $50 billion per year. During the same year, in a meeting in Paris, donors promised to coordinate their interventions for more effective delivery. These commitments are now often referred to as the promise of donors to “scale up aid.” Increasing aid flows and improving coordination are indeed important goals and, in fact, goals that donors seem to have trouble meeting. The international donor community met this fall in Accra and will meet in Doha in November 2008 to review progress with this aspect of scaling up aid, and it is hoped that they will recommit to meet the ambitious targets set three years ago.

Scaling up aid is only one of the challenges that donors face. A more important challenge is to “scale up through aid,” meaning that aid flows should not merely support short-lived, one-time and partial development interventions—pilot projects, short-term technical assistance, programs that only address part of the problem, but leave major bottlenecks unaddressed—but should support projects, programs and policies that scale up successful interventions in a country, region or globally to reach the entire target population. Scaling up means that programs are long-term and sustained and that external support is aligned with country needs and deals comprehensively with the development challenges—often by working in partnership with other donors and pooling resources. This is the scaling up challenge that donors should address head-on, but so far have not.

This policy brief reports on the findings of an in-depth review of the literature and practice of scaling up development interventions and focuses on the role that aid donors can play in supporting scaling up for effective development. It stresses that successful scaling up with external assistance means that donor agencies need to: work with a vision and leadership; help create the political constituencies for large-scale implementation; create linkages among project, program and policy interventions; strengthen the institutional capacity of the implementing entities; provide for effective incentives and accountabilities of their own staff and management; work together with each other; monitor and evaluate the progress of programs with special attention to the scaling up dimension; and finally make sure they focus on effective preparation and flexible implementation of the scaling up process. While this is a long-term agenda, donors can take a few practical steps right away that will provide a basis for a more ambitious effort over time.

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Editor’s Note: The National Perspectives on Global Leadership (NPGL) project reports on public perceptions of national leaders’ performance at important international events. This fifth installation of the NPGL Soundings provides insight on the issues facing leaders at the Seoul G-20 Summit and the coverage they received in their respective national media. Read the other commentary »

The week before the Seoul G-20 Summit was one in which the main newspapers read in Washington (The New York Times, The Washington Post and Financial Times) all focused their primary attention on the “currency war,” global imbalances, the debate on quantitative easing (QE 2), the struggle over whether there would be numerate current account targets or only words, and the US-China relationship. As early as Wednesday, November 10, The Washington Post front-page headline read: “Fed move at home trails U.S. to Seoul; Backlash from Europe; Obstacles emerge for key goals at G-20 economic summit.” By Thursday, November 11, things had gotten worse. “Deep fractures hit hopes of breakthrough; governments are unlikely to agree on a strategy to tackle economic imbalances” read the Financial Times headline on Alan Beattie’s article from Seoul. Friday, November 12, The New York Times front-page headline declared: “Obama’s Economic View is Rejected on World Stage; China, Britain and Germany Challenge U.S.; Trade Talks with Seoul Fail, Too.” By Saturday, the Financial Times concluded in its lead editorial: “G-20 show how not to run the world.”

From these reports, headlines and editorials it is clear that conflicts over policy once again dwarfed the progress on other issues and the geopolitical jockeying over the currency and imbalances issues took centre stage, weakening G-20 summits rather than strengthening them. Obama was painted as losing ground, supposedly reflecting lessening U.S. influence and failing to deliver concrete results. China, Germany and Brazil were seen to beat back the U.S. initiative to quantify targets on external imbalances. Given the effort that Korean leaders had put into achieving positive results and “consolidating” G-20 summits, it was, from this optical vantage point, disappointing, to say the least.

How was the Rebalancing Issue Dealt With?

At lower levels of visibility and intensity, however, things looked a bit different and more positive. Howard Schneider and Scott Wilson in Saturday’s edition of The Washington Post (November 13) gave a more balanced view of the outcomes. Their headline read: “G-20 nations agree to agree; Pledge to heed common rules; but economic standards have yet to be set.” They discerned progress toward new terrain that went beyond the agreement among G-20 finance ministers in October at Gyeongju, which other writers missed.

“By agreeing to set economic standards, the G-20 leaders moved into uncharted waters,” they wrote. “The deal rests on the premise that countries will take steps, possibly against their own short-term interests, if their economic policies are at odds with the wider well-being of the world economy. And leaders are committing to take such steps even before there’s an agreement on what criteria would be used to evaluate their policies.”

They continued: “In most general of terms, the statement adopted by the G-20 countries says that if the eventual guidelines identify a problem, this would ‘warrant an assessment of their nature and the root causes’ and should push countries to ‘preventive and corrective actions.’”

The Schneider-Wilson rendering went beyond the words of the communiqué to an understanding of what was going on in official channels over time to push this agenda forward in real policy, rather than declarative terms. As the Saturday, November 13, Financial Times’ editorial put it, “below the headline issues, however, the G-20 grouping is not completely impotent,” listing a number of other issues on which progress was made including International Monetary Fund (IMF) reform which the Financial Times thought might actually feed back into a stronger capacity to deal with “managing the global macroeconomy.”

The Role of President Barack Obama

Without doubt, the easy, simple, big-picture message coming out of Seoul was that Obama and the United States took a drubbing. And this did not help the G-20 either. The seeming inability of the U.S. to lead the other G-20 leaders toward an agreement in Seoul on global imbalances, the criticism of U.S. monetary easing and then, on top of it all, the inability to consummate a US-Korea trade deal, made it seem as if Obama went down swinging.

But again, below the surface of the simple, one got a different picture. Obama himself did not seem shaken or isolated at the Seoul summit by the swirl of forces around him. At his press conference, he spoke clearly and convincingly of the complexity of the task of policy coordination and the time it would take to work out the policies and the politics of adjustment.

“Naturally there’s an instinct to focus on the disagreements, otherwise these summits might not be very exciting,” he said. “In each of these successive summits we’ve made real progress,” he concluded. Tom Gjeltin, from NPR news, on the Gwen Ifyl Weekly News Roundup commented Saturday evening that the G-20 summits are different and that there is a “new pattern of leadership” emerging that is not quite there yet. Obama seems more aware of that and the time it takes for new leadership and new patterns of mutual adjustment to emerge. He may have taken a short-run hit, but he seems to have the vision it takes to connect this moment to the long-run trajectory.

Reflections on the Role of South Korea

From a U.S. vantage point, Seoul was one more stop in Asia as the president moved from India to Indonesia to Korea to Japan. It stood out, perhaps, in higher profile more as the locus of the most downbeat moments in the Asia tour, because of the combination of the apparent lack of decisive progress at the G-20 along with the needless circumstance of two presidents failing to find a path forward on something they both wanted.

From a Korean vantage point, the summit itself was an event of immense importance for Korea’s emergence on the world stage as an industrial democracy that had engineered a massive social and economic transformation in the last 50 years, culminating in being the first non-G8 country to chair the G-20 summit. No one can fault Korea’s efforts to reach significant results. However, the fact is that the Seoul Summit’s achievements, which even in the rebalancing arena were more significant than they appeared to most (see Schneider and Wilson), but included substantial progress on financial regulatory reform, international institutional reform (specifically on the IMF), on development and on global financial safety nets, were seen to be less than hoped for. This was not the legacy the Koreans were looking for, unfortunately.

Conflicts among the major players on what came to be seen as the major issue all but wiped out the serious workmanlike progress in policy channels. The leaders level interactions at G-20 summits has yet to catch up to the highly significant degree of systemic institutionalization of the policy process of the G-20 among ministers of finance, presidents of central banks, G-20 deputies and Sherpas, where the policy work really goes on. On its watch, Korea moved the agenda in the policy track forward in a myriad of significant ways. It will be left to the French and French President Nicolas Sarkozy to see if they can bring the leaders into the positive-sum game arrangements that are going on in the policy channels and raise the game level of leaders to that of G-20 senior officials.

      

      

In our latest 21st Century Capitalism initiative paper, "What must corporate directors do? Maximizing shareholder value versus creating value through team production," author Margaret M. Blair explores how the share value maximization norm (or the “short-termism” malady) came to dominate, why it is wrong, and why the “team production” approach provides a better basis for governing corporations over the long term.

Blair reviews the legal and economic theories behind the share-value maximization norm, and then lays out a theory of corporate law building on the economics of team production. Blair demonstrates how the team production theory recognizes that creating wealth for society as a whole requires recognizing the importance of all of the participants in a corporate enterprise, and making sure that all share in the expanding pie so that they continue to collaborate to create wealth.

Arguing that the corporate form itself helps solve the team production problem, Blair details five features which distinguish corporations from other organizational forms:

1. Legal personality
2. Limited liability
3. Transferable shares
4. Management under a Board of Directors
5. Indefinite existence

Blair concludes that these five characteristics are all problematic from a principal-agent point of view where shareholders are principals. However, the team production theory makes sense out of these arrangements. This theory provides a rationale for the role of corporate directors consistent with the role that boards of directors historically understood themselves to play: balancing competing interests so the whole organization stays productive.

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Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr. guided the Peace Corps from its inception in 1961 (when it was a nascent vision of service and citizen diplomacy) to establish a renowned track record of success over the past half century, in which more than 200,000 volunteers and trainees have served in 139 countries.

The legacy of Shriver’s leadership with the Peace Corps and later with the Office on Economic Opportunity and Special Olympics has reached and changed millions of lives—of both those empowered and those who served—from impoverished communities across rural and urban America to huts and villages in developing nations throughout the world. Yet one of the greatest gifts he leaves us is the foundation to build on those accomplishments to scale-up service as a direly needed “soft power” alternative to establish international understanding and collaboration in a volatile world. As Sarge put it, so simply but powerfully: “Caring for others is the practice of peace.”

Sarge Shriver’s unquenchable idealism today is being advanced by a new generation of social entrepreneurs such as Dr. Ed O’Neil, founder of OmniMed and chair of the Brookings International Volunteering Project health service policy group. With the help of Peace Corps volunteers and USAID-supported Volunteers for Prosperity, O’Neil has fielded an impressive service initiative in Ugandan villages that has expanded the capacity and reach of local health-service volunteers engaged in malaria prevention and education on basic hygiene. 

Timothy Shriver, who succeeded his parents, Sarge and Eunice, at the helm of the Special Olympics, speaks eloquently on the move of a second generation from politics to building civil society coalitions promoting soft power acts of service and love, one at a time. This impulse is echoed in the Service World policy platform which hundreds of NGOs and faith-based groups, corporations and universities have launched to scale-up the impact of international service initiatives. This ambitious undertaking was first announced by longtime Shriver protégé former Senator Harris Wofford at a Service Nation forum convened on the morning of President Obama’s Cairo speech in which he called for a new wave of global service and interfaith initiatives.

I had the privilege of serving as a national director of the VISTA program inspired by Shriver and  to work alongside Senator Wofford and John Bridgeland, President George W. Bush’s  former White House Freedom Corps director, who have co-chaired the Brookings International Volunteering Project policy team. Along with Tim Shriver, they have ignited the Service World call to action, together with Michelle Nunn of Points of Light Institute, Steve Rosenthal of the Building Bridges Coalition, Kevin Quigley of the National Peace Corps Association and many others.

The Obama administration and Congress would best honor the life and legacy of Sarge Shriver by calling for congressional hearings and fast- tracking agency actions outlined in the Service World platform and naming the global service legislation after him. Coupled with innovative private-sector and federal agency innovations, the legislation would authorize Global Service Fellowships, link volunteer capacity-building to USAID development programs such as  Volunteers for Prosperity, and double the Peace Corps to reach a combined goal of 100,000 global service volunteers annually—a goal first declared by JFK.

Those who promote opportunity and service as vehicles to advance peace and international collaboration will continue to draw inspiration from Sargent Shriver’s indefatigable quest for social justice―from the time he talked then-Senator John F. Kennedy into intervening in the unjust jailing of Martin Luther King, Jr. to his refusal to accept wanton violence and impoverished conditions in any corner of the world.

Information on offering online tributes to the Shriver family and donations in lieu of flowers requested by the family of Sargent Shriver can be found at www.sargentshriver.org .

      

INTRODUCTION

In December 2011, the United Nations State of the World’s Volunteering Report was released at the U.N. headquarters in New York along with a General Assembly resolution championing the role of volunteer action in peacebuilding and development. The United Nations Volunteers (UNV) Program report states that:

The contribution of volunteerism to development is particularly striking in the context of sustainable livelihoods and value-based notions of wellbeing. Contrary to common perceptions, the income poor are as likely to volunteer as those who are not poor. In doing so, they realize their assets, which include knowledge, skills and social networks, for the benefit of themselves, their families and their communities…Moreover, volunteering can reduce the social exclusion that is often the result of poverty, marginalization and other forms of inequality…There is mounting evidence that volunteer engagement promotes the civic values and social cohesion which mitigate violent conflict at all stages and that it even fosters reconciliation in post-conflict situations...

The “South Africa Conference on Volunteer Action for Development” convened in Johannesburg in October 2011, and the July 2012 “Africa Conference on Volunteer Action for Peace and Development” co-hosted with the Kenya’s Ministry of East African Community, the United Nations and partners in Nairobi give further evidence to the rise of and potential for volunteer service to impact development and conflict. Indeed, in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring, youth volunteer service and empowerment have emerged as a pivotal idea in deliberations aimed at fostering greater regional cohesion and development.

In “Foresight Africa: Top Priorities for the Continent in 2012,” Mwangi S. Kimenyi and Stephen N. Karingi note that: “One of the most important pillars in determining whether the positive prospects for Africa will be realized is success in regional integration… This year is a crucial one for Africa’s regional integration project and actions by governments, regional organizations and the international community will be critical in determining the course of the continent’s development for many years to come.”

The authors note the expected completion of a tripartite regional free trade agreement by 2014 and the expected boost to intra-African trade, resulting in an expanded market of 26 African countries (representing more than half of the region’s economic output and population). At the same time, the declaration from the “South Africa Conference on Volunteer Action for Development” calls on “Governments of Southern African member states and other stakeholders to incorporate volunteering in their deliberations from Rio +20 and to recognize the transformational power as well as economic and social value of volunteering in achieving national development goals and regional priorities, which can be achieved by facilitating the creation of an enabling environment for volunteering to support, protect and empower volunteers.” This speaks directly to the urgent need to factor the social dimension into the regional integration agenda in the different African subregions.

This paper includes examples of the growth of volunteer service as a form of social capital that enhances cohesion and integration across three regions: southern, western, and eastern Africa. It further highlights civil society best practices and policy recommendations for increased volunteering in efforts to ensure positive peace, health, youth skills, assets and employment outcomes.

The importance of volunteering to development has been noted in recent United Nations consultations on the Rio+20 convening on sustainable development and the post-2015 development framework. As the U.N. reviews its Millennium Development Goals (MDG) process, Africa’s regional service initiatives offer vital lessons and strategies to further achieve the MDGs by December 2015, and to chart the way forward on the post-2015 development framework.

But how does volunteerism and civic service play out in sub-Saharan Africa? What are its institutional and non-institutional expressions? What are the benefits or impacts of volunteerism and civic service in society? Our specific purpose here is to provide evidence of the different manifestations and models of service, impact areas and range of issues in three African regions. In responding to these questions, this analysis incorporates data and observations from southern, western and eastern Africa.

In conclusion, we provide further collective insights and recommendations for the roles of the Africa Union and regional economic communities (RECs), youth, the international community, the private sector and civil society aimed at ensuring that volunteerism delivers on its promise and potential for impact on regional integration, youth development and peace.

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As the world pays its tributes to the critically ailing former South African President Nelson Mandela, youth across Africa are stepping up their own tributes to Madiba in the form of civic service on Mandela Day. The United Nations and the African Union have called on citizens across Africa and the world to volunteer 67 minutes— representing the 67 years of Mandela’s public service—to community projects on his birthday, July 18.

The Africa Peace Service Corps (APSC) has launched volunteering projects in Nairobi, Kenya; Cape Town and rural Limpopo, South Africa; Lusaka, Zambia; Abuja, Nigeria; villages in Uganda and other countries.  Four hundred youths and 35 partners assembled last July at the United Nations conference in Nairobi to launch the Pan-African service project, spurring civic action in health, climate change, youth entrepreneurship and positive peace. 

A 2012 Brookings report, “Volunteering and Civic Service in Three African Regions,” released at the Nairobi conference and co-authored by three African scholars notes the benefits of volunteering (“Ubuntu”) in South, West and East Africa in addressing youth livelihoods, health and peace-building.  The report further documents policy recommendations and strategies linking youth service and entrepreneurship in addressing the daunting task of youth unemployment across the region.  Dr. Manu Chandaria  (Comcraft CEO and Global Peace Foundation Africa chairman) and Les Baillie (chairman of Kenya mobile phone giant Safaricom Foundation, which created Africa’s M-Pesa mobile banking microfinance success) have assembled corporate leaders to back APSC youth social enterprises in tree planting and waste management to generate green jobs and reach Kenya’s goal of ten percent tree coverage.

Nelson Mandela’s life of struggle and triumph, in particular his time and insights during his time unjustly incarcerated on Robben Island, provides a rich textbook for these young social entrepreneurs.  During my recent Harris Wofford Global Service Fellowship with the University of Cape Town Development Policy Research Unit (DPRU) and Cross Cultural Solutions, while teaching an entrepreneurship class in the townships I was able to see the teeming spirit of youth enterprise first-hand alive in the poorest communities.  A South African national assets demonstration has been launched this year to tap the power of service and entrepreneurship in generating savings among township youths from these deliberations with the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, Ford Foundation, University of Johannesburg Center for Social Development and Washington University Center for Social Development and Brookings’ Africa Growth Initiative partner DPRU, among others.

Along with addressing Mandela’s dream of ending poverty, a recent Brookings report, “Impacts of Malaria Interventions and their Potential Additional Humanitarian Benefits in Sub-Saharan Africa,” outlines the potential significant peace-building effects of service in sub-Saharan Africa by highlighting the joint efforts of the Muslim Sultan and Catholic Cardinal of Nigeria in tackling malaria along with those of the Africa Malaria Leaders Alliance with PEPFAR support.  The contributions of volunteering to both peace and development outcomes are further underscored in the draft of a United Nations post-2015 “sustainable development goals” report.

Amidst inevitable political debates over the Mandela legacy, his generous spirit and legacy of reconciliation rises high above Cape Town’s Table Mountain and across the Pan-African youth landscape.  The challenge of applying his vision and spiritual values in addressing poverty through emerging demonstrations of youth service, assets and entrepreneurship will test the commitment of Africa’s next generation of young freedom pioneers, guided by this humble giant’s profound legacy now spanning the globe.

       

       

What a way to start the new year. Decades of Saudi-Iranian tensions reached a new high this past week. The cycle of reactions to Riyadh’s execution of prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr on January 2 is a reminder of how the Saudis, and their Iranian rivals, have viewed and used sectarianism throughout the tumultuous period since 2011.

Al-Nimr was arrested in 2012 and subsequently sentenced to death for allegedly "seeking ‘foreign meddling’ in Saudi Arabia, ‘disobeying’ its rulers and taking up arms against the security forces." The arrest was meant not merely as a signal to Tehran, but at least as much to Saudi Arabia’s own Shiite minority. Shiites comprise as much as 20 percent of the Saudi population, and are concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern Province—and the community has regularly erupted in protests against its economic and political marginalization. In 2011, amid the Arab Spring uprisings in majority-Shiite Bahrain, Saudi Shiites also demonstrated for the release of long-held prisoners, and Saudi forces shot and killed several Shia in the streets.

Riyadh’s decision to carry out the death sentence was greeted with demonstrations in Iran and attacks on Saudi diplomatic facilities. This Iranian reaction must have been calculated, as al-Nimr has been on “death row” for a very long time. In response, Saudi Arabia quickly cut ties with its longtime geopolitical foe and urged fellow Sunni governments to follow suit. So far, Bahrain and Sudan have also cut off relations, and both Qatar and the UAE have downgraded them. 

Governments on both sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide found a sectarian narrative useful in rallying their populations and in justifying their actions in response to the 2011 Arab uprisings. The sectarian narrative has helped the parties in this larger regional power struggle mobilize support by playing up the sectarian dimension of protests in Bahrain, the Assad regime’s crackdown in Syria, and the breakdown of inclusive politics in Iraq. Likewise, many Sunni-led countries have found sectarian rhetoric an effective way to rally Sunni citizens, intimidate their own Shiite populations, and to justify crackdowns on dissent. 

Governments on both sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide found a sectarian narrative useful in rallying their populations and in justifying their actions in response to the 2011 Arab uprisings.

Last April, I wrote that Iran was likely to escalate its asymmetric efforts to destabilize Arab politics by exploiting the cracks within Arab societies. They have done so, and it is a form of escalation the Saudis are ill-equipped to match. Last summer, I suggested that the Sunni Arab states could defend best against this Iranian subversion by tamping down sectarian tensions and working to heal the rifts within their own societies through inclusive political and economic policies. So far, I have not seen much effort from the Arab Gulf states in that direction—instead, they have doubled down on divisive sectarianism in Yemen and elsewhere. As this escalatory spiral advances, civilians will pay the price. 

Some are portraying the decision to execute al-Nimr as a negative Saudi response to Iranian efforts at rapprochement over the last few weeks. I do not necessarily see it that way, because the Iranians have done as much as the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states to provoke and exploit tensions between the two in recent times. That notwithstanding, there is no question this execution will inflame sectarian tensions in the Gulf and Iraq, as well as present the Islamic State with new opportunities. 

It has been clear for some time that the U.S. focus on the threat from the so-called Islamic State is simply not matched by the Saudis, who are far more concerned about Iran and Shiite expansionism than by this violent extremist Sunni group in their neighborhood. As such, the execution and ensuing crisis brings the clash of U.S. and Saudi interests into sharp relief and has the potential to become an inflection point in regional affairs – not necessarily because of the way the Saudi and Iranian governments choose to play, but because of how others might react.

For example, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi quickly and publicly condemned the execution. The execution—and the inevitable crackdown on Shiite protests in Qatif—might increase pressure on Abadi from Shiites in Iraq (and from Iran) to demonstrate sectarian preferences in his rhetoric and policy. That could prevent him from moving forward on steps Washington has been pushing to bring Iraqi Sunnis back into the political fold. This easily could threaten the anti-Islamic State campaign in Iraq, since it relies on Sunnis in Ramadi, Mosul, and elsewhere turning away from Islamic State and back toward the Iraqi state. Iraqi counterterrorism forces have taken much of Ramadi, but they cannot hold it without local Sunni support.

Increased Islamic State influence in the Arabian Peninsula would certainly challenge the Saudi government and prompt a renewed securitization of domestic policy.

The Islamic State worked hard to stoke sectarian tensions within the Gulf states over the past year, carrying out attacks on Shiite mosques in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The GCC leaders were not drawn in at that stage, instead expressing solidarity with their Shiite compatriots. But this time, a Sunni Gulf government is taking steps that exacerbate sectarian tensions—and that could very easily push the Islamic State to take up the issue again by attempting more such attacks. Increased Islamic State influence in the Arabian Peninsula would certainly challenge the Saudi government and prompt a renewed securitization of domestic policy. It would be an ironic outcome of a Saudi move—47 executions, mostly of Sunni extremists—that was intended to deter ISIS sympathizers. At a moment when low oil prices and a tightened financial future constrain their capacity to coopt a large, underemployed, youthful populace, this is not a recipe for stability.

The possibility that ISIS will gain from this crisis illustrates the problem with governments self-interestedly wielding that sectarian narrative is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it actually increases the incentive on both sides of the sectarian divide to escalate their real power competition, both directly and through proxies. Today, that narrative of sectarian conflict is far more than rhetoric in Iraq and Syria, where a true intercommunal conflict is underway. 

More immediately, the ripple effects of al-Nimr’s execution spotlight American policy dilemmas in the region. The escalation in sectarian conflict threatens the nascent Syrian peace process. It increases the Islamic State’s scope for action there, threatens the political dimension of the anti-Islamic State strategy in Iraq, and incentivizes Sunni extremism in the Arabian Peninsula. It pushes the Yemen war further from resolution as well, leaving al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) with room to grow and plan attacks against the American homeland. And it puts the United States into a very tight spot as it continues diplomatic dialogue with Iran in the wake of the nuclear agreement. Given this beginning, 2016 looks to be an even tougher year for the United States in the Middle East than 2015.

      

Editor's note: Tamara Cofman Wittes testifies before both the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade and the Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa for a joint session on threats to Israel in the region and on the world stage. Read her full testimony below.

Members of the Committee, thank you for the invitation to appear before you today. I am delighted to offer my views. I must emphasize, as always, that I represent only myself before you today; the Brookings Institution does not take any institutional positions on policy issues.

About a year ago, I appeared before this committee to discuss the likely impact on the region of a nuclear deal with Iran. On the afternoon following a day Israelis began with the discovery of yet another Hamas tunnel from Gaza into Israel, and that ended with the bombing of a bus, it seems like a very pat, and a very sobering opportunity to give you some thoughts on the threats facing Israel from terrorism and the impact of regional disorder. I’ve had the chance to discuss these concerns with a range of Israeli officials and experts in the last several months, and I’ll share my impressions with you.

Let me begin with Iran, the government whose policies and proxies lie behind some of the worst threats Israel faces today. When I appeared before you last year, I said that “Whether there’s a nuclear deal or not, I predict we will see a more aggressive approach by Iran in a host of arenas around the region, where the upheaval has given them greater opportunities than before.” And indeed that’s what we’ve seen — Iran, helped in Syria by Russia, has pushed forward assertively to advance its influence and strengthen its allies around the region. The Iranian threat — not primarily the threat of nuclear capabilities but rather these other dimensions of Iranian behavior destabilizing the region — has led Israel and the Sunni Arab states of the region to find more common ground in the past year than perhaps ever before.

That said, I want to emphasize that in my view this escalation of Iran’s attempts at subversion around the region was inevitable with or without a nuclear agreement. While sanctions relief will, over time, give the Iranian government more resources, the Islamic Republic has been committed to this path since 1979. Ever since this revolutionary regime was established, it has sought to exploit the cracks within societies across the region to expand its own influence. Iran never lacked motivation for its assertions of power. Iran’s sanctions-induced economic hardship did not prevent them from giving Hezbollah hundreds of millions of dollars a year, or prevent them from spending billions of dollars and their own soldiers’ lives keeping Bashar al-Assad in power. The Arab uprisings of 2011, the civil wars that emerged in their wake, and the sectarian narratives employed by Iran and its Arab adversaries have all given Iran unprecedented opportunities to expand its activities, and it has exploited those opportunities very successfully. So yes, Iranian interference across the region is likely to continue in the wake of the Iran deal — and it was getting worse with or without the deal. The main driver of instability and threat in the Middle East today is the civil violence in Syria, Yemen, Libya, and increasingly in Iraq. Ending those civil wars should be a top priority for the United States and others concerned with regional stability.

In a major speech in January outlining Israel’s strategic environment, IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot noted that the P5+1 nuclear agreement with Iran is a turning point for Israel, because the nuclear threat from Iran used to be the biggest threat Israel faced. While Israel does not assume that Iran will fully comply with the deal, Eisenkot recognized that the dismantling of centrifuges and the Arak reactor, and the shipment of uranium out of the country, have concretely rolled back Iran’s nuclear capabilities. He also noted that the IDF does believe that Iran will work hard over the coming five years to gain the advantages they will get by complying with the terms of the agreement. Indeed, Eisenkot said that he did not anticipate Israel facing major nonconventional weapons threats in the near future, because the nuclear deal has rolled back Iran’s nuclear capabilities and put them under tighter controls, and because of the removal of chemical weapons from Syria. That gives the IDF important breathing space in which to focus on building up capabilities to address other threats and opportunities. Let me address now some of these other threats.

Syria

For the first several years of the war in Syria, Israel took a fairly hands-off approach: concerned over the emergence of jihadi groups, but wary of Hezbollah and Iranian involvement backing Assad. Israelis used to see the Syrian government as a stable and predictable adversary, and even sometimes as a check on Iran and Hezbollah. But today Israeli military officials judge that it’s unlikely Bashar will again control all of Syrian territory, and they see him as dependent and subservient within the Syrian-Iranian alliance.

As a result, it’s clear today that the scenario that most concerns Israel in Syria is one in which Assad remains in power in Damascus, and remains dependent on Iran for survival — leaving Iran with stronger influence on Israel’s northern border than it had before the war. Iran is determined to sustain Assad in power because Syria is the strategic depth and channel of support to Hezbollah, Iran’s most effective regional ally, and is also a good entry point for Iran to the Arab-Israeli arena. According to a new BBC investigation and other sources, Iran has reportedly bolstered its IRGC forces in Syria with militias made up of Iraqi Shia and of Hazara refugees from Afghanistan, who are picked up in Iran and given minimal training before being sent to Syria to fight. The level of Iranian investment in Assad’s survival is impressive, and should increase our skepticism that the diplomatic talks including Iran will yield a constructive outcome. Israeli officials also worry that continued chaos in Syria, should the war continue unabated or escalate, could allow jihadi groups like Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State to launch attacks into Israel from the Golan. Israel will be looking to the United States, and to some extent the Sunni Arab states who share its concern over Assad and Iran, to advance its interests in the diplomatic talks.

Hezbollah

Of even greater concern to Israel is the impact of the Syrian war on Hezbollah. That concern has several dimensions.

First, Hezbollah’s investment in saving Assad has altered the political equation in Lebanon in ways that could destabilize the country. Hezbollah fighters have been operating in Syria, perhaps about 5000 at a time in rotation, and they have lost about a thousand fighters there. This emphasizes very clearly for all to see (including the Lebanese people) that the organization is not so focused, as it claims, in defending Lebanon, but rather on increasing its own power and influence and securing Shia and Iranian influence in the Arab world.  In addition, the Syrian civil war has spilled over into Lebanon already, reigniting sectarian tensions and generating an influx of one million Syrian refugees – that’s adding 25% to Lebanon’s population. The tensions in Lebanon are evident in its politics – the sect-based political factions have been unable to agree on a president for the past year and a half. Hezbollah has been boycotting parliament as well, exercising its effective veto over the political system, and preventing any progress on basic governance in the country. If sectarian tension in Lebanon increases, and particularly if Sunni extremist groups fired up by the Syrian war carry out more violent attacks in Lebanon, Hezbollah could easily choose to try and win political points domestically by attacking Israel. Thus far, Hezbollah has not chosen this path, perhaps because of Israel’s deterrent power, perhaps because it worries about overstretch fighting on two fronts; but one cannot assume that reticence will last forever, and unintended escalation is also a possibility.

Second, the prospect of an outcome from the Syrian war that leaves Assad in power and Iran in effective control of the country presages further transfers of weapons and technology from Iran to Hezbollah through Damascus. Iran has already enabled Hezbollah to expand its rocket and missile arsenal to nearly 100,000, some with advanced guidance and some with range that would enable them to target infrastructure and to reach all of Israel’s population centers. This prospect makes leaving Assad in control of Damascus a deeply concerning outcome for Israel’s security. Israel has acted to try and prevent the transfer of advanced technology to Hezbollah through Damascus several times over the course of the Syrian conflict — but 100% success would be a miracle.

Third, the Syrian war has given Hezbollah fighters extensive experience in conventional warfare, increasing their battle hardiness and thus their capabilities in the event of another war with Israel. Should Hezbollah embark on a campaign of rocket attacks on Israeli territory, the scope of the threat would likely lead Israel to move quickly toward a ground offensive in southern Lebanon designed to reduce or eliminate the attacks.  But as Eisenkot noted in January, Hezbollah has scattered its presence across 240 villages in southern Lebanon; each has a defense system; and each, of course, also has a civilian population. In the event of a new confrontation, Israel will be facing a more entrenched, more experienced enemy and the IDF will face real dilemmas in ground operations in southern Lebanon.

Hamas in Gaza

Iran continues to seek to provide funding and weapons to Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad in Gaza. While Hamas has reportedly rebuilt some of its tunnel and rocket capabilities since the 2014 conflict, it has not so far sought a new confrontation with Israel. Rather, the rocket attacks from Gaza in 2015 were launched by salafi groups in the Strip that are seeking to compete with and displace Hamas; and Hamas has dealt with them harshly. Recent reports suggest that, under pressure from Cairo, Hamas is also trying to sever links to Sinai militants and prevent its own operatives from going into Sinai. In other words, current events indicate that Hamas seems more interested right now in survival in power, than in confrontation with Israel.

Should Hamas provoke another round with Israel, there is no question that the IDF would face many of the same challenges militarily that it faced in 2014 — in terms of the threat from tunnels, and in terms of the way Hamas embedded both fighters and weapons within the civilian population. Indeed, fighting terrorism in a heavily populated environment is a long-term challenge for the IDF, whether in Gaza or potentially in southern Lebanon or the West Bank. Building up new tactics and capabilities against this challenge is a key task for Israel’s military in the coming years.

The West Bank and the “Knife Intifada"

The wave of violence that began in September last year has comprised hundreds of attacks, and claimed the lives of several dozen Israelis, over two hundred Palestinians, and several Americans. According to public comments by officials, the IDF and security services understand this violence to be of a different nature than past terrorism by Palestinians. The attacks do not, for the most part, appear to be directed by any organization, and the individuals who carry out these attacks often do not seem to have planned the attacks in advance in any meaningful way. The lack of organization or direction means that there is little tactical warning that Israel’s security forces can use to prevent these attacks; they can only react.

According to the briefings I received in January, the incitement that was evident in the Palestinian media and in politicians’ statements in the early months has been significantly reduced, and the IDF was expecting a reduction in the overall number of attacks due to increased efforts both by Israel and by the Palestinian Authority. This past month has seen a dramatic drop in the number of attacks. Two weeks ago, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas gave a notable interview to Ilana Dayan of Israel's Channel Two in which he condemned the violence in robust terms and called on Palestinians to stop these attacks. He acknowledged the problem of incitement in the Palestinian media, and spoke powerfully about his security forces' coordination with Israel to prevent attacks. He also reiterated that he sees Netanyahu as a peace partner and is prepared to meet with him at any time.

Overall, Israeli security sources say clearly that the drivers for those who carry out these attacks include despair at the lack of any political horizon in the conflict with Israel. This points to the fact that the stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict carries a continuing cost for both societies, and that cost may be increasing over time. The status quo in this conflict is deteriorating, not static, and reminds us that a negotiated resolution of the conflict remains Israel’s best option for long-term security.

The Israeli government has sought to avoid responding to the attacks in ways that severely constrain the wider Palestinian population. For example, throughout this wave of attacks, 120,000 Palestinians have continued to work inside Israel and in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The Israeli government has also sought to bolster the Palestinian economy in other ways. These steps are directed toward stabilizing a shaky Palestinian Authority which is a crucial bulwark for Israel against instability and inroads by radical groups into the West Bank.

Palestinian politics are not immune from the governance challenges faced by other Arab societies. There is a wide and growing gap between the Palestinian leadership and the public, particularly young people who see little prospect for economic, diplomatic, or political progress in their current circumstances. Continued uncertainty about leadership succession in the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian national movement more generally also raises concern over a potential weakening or collapse of PA security forces. Israeli officials I spoke to expressed concern that the anger and violence currently directed against Israel would, if it continues, inevitably turn against the Palestinian Authority as well; and that could provoke a collapse of the PA or an end to Israel-PA security cooperation. This could leave the IDF feeling pressured to reenter Palestinian population centers in an ongoing way, and could make the West Bank vulnerable to inroads by ISIS and other radical groups.

Sinai and ISIS’s Egyptian Affiliate

The ISIS affiliate in Sinai has continued to attack Egyptian targets nearly every day. The most recent statistics from the Tahrir Institute, which tracks terrorism in Egypt, recorded 74 attacks in the last quarter of 2015. These included the downing of a Russian passenger plane on October 31st, which has devastated what was left of Egypt’s tourist economy. ISIS has also claimed assassination attempts against government officials and individuals accused of supporting the government, IEDs, and armed assaults on various military and civilian facilities.

Egypt’s counterterrorism campaign in Sinai has been of limited impact in reducing attacks; one Israeli source told me that the Egyptian campaign was mostly good as “making the sand jump.” There are concerns among some observers both in Israel and here in Washington that the Egyptian military’s tactics may even be counterproductive. Egypt has, for example, razed homes along the Sinai border with Israel, destroying farmland and displacing thousands of Sinai residents. Such tactics may be alienating Sinai residents and giving ISIS more room to operate. Similarly, Egypt’s overcrowded jails are reportedly hotbeds for extremist recruitment.

The Obama Administration, as you know, is redirecting US military assistance to Egypt away from long-term commitments to major weapons systems, and toward effective counterterror and border security capabilities. This effort deserves the robust support of Congress. The United States also has both legal and moral obligations to ensure that its support for Egyptian counterterror efforts does not contribute to human rights abuses, which have vastly escalating in the last two years in Egypt. I know this is an issue your committee is watching closely.

Conclusions

It’s clear that the changes in the region have shifted the nature of the threats facing Israel — from state-centered and nonconventional threats to non-state, terrorist and insurgent threats. Israel has long relied on deterrence and superior military capabilities as the backbone of its defense. But the new threat profile challenges that approach. As General Eisenkot has asked, how does one deter terrorist organizations that are not accountable to anyone? Likewise, overwhelming conventional military capabilities are better suited for a major land war than for a campaign against a terrorist group that is embedded within a civilian population.

From a broader perspective, there is in fact a sort of “threat trough” for Israel at the present moment, which presents important strategic opportunities. Iran is pre-occupied with its geopolitical competition with the Sunni Arab states, and its nuclear program has been rolled back in concrete terms, taking that threat off the table for a period of years. Some of Israel’s worst enemies in previous years – Syria, Iraq, and Libya – are consumed by civil war themselves. Hamas has less Iranian support than in the past, and is contained and reticent after its 2014 confrontation with Israel; and Hezbollah is for now wholly committed in Syria.

Two opportunities emerge for Israel from this changed threat environment: first, time and space to undertake longer-term planning for the structure, size, and capabilities of the Israel Defense Forces to meet the challenges ahead, especially from non-state actors. Second and perhaps more importantly, to seize the moment to determine what it wants in its future relationship with the Palestinians, and to push forward with steps to advance the two-state solution that Israel’s leader continues to avow is in his country’s best interests. This unique moment should not be wasted.

As the United and Israel continue discussions on a new ten-year memorandum of understanding on defense assistance, it will be important to evaluate this fundamental shift in Israel’s threat environment and help Israel prepare accordingly. Enshrining US-Israel defense cooperation in a new MOU will help address emerging threats, and will give the IDF needed predictability in funding to implement its new long-term plans. Most of all, a new MOU will send a clear signal to adversaries and friends alike about the depth and breadth of the US-Israel defense partnership. In other words, the significance of the MOU goes well beyond a dollar amount, a specific capability, or a specific source of threat. I hope it will be concluded soon.

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• Israel imperiled: Threats to the Jewish state (Full Testimony)