Josef Joffe, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and at the Hoover Institution, is the author of The Myth of America's Decline: Politics, Economics, and a Half Century of False Prophecies (Liveright Publishing). He is also the editor-publisher of Die Zeit, a national weekly newspaper in Germany.
Joffe's analysis of U.S. dynamism and resiliency combines his international perspective with his observations on the particular influences of Stanford, Silicon Valley and California. He recently sat down with Stanford for an interview in his office and then elaborated by email. The questions and answers presented here are not in the same order as the conversation and have been edited for length.
You describe the strength of the United States as much in cultural terms as political or economic. You call restlessness, inventiveness and hustling American traits. Is America unique?
Certainly compared to Europe, with its settled welfare states. Highly regulated and much more generous in their social supports, they also come with more barriers of regulation, which act against innovation. So it is not as easy to turn restlessness and hustling into opportunity. Everybody wants to imitate Silicon Valley. Why is that so hard?
First, it is very hard to replicate this unique interaction between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Stanford is Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley is Stanford, meaning that Stanford people keep migrating back and forth, as they have done since the legendary Terman days of the 1930s.
The other reason is California. [Citing from his book] "It was in California . . . that a particular law emerged in 1872 [that] defended the employee's freedom of movement, the right to leave his or her employer at any moment, even to immediately go to work in direct competition with their former employer. . . . " I can't think of any other legal system that gives people such free rein. Not even in other parts of the United States where those who leave a company must often sign "no-compete" agreements. In general, movement and mobility—plus little opprobrium attached to failure—mark an important cultural advantage.
You write that the United States could undermine itself by closing the door to immigration.
A general point first: The United States was the first Western nation-state to separate citizenship from faith, ancestry or bloodline. You had to have the right religion and ethnicity in Europe to claim full citizenship until pretty much the turn of the 20th century. But in America, where everybody came from somewhere else, citizenship was unlinked from birthplace, social position and faith. It helped that this country never had a state religion. To exaggerate, what mattered was not where you came from—slavery being the horrifying exception—but what you had to offer. Degree beats passport, so to speak.
As a result, it is easy to become American. A bit facetiously: It's shop till you drop, and buy an SUV. Celebrate secular holidays like Thanksgiving; run up the flag on the Fourth of July; serve in the PTA; coach Little League. How do I become a "real" Chinese?
A nice payoff, by the way, is demography. A country that accepts immigrants as numerously as the United States does—one million legals, half a million illegals per year—will be much younger than Russia or China. First, because it is the young who immigrate. Second, [immigrants] tend to have a higher birthrate, for a generation or so. Those willing to uproot themselves are also more ambitious. So immigration is an eternal engine of change, as this country demonstrates. It began as a WASP republic, an offspring of Britain. But then wave after wave came in: Germans, Irish, East Europeans, Jews; now Asians and Latinos. The engine keeps revving. Every new group wants to make it, pushing and ultimately dislodging the old elites. Suddenly, the name of the national security advisor is no longer McGeorge Bundy but Henry Kissinger. Countries that freeze up don't do as well as those that keep churning.
For a moment after 9/11, I worried that the United States might close its doors. The number of foreign students went down. It's back up, which is good. The eternal complaint is that America has gone soft, its young preferring law and business to the hard stuff: STEM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics]. The statistics confirm this point. But they also tell us that the United States is the largest PhD factory in the world for STEM. So the shortfall is made up by foreigners. Is that a sign of weakness? It's a sign of strength, because they don't go to China or Russia and, even better, because two-thirds of them stay. Today, you can't imagine Silicon Valley without tens of thousands of foreign-born.
Photo: Werner BartschYou also draw a connection between born-again spirituality and socioeconomic vitality.
The foundation of American Protestantism is Puritanism, an English version of Calvinism. Calvinism's theory of predestination says that from day one you are slated to go to heaven or hell. Basically, it didn't leave room for individual redemption. After this creed crossed the Atlantic, it lost its doom-and-damnation quality. It turned into optimism and self-help. You could choose baptism anytime in life; you would be "born again." You could ditch the past and start a new life. Salvation in the here and now—isn't that the creedal underpinning of the American secular experience?
This creed and Americanism go hand in hand. People could drop their baggage in the ocean, so to speak. Maybe they had a criminal record or a bankruptcy in their past. Never mind, America was the country of the second chance. Protestantism reinforces Americanism: You can start over and reinvent yourself, over and over again.
Let's talk foreign policy. You think the current U.S. posture toward the rest of the world is, what, puzzling?
Isolationism and interventionism are seemingly total opposites, but in Obama's case, they come together. Interventionism à la Obama is the circumscribed use of military power by way of drones and special forces. Why would I call this isolationism? Because his grand strategy, if it is one, requires no allies and no international institutions. We can act without international restraints on U.S. power. It is unilateralism by drone and Delta Force.
The United States, tired of war, is clearly in retraction mode, in yet another of its withdrawal cycles since the founding. But maybe the change is secular and not just cyclical, with America becoming more like Europe. The Europeans were once a race of warriors who conquered the four corners of the world. Today they are as aggressive as pussycats. Take the Swedes, the scourge of Europe in the 17th century, and the Germans, far worse, in the 20th. These societies, rich and self-preoccupied, are now models of pacifism. Welfare trumps warfare; the fires of nationalism have burned out. Maybe this is what modernity does to all advanced economies. Maybe the United States will become a very big Sweden. If so, who will mind the international store?
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