The Days of Rage seem to be persisting in Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak is gunning for 2011's Marie Antoinette Award for Most Clueless Political Response By a Leader, and Egyptian protestors have completely and repeatedly ignored the 4 PM curfew announced on Friday.  The police have withdrawn, the armed forces are out but not exactly stopping the protestors, and anyone vaguely related to Hosni Mubarak appears to have decided this was a swell time to shop at Harrod's.  The official U.S. take on the situation is to tap-dance as fast as humanly possible not say all that much. 

So.... what now?  What's going to happen?   Like I said last week -- and like Paul Krugman -- I don't know.  But having spent the morning watching the Sunday talk shows and the afternoon feverishly updating my Twitter feed, let me take this opportunity to ask as many provocative questions as I can: 

1)  Why is Mubarak toast?  Everyone assumes that the Egyptian leader is a dead man walking, and given his speech on Friday, I can understand that sentiment.  There are, however, remaining options for Mubarak to pursue, ranging from a full-blown 1989 Tiananmen square crackdown to a slow-motion 2009 Tehran-style crackdown. 

Obviously, these aren't remotely good options for anyone involved.  The first rule in political science, however, is that leaders want to stay in power, and Mubarak has given no indication that he wants to leave.  He could be packing up as I type this -- but 80-year old strongmen don't tend to faint at the first spot of trouble. 

The Days of Rage have clearly altered the future of Egypt -- Gamel Mubarak is not going to succeed his father.  How much additional change will take place is unclear. 

2)  Could the army crack down if it wanted to?  Contradicting my first question, the one thing I wonder is whether the Egyptian state has the capacity to crack down any more.  Egypt's internal security forces have failed miserably.  This leaves the army, an institution that has, to date, commanded respect across all walks of life in Egypt and refrained from direct internal coercion activities . 

The fact that jets buzzed Tahrir Dquare suggests two things.  First, the military is trying to signal to protestors to, you know, go home.  Second, the military might not have the available tools to make this point more effectively, and might not be able to efficiently dispatch protestors if so desired.  If this cable is accurate, the Egyptian military has long-focused on developing its conventional warfare capabilities, which is great for an armored attack in the desert and lousy for subduing a restive civilian population. 

I'm sure the military could restore order if necessary, but it would be a hugely inefficient enterprise.  The hit to their reputation would be massive. 

3)  Has U.S. influence over the situation increased and not decreased?  Again, lots of talk today about how U.S. can't really shape the outcome.  OK, except that I don't think the following statements add up:

a)  The Egyptian armed forces are now the central pillar propping up the Egyptian state;

b)  The Egyptian and American defense establishments have strong ties;

c)  U.S. aide to Egypt is roughly $3 billion a year;

d)  U.S. influence over the situation has waned.

As the Obama administration's rhetoric shifts -- going from calling on Mubarak to take action to talk about "transition" -- I wonder whether the U.S. is simply following the situation on the ground, or whether the situation on the ground has allowed the administration to start exerting more leverage. 

4)  After Egypt, which country in the region is the most nervous?  This ain't Tunisia, it's the heart of the Arab Middle East.  Regime chage in Egypt will send shockwaves across Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Libya and Syria. 

That said, I suspect the most nervous country in the region will be Israel.  When I was there this summer listening to their top security experts, Egypt was barely mentioned.  The cornerstone of Israel's security was the notion that Egypt was a partner and not a threat.  A region in which Iran, Turkey and Egypt all adopt hostile attitudes towards the State of Israel is, let's say, not an ideal situation.  If both Turkey and Egypt look like democracies a year from now, that makes things even worse. 

5)  Is the Muslim Brotherhood really all that and a bag of chips?  The MB wasn't behind the latest protests, and it's not entirely clear how much support they actually command in Egypt. This hasn't stopped speculation about what an MB-led Egypt would look like.  While everyone is evoking what happened in Iran in 1979, I keep thinking that the Egyptian military is a lot more robust now than the Iranian military was back then.  Stratfor speculates otherwise, but they don't have much data to back up their claim.  I find it interesting that the MB threat has not deterred neoconservatives from supporting, at a minimum, regime change in Egypt. 

[So do you have any answers?--ed.  The U.S. should be pursuing a broad-spectrum policy of engaging any and every actor in Egypt right now, but the key is the military.  All available pressure -- including an aid cutoff -- should be put on that institution to not intervene and not attack civilians.  If that happens, I think that all the other dominoes fall.] 

Longtime readers might have noted that I've been super-silent about events in Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, etc. As one reader asked me, "What gives?"

The answer is that, way back in the early days of... er... this month, I was all set to blog a response to Marc Lynch's speculation that authoritarian Arab governments were in trouble. "Silly Marc!" I thought, "this kind of speculation happens every five years or so, and it always turns out that these regimes are more robust than anyone thought."

In an unusual display of sloth caution on my part, however, I held back out of prudence. I hadn't thought all that much about the situation on the ground, and that's a time when silence is the best policy. In contrast, Steve Walt stepped into the breach... and now he's trying to find his way back to shore.

Marc's latest post strikes me as both informative and spot-on in his assessments, so to avoid redundancy, I'd suggest checking it out.

For my readers, I'll just leave this as an open comment thread with the following discussion questions:

1) How much logic will be contorted in an effort to argue that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the trigger? I'm thinking a lot.

2) Which neoconservative impulse will win out -- the embrace of democratic longing, or the fear of Islamic movements taking power?

3) A year from now, will Tunisia actually be a democracy? The "Jasmine Revolution" portion of this story is easy -- it's the grubby parts of institution-building and power-sharing that muck things up.

Developing....

Your humble blogger has, in the past, live-blogged or live-tweeted the State of the Union address. After reading the National Journal's draft of the speech, I've decided that the mindless applause will convert a decent 30-minute speech into an interminable 75-minute talkathonso I'm gonna watch Mystery Men instead to pass.

Looking over the draft, however, I see that the Obama administration has really taken this competitiveness theme to heart. More than any State of the Union I've seen before, President Obama raises the examples of other countries doing things better than the United States as an impetus for the U.S. to do more. Consider:

The rules have changed. In a single generation, revolutions in technology have transformed the way we live, work and do business. Steel mills that once needed 1,000 workers can now do the same work with 100. Today, just about any company can set up shop, hire workers, and sell their products wherever there's an internet connection.

Meanwhile, nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world. And so they started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science. They're investing in research and new technologies. Just recently, China became home to the world's largest private solar research facility, and the world's fastest computer....

Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik¸ we had no idea how we'd beat them to the moon. The science wasn't there yet. NASA didn't even exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn't just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.

This is our generation's Sputnik moment....

The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations. America has fallen to 9th in the proportion of young people with a college degree. And so the question is whether all of us - as citizens, and as parents - are willing to do what's necessary to give every child a chance to succeed....

Our infrastructure used to be the best - but our lead has slipped. South Korean homes now have greater internet access than we do. Countries in Europe and Russia invest more in their roads and railways than we do. China is building faster trains and newer airports. Meanwhile, when our own engineers graded our nation's infrastructure, they gave us a "D."

We have to do better.

I'm curious to see how this will play out. On the one hand, the administration is obviously using this kind of "we're falling behind other countries!" shtick as a way to build public support for investments in education and infrastructure. In the same speech he talks about falling behind South Korea, for example, he embraces the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.

At the same time, I have two big concerns with this approach. First, there's the risk of rhetorical blowback, in which everyone freaks out and reacts in a hysterical manner.

Second, and more important, the percentage of the speech devoted to microeconomic "competitiveness" issues vastly exceeds the amount devoted to long-term macroeconomic policy. If the federal government really wants to create a better climate for innovation, it needs to send a credible signal that steps are being taken to deal with long-term budgetary problems. That section of the speech was, er, less solid.

[What about the foreign policy sections?!--ed. Meh. Nothing bad -- just nothing of substance either. One could argue that the biggest foreign policy innovation of the SOTU is the administration's decision to use globalization as the political crowbar to pry infrastructure spending investments from Congress.]

Feel free to comment away on what you would like to see in the speech.

In his New York Times column today, David Brooks analogizes the government's proper role in the economy to an administration's actual role in a modern U.S. university:

[G]overnment will be a bit like the administration of a university. A university president is nominally the head of the institutions. He or she lives in the big house. But everybody knows a university president is a powerful stagehand.

The professors, the researchers, the tutors, the coaches and the students are the real guts of a university. They handle the substance of what gets done. The administrators play vital but secondary roles. They build the settings. They raise money. They recruit and do marketing. They help students who are stumbling.

The administrators couldn't possibly understand or control the work in the physics or history departments. They just try to gather talent, set guidelines and create an atmosphere where brilliance can happen.

Mulling it over, this is a better analogy than even Brooks indicates. The administration/everyone else dynamic at a university also captures the feelings that often predominate debates about the role of government in society.

To be specific:

1) Most faculty and students do their damndest to simply ignore the fact that a university administration actually exists.

2) Most faculty and students cultivate an active ignorance about things like budgets, revenues, etc.

3) The only time any university administration is popular is when it has resources to dole out;

4) Any time the administration interferes with what faculty, students, etc. want to do it provokes fierce resentment -- unless the faculty/student is in trouble, in which case the hope is that the administration will make it all better.

5) Trying to change any aspect of university governance is, I suspect, even more difficult than trying to get a law passed through Congress.

6) Paying customers rack up massive debts and inevitably feel like they're not getting close to their money's worth, even though the data suggests that the pecuniary rewards from going to college are pretty significant.

7) Even if administrators lack local knowledge about the research going on in their schools, they're nevertheless sure that they completely understand the research.

8) Even though administrators come from the faculty, approximately 99.8 percent of all faculty are completely ill-suited for administrative responsibilities.

Brooks uses this analogy because of his argument for how the global economy will function in this century:

In this century, economic competition between countries is less like the competition between armies or sports teams (with hermetically sealed units bashing or racing against each other). It's more like the competition between elite universities, who vie for prestige in a networked search for knowledge. It's less: "We will crush you with our efficiency and might." It's more: "We have the best talent and the best values, so if you want to make the most of your own capacities, you'll come join us."

The new sort of competition is all about charisma. It's about gathering talent in one spot (in the information economy, geography matters more than ever because people are most creative when they collaborate face to face). This concentration of talent then attracts more talent, which creates more collaboration, which multiplies everybody's skills, which attracts more talent and so on.

Well.... economic competition among countries has been something of a misnomer since the start of the Industrial Revolution. It's mattered only in the sense that geopolitical competition exists. To put this into concrete terms, from a strictly economic perspective China's massive growth is an unalloyed good for Americans, because it means a future growth market for U.S. goods and services. It good becomes slightly less pure only when people start worrying about a) whether China will convert its growing wealth into power; and b) whether Chinese power will advance interests that conflict with the United States.

More importantly, however, there's a way in which Brooks' model is the great power equivalent of the Dubai model of economic growth -- and as I noted earlier this month, a world in which everyone races after the Dubai model is a world of massive overinvestment and inadequate demand. Like the dollar auction game, a few countries might win, but most will lose in pursuing this strategy.

Readers are warmly encouraged to provide more ways in which the administration/university relationship is akin to the government/economy relationship.

Your humble blogger likes to occasionally check the interwebs to make sure that no one is abusing Thucydides in making an argument about modern-day international relations. In descending order of offensiveness, examples of Thucydides Abuse include:

1) Blatantly making up what Thucydides actually said in History of the Peloponnesian War;

2) Exaggerating how Thucydides can contribute to understanding world politics today;

3) Writing the truth, but not the whole truth, about Thucydides' history.

Yesterday David Sanger invoked Thucydides in his New York Times Week in Review essay on a rising China and a fading United States. Let's see how he did:

For a superpower, dealing with the fast rise of a rich, brash competitor has always been an iffy thing....

[A]sk Thucydides, the Athenian historian whose tome on the Peloponnesian War has ruined many a college freshman's weekend. The line they had to remember for the test was his conclusion: "What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta."

So while no official would dare say so publicly as President Hu Jintao bounced from the White House to meetings with business leaders to factories in Chicago last week, his visit, from both sides' points of view, was all about managing China's rise and defusing the fears that it triggers. Both Mr. Hu and President Obama seemed desperate to avoid what Graham Allison of Harvard University has labeled "the Thucydides Trap" - that deadly combination of calculation and emotion that, over the years, can turn healthy rivalry into antagonism or worse....

[I]n both capitals, fear makes for good business: It's a proven way to sell weapons systems.

Meanwhile, Thucydides might be appalled at the nationalistic talk that resounds in both countries. In Chinese newspapers these days, it's hard to avoid accounts of "American decline." Meanwhile, some new members of Congress talk lightly of cutting off Chinese access to the American market - as if that could happen in today's global economy.

In both languages, that's fear talking.

You know what? Given the space constraints, Sanger does pretty well. He manages to nail the subtle point about how fear leads to the worst sort of policy decisions. It is telling that, as the war progresses, Athenian decision-making devolves. Initially, the country's leaders understand that "fear, honor and interest" guide foreign policy. By the time the invasion of Sicily comes around, however, the Athenian leadership has reduced this to fear. Sanger actually quotes Thucydides rather than paraphrasing him. By modern journalistic standards, that's pretty extraordinary.

Nonetheless, Sanger commits the misdemeanor of omitting the whole truth of Thucydides. This is important, because the omission gets at how the historical analogy doesn't really hold up.

First, Sparta was never the hegemonic power prior to the war -- at best, they were a co-equal of Athens. That's not the current situation.

Second, Sparta was scolded by its allies -- and implicitly, by Thucydides himself -- for excessive caution when confronted with a rising power. Throughout the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides contrasts Athenian energy and dynamism with Spartan conservatism and risk-aversion. Spartan fear was triggered by past Spartan inaction and caution.

Now, say what you will about American foreign policy, but conservatism and risk-aversion have not been nouns associated with it for quite some time. Similarly, until about mid-2009, China was not thought of as a source of foreign policy dynamism. Furthermore, when China's foreign policy changed, so did the United States'. Comparing the Obama administration's response to Spartan inaction doesn't hold up.

In the sparest structural sense, there are a few parallels that can be drawn between Greece in the fifth century B.C.E. and the present day. On the whole, however, I think the Athens-Sparta historical analogy obfuscates more than it enlightens.

Readers are warmly encouraged to alert the hard-working staff here at the blog for any further abuses of Thucydides. I mean, you know this is going to crop up on the next Jersey Shore episode.

I see that The Powers That Be at FP are highlighting my foolhardy unconventional wisdom about China's rise on their splash page.

Given the Hu-Obama summit and subsequent flurry of China commentary this week, it's worth highlighting the most absurd data point I cited in that article -- Forbes' magazine's decision to name Chinese President Hu Jintao the world's most powerful individual. Their explanation:

Paramount political leader of more people than anyone else on the planet; exercises near dictatorial control over 1.3 billion people, one-fifth of world's population. Unlike Western counterparts, Hu can divert rivers, build cities, jail dissidents and censor Internet without meddling from pesky bureaucrats, courts.

With these two sentences, the editors at Forbes managed to demonstrate an even shallower analysis of domestic politics than their Dinesh D'Souza cover story on Obama, which I didn't think was possible.

Let's review just a smattering of coverage about Hu Jintao's current ability to exercise iron-willed control over the Chinese bureaucracy, shall we? First, Gordon Chang in The New Republic:

Hu is sometimes called the world's most powerful person -- Forbes magazine gave him that accolade in November -- but he is a weak leader back home. Just how weak was revealed in two startling incidents within the past three weeks. On Tuesday, after the state-run Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute performed the first flight test of the J-20 stealth fighter -- an unmistakable slap in the face of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who was visiting Beijing at the time -- Hu professed not to know that the test had occurred....

If the Chinese leader was telling the truth, the test flight reveals a remarkable defiance of civilian authority by the flag officers of the People's Liberation Army, an obvious attempt to undermine the military cooperation Hu said he wanted to foster. Or if, as is more likely, Hu did in fact know about the timing of the test, he nonetheless said something that made himself appear inept. One has to wonder about a political system that creates incentives for its top leader to publicly imply that he is both ignorant and weak.

Either way, the unmistakable impression is that Hu seems to have much less influence than is often assumed. This could be due to the fact that China is in the middle of a transition to the next generation of political leaders -- led by Xi Jinping -- who are gaining in power as Hu loses his in the long run up to the actual handover.

Next, the Economist:

China's new raw-knuckle diplomacy is partly the consequence of a rowdy debate raging inside China about how the country should exercise its new-found power. The liberal, internationalist wing of the establishment, always small, has been drowned out by a nativist movement, fanned by the internet, which mistrusts an American-led international order.

Then there's Drew Thompson in -- hey, it's FP!!

China's national security decision-making process is opaque, and so this worrisome disconnect -- who knew what when -- is difficult to ascertain with certainty. It is highly improbable that Hu was unaware of the development of this major military advancement. His role as chairman of the Central Military Commission ensures that he is well briefed about major programs, and he doubtlessly approves their large budgets. What is not known is how much oversight and control the central government leadership in Beijing had over the PLA's decision-making process that lead to highly visible tests at the Chengdu air base just as Gates was visiting China.

And, finally, David Sanger and Michael Wines in the New York Times:

China is far wealthier and more influential, but Mr. Hu also may be the weakest leader of the Communist era. He is less able to project authority than his predecessors were -- and perhaps less able to keep relations between the world's two largest economies from becoming more adversarial.

Mr. Hu's strange encounter with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates here last week -- in which he was apparently unaware that his own air force had just test-flown China's first stealth fighter -- was only the latest case suggesting that he has been boxed in or circumvented by rival power centers....

President Obama's top advisers have concluded that Mr. Hu is often at the mercy of a diffuse ruling party in which generals, ministers and big corporate interests have more clout, and less deference, than they did in the days of Mao or Deng Xiaoping, who commanded basically unquestioned authority....

"There is a remarkable amount of chaos in the system, more than you ever saw dealing with the Chinese 20 years ago," Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser and Mr. Gates's mentor, said Saturday. "The military doesn't participate in the system the way it once did. They are more autonomous -- and so are a lot of others."

Now, to be fair, it's possible that China is learning how to play the authoritarian equivalent of the two-level game. Even if that's true, however, China is playing that game very badly -- and they're playing it in policy arenas that are guaranteed to trigger a balancing coalition rather than accommodation.

There are a lot of other areas where your replacement-level American commentator is vastly exaggerating China's power. But Forbes' editors easily win the... the....

OK, contest for readers -- name the award that I want to give to writers who vastly exaggerate China's rise!

As much as I didn't enjoy John Mearsheimer's cover essay in The National Interest, that's how much I've been enjoying his latest book, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics. Mearsheimer basic argument is that governments lie to each other far less frequently that one would expect, but they more commonly lie to their own citizenry. On the whole, however, they do this less for venal but for strategic reasons.

Mearsheimer's book went to press before Wikileaks blew up. As Stuart Reid points out at Slate, however, it's a wonderful testing opportunity for some aspiring dissertation-writer out there. Indeed, it now turns out that the Obama administration exaggerated juuuuust a wee bit about the damage caused by Wikileaks:

Internal U.S. government reviews have determined that a mass leak of diplomatic cables caused only limited damage to U.S. interests abroad, despite the Obama administration's public statements to the contrary.

A congressional official briefed on the reviews said the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers.

"I think they just want to present the toughest front they can muster," the official said.

But State Department officials have privately told Congress they expect overall damage to U.S. foreign policy to be containable, said the official, one of two congressional aides familiar with the briefings who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity.

"We were told (the impact of WikiLeaks revelations) was embarrassing but not damaging," said the official, who attended a briefing given in late 2010 by State Department officials.

Hmmm.... this sounds familiar. Very familiar.

What's interesting is how one reacts to this kind of news. For example, I'm shocked, shocked that Glenn Greenwald has jumped all over this as yet another data point revealing official American perfidy:

And this, of course, has been the point all along: the WikiLeaks disclosures are significant precisely because they expose government deceit, wrongdoing and brutality, but the damage to innocent people has been deliberately and wildly exaggerated -- fabricated -- by the very people whose misconduct has been revealed. There is harm from the WikiLeaks documents, but it's to wrongdoers in power, which is why they are so desperate to malign and then destroy the group.

Contrast this with Kevin Drum:

For the most part, the leaked cables were interesting and in some cases embarrassing, but as a lot of people pointed out in real time, not really all that revelatory. In fact, they mostly showed U.S. diplomacy in a pretty good light. Obviously American diplomats would prefer that private conversations remain private -- and that's perfectly reasonable -- but in the end the WikiLeaks releases didn't cause nearly as much damage as government officials claimed.

It will shock, shock you to know that I agree with Drum more than Greenwald. This is not because of world-weary cynicism -- indeed, there's a very strong argument to be made in favor of a "broken windows" theory of government lying. Do it for small things, and it becomes easier to do it for big things.

The thing is, government honesty and transparency inevitably becomes a comparative exercise, and compared to other governments, the United States does pretty well. Looking at the various lists of Wikileaks revelations, the bulk of the truly embarrassing and/or damaging material affects other governments far more [But what about U.N. spying?--ed. Look up desuetude and get back to me].

My take on Wikileaks really hasn't changed much since my first post on the matter -- the revelations do less to harm U.S. interests than the official overreaction to those revelations.

If the U.S. government stopped exaggerating the threat to U.S. interests and then going all Emily Litlella later, that would be peachy.

I'm at the point in my life when there are only three occasions that prompt the watching of cable news:

1) An election night;

2) A real-time breaking news event in which video has a comparative advantage over the web;

3) Being on the treadmill on a slow sports day with nothing good on basic cable.

So yesterday was no. 3, and I caught a report on Fox News about "pre-summit brinksmanship" on the part Hu Jintao. The headline was accurate: "China's President Hu Jintao: Dollar-Based System 'Thing of the Past.'" And I should stress that Fox News was hardly the only news outlet to jump on this turn of phrase.

That said, some perspective might be in order. The statement came from a series of answers that a committee of propaganda writers with the stylistic panache of Andrei Gromyko Hu provided to the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.

Let's reprint the question and answer in full, shall we?

Q: What do you think will be the US dollar's future role in the world? How do you see the issue of making the RMB an international currency? Some think that RMB appreciation may curb China's inflation, what's your view on that?

HU: The current international currency system is the product of the past. As a major reserve currency, the US dollar is used in considerable amount of global trade in commodities as well as in most of the investment and financial transactions. The monetary policy of the United States has a major impact on global liquidity and capital flows and therefore, the liquidity of the US dollar should be kept at a reasonable and stable level.

It takes a long time for a country's currency to be widely accepted in the world. China has made important contribution to the world economy in terms of total economic output and trade, and the RMB has played a role in the world economic development. But making the RMB an international currency will be a fairly long process. The on-going pilot programs for RMB settlement of cross-border trade and investment transactions are a concrete step that China has taken to respond to the international financial crisis, with the purpose of promoting trade and investment facilitation. They fit in well with market demand as evidenced by the rapidly expanding scale of these transactions.

China has adopted a package plan to curb inflation, including interest rate adjustment. We have adopted a managed floating exchange rate regime based on market supply and demand with reference to a basket of currencies. Changes in exchange rate are a result of multiple factors, including the balance of international payment and market supply and demand. In this sense, inflation can hardly be the main factor in determining the exchange rate policy (emphases added).

Meh. First of all, Hu isn't saying anything here that hasn't been said by other Chinese officials since early 2009.

Second of all, Hu didn't say that the RMB was going to be supplanting the dollar anytime soon. In fact, he pretty much said the opposite of that. China wants a multiple-reserve currency regime, and they're moving veeeerrrrrry slowly to bring their currency into the conversation. And minus the RMB, as I've said before, there ain't much in the way of viable alternatives right now.

If you read the rest of the answers, there's a lot of CCP boilerplate "stiffly worded answers" mixed in with "a positive note on bilateral ties," as Richard MacGregor of the Financial Times notes. What I don't see is any brinksmanship.

Substantively, however, what about the future? Will a multiple currency reserve system work? It's a vision shared by Barry Eichengreen, Nicholas Sarkozy, and.... well, I'm not sure who else. I have my doubts, but I can't quite convey them in a single blog post.

What do you think?