Peter Berkowitz

Peter Berkowitz

Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow Peter Berkowitz is an expert on classical and contemporary liberalism, American constitutionalism, and the Middle East. He authored Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism and Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist. He also edited, among other books, Terrorism, the Laws of War, and the Constitution: Debating the Enemy Combatant Cases. He chairs the Koret-Taube Task Force on National Security and Law and cochairs the Boyd and Jill Smith Task Force on Virtues of a Free Society.

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    • Second Term Challenges at the Intersection of National Security and Law

    | February 11, 2013 | 3:00 am

     

    As Barack Obama begins his second term as president of the United States, the nation confronts a range of formidable challenges at the intersection of national security and law.  Some challenges involve the inadequacies of both the existing criminal law and the contemporary laws of war to deal with transnational terrorists who are neither criminals nor lawful combatants but partake of aspects of both. Some involve the development of technologies of mass empowerment and mass destruction.  Some involve the proper interpretation of the Constitution and the best division of national security responsibilities among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the federal government, and the departments and entities within them.  Some involve understanding the ideas that motivate our adversaries.  Some involve the application of the international laws of war to complex conflicts abroad.  Some involve the changing character of the nation-state.  And some challenges involve several or all of these aspects at the same time.

    In the essays that follow, members of the Hoover Institution’s Task Force on National Security and Law address several of the challenges with which the Obama administration and administrations before it have wrestled and with which the Obama administration and administrations that follow it will continue to grapple.  We do not pretend to agree on a solution or set of solutions. But we do agree on the nature of the problem.  And we are proud to share a defining sensibility.

    The task force’s sensibility is defined in the first place by the conviction that questions of security and questions of law are increasingly intertwined and that the Constitution provides a sturdy and flexible framework that enables the nation to provide for its defense while securing citizens’ rights and respecting international law.  Our sensibility is also characterized by a clear recognition that the rise of transnational terrorism; the proliferation of increasingly inexpensive, mobile, and devastatingly destructive weapons; and the diffusion of power from nation states to international bodies and transnational organizations at one end of the spectrum, and to enterprising individuals at the other end, have generated novel and difficult questions of strategy and law.  It is marked by an acute awareness that war has increasingly come under the supervision of law, and that law has increasingly been employed as a weapon of war.   And it is committed to responding to the use and abuse of domestic and international law in the realm of national security by means of precise analysis, careful criticism, and prudent reform.

    Such a sensibility, we believe, is crucial to advancing the nation’s interest in dealing effectively and lawfully with the daunting security threats it confronts.

    A Boot Camp for Citizenship

    | April 07, 2012 | 3:57 pm

    America’s crisis of civic education is acute, requiring a major change in the way students are taught about the workings of American government and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. So contends David Feith, an opinion editor at the Wall Street Journal, in his introduction to Teaching America, a well-crafted collection of essays from a distinguished and diverse group of authors—progressives and conservatives, policy makers and professors, jurists and political commentators.

    The case for civic education—what might have been called “civics” in an earlier generation—is straightforward. Just as, say, doctors who receive defective medical training will be handicapped in the performance of their professional tasks, so too citizens whose civic education is lacking will be less than competent as members of an extended political community. Studying the Constitution—not to mention American political ideas and institutions—can help us all to exercise our rights, respect the rights of others, and weigh the merit of contending policies. More generally, as Feith notes, civic education can nourish a common culture by showing that partisan disputes often reflect conflicting interpretations of a shared commitment to freedom and equality.

    Continue reading Peter Berkowitz…

    How California’s Colleges Indoctrinate Students

    | April 03, 2012 | 7:04 pm

    The politicization of higher education by activist professors and compliant university administrators deprives students of the opportunity to acquire knowledge and refine their minds. It also erodes the nation’s civic cohesion and its ability to preserve the institutions that undergird democracy in America.

    So argues "A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California," a new report by the California Association of Scholars, a division of the National Association of Scholars (NAS). The report is addressed to the Regents of the University of California, which has ultimate responsibility for governing the UC system, but the pathologies it diagnoses prevail throughout the country.

    The analysis begins from a nonpolitical fact: Numerous studies of both the UC system and of higher education nationwide demonstrate that students who graduate from college are increasingly ignorant of history and literature. They are unfamiliar with the principles of American constitutional government. And they are bereft of the skills necessary to comprehend serious books and effectively marshal evidence and argument in written work.

    This decline in the quality of education coincides with a profound transformation of the college curriculum. None of the nine general campuses in the UC system requires students to study the history and institutions of the United States. None requires students to study Western civilization, and on seven of the nine UC campuses, including Berkeley, a survey course in Western civilization is not even offered. In several English departments one can graduate without taking a course in Shakespeare. In many political science departments majors need not take a course in American politics.

    Continue reading Peter Berkowitz…

    Reconsidering the Arab Spring

    | April 03, 2012 | 6:46 pm

    President Obama entered the White House determined to overcome what he and his supporters regarded as the Bush administration’s poisonous legacy in the Middle East. And yet, though loath to acknowledge it, since the advent of the Arab Spring in Tunisia in December 2010 and January 2011 and its rapid spread throughout the region, the Obama administration has been struggling to formulate and implement its own version of the Bush Doctrine, according to which it is in the interest of the United States to promote freedom and democracy in the Arab world.

    This unacknowledged reversal came at a time in which the president’s major policy initiatives in the Middle East were in disarray, in significant measure because they were ill-conceived and clumsily executed. Touting engagement with the Iranians, Obama’s smart diplomacy went nowhere. Tehran mocked him, flouting deadline after deadline set by the president for ensuring that Iran’s nuclear program was limited to civilian purposes by subjecting it to international supervision. And while the United States was reduced to silently observing the carnage, Iran brutally suppressed large public demonstrations against the corrupt presidential elections of June 2009. Having lost two years in fruitless efforts to sweet talk the Iranians, the Obama administration has over the last year expanded and intensified sanctions imposed by the Bush administration. By the president’s own secretary of defense’s estimates, Iran is on a path to developing the capacity to make a nuclear weapon within a year.

    Continue reading Peter Berkowitz…

    Boot Camp for Citizens

    | December 09, 2011 | 11:07 am

    America’s crisis of civic education is acute, requiring a major change in the way students are taught about the workings of American government and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. So contends David Feith, an opinion editor at The Wall Street Journal, in his introduction to "Teaching America," a well-crafted collection of essays from a distinguished and diverse group of authors—progressives and conservatives, policy makers and professors, jurists and political commentators.

    The case for civic education—what might have been called "civics" in an earlier generation—is straightforward. Just as, say, doctors who receive defective medical training will be handicapped in the performance of their professional tasks, so too citizens whose civic education is lacking will be less than competent as members of an extended political community. Studying the Constitution—not to mention American political ideas and institutions—can help us all to exercise our rights and respect the rights of others and to weigh the merit of contending policies. More generally, as Mr. Feith notes, civic education can nourish a common culture by showing that partisan disputes often reflect conflicting interpretations of a shared commitment to freedom and equality.

    Continue reading Peter Berkowitz…

    The Importance of Experience

    | October 21, 2011 | 10:45 am

    After the inglorious defeat of his cross country campaign to win passage of his second stimulus bill in the Democratic Party controlled Senate, only diehard supporters still share President Obama’s apparently unshaken confidence in his speech-making prowess. But it would be a mistake to dwell on his followers’ idolization and the president’s vanity.

    Obama seems to believe that the soaring rhetoric that propelled him to the presidency supplies a way of governing that offsets his stunning lack of executive experience. Fawning admirers reinforce the illusion. But the illusion stems from the progressive academy from which the president emerged.

    Continue reading Peter Berkowitz…

    (photo credit: The White House)

    The Myth of Conservative Purity

    | September 07, 2011 | 5:52 pm

    With the opening of the fall political season and tonight’s Republican candidate debate, expect influential conservative voices to clamor for fellow conservatives to set aside half-measures, eschew conciliation, and adhere to conservative principle in its pristine purity. But what does fidelity to conservatism’s core convictions mean?

    Superstar radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has, with characteristic bravado, championed a take-no-prisoners approach. In late July, as the debt-ceiling debate built to its climax, he understandably exhorted House Speaker John Boehner to stand strong and rightly praised the tea party for “putting country before party.” But then Mr. Limbaugh went further. “Winners do not compromise,” he declared on air. “Winners do not compromise with themselves. The winners who do compromise are winners who still don’t believe in themselves as winners, who still think of themselves as losers.”

    We saw the results of such thinking in November 2010, when Christine O’Donnell was defeated by Chris Coons in Delaware in the race for Vice President Joe Biden’s vacated Senate seat. In Nevada Sharron Angle was defeated by Harry Reid, who was returned to Washington to reclaim his position as Senate majority leader. In both cases, the Republican senatorial candidate was a tea party favorite who lost a very winnable election.

    Continue reading Peter Berkowitz…

    College Rape Accusations and the Presumption of Male Guilt

    | August 22, 2011 | 10:41 am

    Late August and early September bring recent high school graduates, bright and eager, to campuses around the country. Carefully planned orientation sessions will impress upon freshmen the paramount importance of sensitivity, of avoiding offensive words and ideas, and—notwithstanding that in recent years approximately 55% of matriculating freshmen nationally have been female—the urgency of maintaining a campus atmosphere friendly to women.

    But parents who might expect this orientation to include an introduction to the moral and political purposes of liberal education—including respect for liberty of thought and discussion, and due process of law—will be sorely disappointed.

    The neglect at freshmen orientation of the aim of liberal education and how it undergirds and is undergirded by the principles of freedom is not an accident. It is emblematic of college as a whole. Our universities impair liberal education not only by what they teach and do not teach in classrooms but also by the illiberal rules they promulgate to regulate speech and conduct outside of class.

    The Obama administration has aggravated the problem. On April 4, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, head of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), distributed a 19-page "Dear Colleague" letter to "provide recipients with information to assist them in meeting their obligations."

    At the cost of losing federal funding—on which all major institutions of higher education have grown dependent—colleges and universities are obliged under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act (which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex) to thoroughly investigate all allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus, including the felony of rape. They are also obliged, according to Ms. Ali, to curtail due process rights of the accused.

    Continue reading Peter Berkowitz’ Wall Street Journal op-ed…

    The Debt Deal and the Progressive Crack-Up

    | August 09, 2011 | 2:24 pm

    The debt-limit crisis of 2011 brought the federal government harrowingly close to defaulting on its financial obligations. As the dust settles, it is more harrowing still to contemplate the implications of what the democratically negotiated settlement revealed about the panic of the progressive mind.

    One might view the debt deal as evidence that democracy in America, though often unlovely in execution, is alive and well. After all, President Obama’s $800 billion-plus stimulus package was passed by Congress in early 2009 on a mostly party-line vote. It was followed in April by his $3.5 trillion budget, enacted without a single Republican vote, that contained sizeable across-the-board funding increases for federal departments and agencies. The president devoted the next 12 months to passing costly and unpopular health-care legislation that dramatically increased government’s responsibility for regulating approximately one-sixth of the nation’s economy. Employment hovered at approximately 9% and still does.

    In the congressional elections of 2010, the electorate, led by the tea party movement and disaffected independents, rendered its judgment on the president’s priorities. The people dealt him and his party a historic midterm defeat, producing large Republican gains in the Senate and a comfortable majority in the House, including 87 freshmen.

    The voters’ message was clear: Cut spending, compel the government to live within its means, and put Americans back to work. In short, the president and his party badly overreached in 2009 and 2010; and in 2011 the Republicans, to the extent their numbers in Congress allowed, have effectively pushed back.

    Continue reading Peter Berkowitz’ Wall Street Journal op-ed…

    (photo credit: Nina Matthews)

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