By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, January 18 -- Previewing President Barack Obama's upcoming State of the Union speech, two former Treasury Secretaries, a TV personality and a mad professor spoke Tuesday at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Johns Hopkins professor Michael Mandelbaum urged that the US reduce its spending in Afghanistan, which he called only the fourth most important country to the US in its region, after Pakistan, Iraq and Iran.
Inner City Press asked Mandelbaum if he would put Somalia, Sudan or any African country even in his Top Ten list for US policy.
“No, it's not in the top fifty, or even in the top one hundred,” Mandelbaum replied. “With all due respect to our friends in Turtle Bay, far more important to global stability” is US defense spending, not anything the UN does.
This is at odds with studies, such as one by RAND, a participant at the CFR event, praising the UN as “peacekeeping on the cheap” when compared to how much the US has spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. That the results are also cheap looking is seen in Haiti, and in the failure to protect civilians in from Darfur to Ivory Coast.
The President of CFR Richard Haass, in answer to Inner City Press' question about US participation in the UN and its peacekeeping missions said that he sees a “vulnerability in the US budget for non-defense spending in the international arena.”
Panelist George Stephanopoulos disagreed, saying that such foreign assistance has been relatively unscathed in the last few years, even after the financial meltdown.
The meltdown was the subtext of the panel's talk, with former Treasury Secretary Roger Altman calling it a “civilization threatening event.” Also in the audience was Robert Rubin, who after being Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary cashed in at Citigroup as it got more and more involved in subprime and predatory lending.
Inner City Press previously asked Rubin to justify Citigroup's lending, adjudged as predatory even by the Federal Reserve, in connection with Citigroup's acquisition of the high cost financial company branches of Washington Mutual. “That's not under my aegis,” Rubin answered then.
Tuesday he was nattily dressed, asking about Pakistan, where another Citibanker has served as finance minister. Who is responsible for these “civilization threatening” events? The answer was not spoken, but could partially be found, at CFR on Park Avenue on Tuesday night.
The 4 panelists at CFR Jan 18, causes of meltdown off camera, (c) MRLee
The listed participants included representatives from JPMorgan Chase, Credit Suisse, Mitsui & Co, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Moody's, UBS and Warburg Pincus, which just bought a 16% stake in National Penn Bancshares. And so it goes.
Footnotes: Mandelbaum, who was praised by a former student of his now at Fox News, bragged that he is writing a book with Tom Friedman of the New York Times. He told his friendly questioner KT McFarland, “It's always good to see a former student gainfully employed.”
The event ended with a joke about it preparing Stephanopoulos for a session the next day with Joan Rivers. “She's great on the Euro,” Stephanopoulous said. He also praised Republican budget maven Paul Ryan, on “everything but taxes.” We'll see.
