Foreign Policy 2016 05-06

ESA/ROSETTA/MPS FOR OSIRIS TEAM MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA with Internet startups and had money to down the market early and sign contracts spare. It was no longer just NASA launching with the largest of the private spaceflight rockets into space: In 2010, Musk’s SpaceX companies, or even with NASA. Yet there presided over the maiden voyage of its Fal- wasn’t much precedent. “People would con 9 rocket, proving that a private com- ask, ‘Well, are you allowed to extract these pany could reliably get spacecraft into the minerals? Can you guarantee that an out- stratosphere and back. side body’—the United Nations, say—‘isn’t going to shut you down?’” Kfir told me. Planetary Resources was founded in 2009. Three years later, DSI launched during If DSI was scuffling to gain footing with a time of profound optimism about space- investors, Planetary Resources was flush flight. The U.S. shuttle program had recently with them. In addition to Schmidt, Larry ended, but NASA had managed to get its Page, his Google co-founder, provided Curiosity Rover onto the surface of Mars. financial backing. Virgin’s Richard Bran- SpaceX by then was running regular deliv- son also invested in Planetary Resources, eries to the International Space Station (ISS). and filmmaker James Cameron signed on as an advisor. At the helm of the com- For would-be asteroid miners, such as pany was CEO Chris Lewicki, a NASA sci- Sagi Kfir, the stars were finally aligning. entist. He had served as flight director for The technology was there; the interest in the Spirit and Opportunity rovers and as private spaceflight was there. surface-mission manager for the Phoenix Lander that reached Mars in 2008. It was time to get to work. One of Planetary Resources’s first mis- I nitially, the founders of DSI worked sions was to develop a spacecraft, called remotely from their homes, com- the Arkyd, that the company hoped would municating by telephone. Kfir eventually detect mineable asteroids. To personally supplied some of the help fill out its coffers, in 2013, Planetary incorporation fees. Fundraising was a Resources turned to Kickstarter. It raised boot-strapped affair. “We opened with the $1,505,366 for what it called the “first pub- friends and family round,” Kfir recalled, licly accessible space telescope,” which “with our hands out, going, ‘Hey, can you would ride on board the Arkyd. (A ver- give us some money?’” sion of the craft was successfully launched last year; Planetary Resources is prepar- In approaching potential investors of ing a comprehensive update for the Arkyd the non-familial variety, DSI made sure crowd-funding campaign.) to stress that however far-out its plan sounded, the groundwork was already Despite its connections and fundraising there. NASA had managed to get a probe prowess, however, Planetary Resources into a near-Earth asteroid’s orbit in 2000 soon found itself running into the same and land on the rock in 2001. And in 2010, problem as DSI. Investors were con- the Rosetta, a probe owned by the Euro- cerned about the legality of the venture. pean Space Agency, had successfully Financiers, said Peter Marquez, Plane- passed an asteroid a full 280 million miles tary Resources’s vice president for global from Earth. engagement, needed to know that their money wasn’t going to go toward fighting Kfir recited the company’s appeal to battles in a courtroom. investors for me: “Do we have rockets? Yes. Have people gone to asteroids? Yes. The solution, to Planetary Resources’s Have people landed on asteroids? Yes. Have execs, seemed to be the passage of a bill people taken samples from asteroids? Yes. that would effectively legitimize, from Have those samples been returned to the an American legal perspective, the aster- earth? Yes. So we’re there.” oid mining industry. In 2013, the com- pany hired the veteran lobbying firm Still, DSI quickly found that many poten- K&L Gates to advance its cause on Capi- tial investors were skittish. They under- tol Hill. (Planetary Resources declined to stood that there indeed was money to be made, especially if DSI was able to lock

say how much it paid the firm.) In a memo- resource or space resource obtained.” The DSI penned a public “condolences” mes- randum addressed to lawmakers, Marquez emphatic message to the asteroid mining sage, which it published on its website. “We laid out the company’s case for legislation: sector? Go forth and conquer. know how hard [the engineers at Planetary “[B]eing the standard bearer for this stra- Resources] have been working and the high tegic market has many benefits” for the Last November, President Barack Obama expectations we all had for their first mis- United States, including more jobs and signed the bill into law. By that fall, Plan- sion,” wrote Daniel Faber, the CEO of DSI. room for growth in the tech sector. Some etary Resources had raised a total of $12 “Even as we design and prepare our own other perks were political. If passed, this million from 16 investors since its incep- spacecraft, we recognize that a loss for one would be the first asteroid mining bill in tion, according to a 2015 SEC filing; DSI, of us is a loss for all.” global history. According to Marquez, his based on its filings, had raised $1 million. hope was that when it came time for other Last year, Planetary Resources took to countries to pen their own legislation, they By Silicon Valley investment the skies again, this time placing a new would use Washington’s as a template. standards, these are not exactly device, the Arkyd 3R (A3R), on a rocket massive influxes of dough. In owned by SpaceX. The launch went off In July 2014, Bill Posey, a Republican addition, plenty of technical without a hitch, as did a 90-day test flight representative from Florida, and Derek challenges remain. Despite the lofty prog- launched from the ISS. When I spoke to Kilmer, a Democratic representative nostications of representatives from DSI Lewicki this spring, he told me that the from Washington, introduced a bill on and Planetary Resources, asteroid mining newest Arkyd spacecraft, the Arkyd 6 the House floor they called the Asteroids is still very much in its infancy. Engineers (A6) satellite, was being tested at Plane- Act. “Our knowledge of asteroids—their are still perfecting the art of plopping down tary Resources’s headquarters in Wash- number, location, and composition—has cleanly on asteroids and comets, let alone ington before a scheduled June launch. been increasing at a tremendous rate, mining them. In 2014, the Rosetta probe Larger than the A3R, the A6 satellite will and space technology has advanced to dispatched a lander, dubbed the Philae, to probably stay aloft for a full year, aiming the point where the private sector is now the surface of a comet. But the craft failed its water- and mineral- sensing technology able to begin planning such expeditions,” to anchor itself adequately, and it took in the direction of Earth. This will allow Posey said in a statement. “Our legislation three bounces before landing. The Philae Lewicki and his team to test the accuracy will help promote private exploration and eventually completed its mission before of those sensors and make any necessary protect commercial rights as these endeav- going into hibernation mode. adjustments. Like DSI, Planetary Resources ors move forward.” sees the launch of actual mining vehicles DSI, for its part, has yet to attempt to as several years off. Over the next year, Planetary Resources launch a single craft. Bonin, the chief engi- representatives traveled regularly to Wash- neer, told me he hoped to have Prospector In January, Lewicki traveled to the ington, D.C., to meet with legislators and X, the company’s first probe, into space annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las congressional aides. They were joined on before 2017 is out. Afterward, he said, DSI Vegas to participate in a question-and-an- the Hill by DSI, as well as staffers from Bige- plans to land its first mission, Prospector swer session with Nathan Ingraham, a low Resources, a tech startup that wants 1, on an asteroid. “Its only purpose,” Bonin senior editor at the tech site Engadget. to build “private habitats” in space—orbit- said, “will be to map the amount of water Lewicki, who is young and handsome, with ing condos, essentially—and others from on an asteroid to see if there’s as much as a coif of brown hair he wears parted neatly Moon Express, a lunar mining concern we think there is.” If there was—and only if to one side, has a TED Talker’s ability to dis- from Mountain View. The companies may there was—extraction would begin with the till the most complex technical matters to have been competitors in some sense, but deployment of another specialized space- memorable and digestible cocktail chatter. they all wanted the same thing: a legal craft. Otherwise, Prospector 1 would come Asteroid mining, he told Ingraham with a framework that would guarantee their home and the process would start again. wide smile, is “how we’re going to move into future claims to outer space. space and develop the next Vegas Strip.” Planetary Resources is slightly further In 2015, their lobbying efforts paid off. along than its chief competitor. In 2014, the About halfway through the discussion, The Asteroids Act was rolled into a larger bill company put a probe, the Arkyd 3, aboard Lewicki picked up a small object from the called the U.S. Commercial Space Launch an Orbital Sciences Corp. rocket bound floor and held it forward for the crowd to Competitiveness Act, which protects the for the ISS. Upon reaching the space sta- see. The object, he explained, was a hunk rights of private spaceflight ventures like tion, the hope was for astronauts there to of a millions-year-old meteorite found on Bezos’s Blue Origin. It also states, in no release the Arkyd from the air lock and put Earth, which had been pulverized, pow- uncertain terms, that any “United States cit- it into low-Earth orbit, where its avionics dered, and processed by a 3D printer. As the izen engaged in commercial recovery of an and control systems could be assessed by members of the crowd craned their heads asteroid resource or a space resource under Planetary Resources. But the rocket failed forward to get a better look, Lewicki pro- this chapter shall be entitled to any asteroid to achieve full liftoff and crashed. claimed that this was the “first time ever 50 MAY | JUNE 2016

in history” an object had been 3D printed Still unanswered from an asteroid. It was a glimpse of the is the question day when such technology, parked in space of who, in fact, but receiving digital orders from Earth, will owns space. What create on-demand tools and parts for the will happen new space economy. when, one day, companies from For Planetary Resources and DSI, a big two countries part of their battle is to convince those clash over the around them that the future they are bet- same rock? ting on will manifest—and that wealth will follow. In the meantime, both companies According to news reports, it is likely the granted on a first-come, first-served basis. have sought to diversify their offerings, legislation will be similar to the act signed which is helping keep them afloat. Just into law by Obama last year. Frans von der Dunk, a professor of consider how much Planetary Resources raised for its public telescope. To Kfir, the news was evidence of the space law at the University of Nebraska, unstoppable momentum of the asteroid During my trip to the DSI offices, Kfir mining industry. “First the U.S., and now forecasted the gradual adoption of inter- showed me into a small cubicle separated Luxembourg. I think the genie is out of from the rest of the office by a translucent the bottle,” he told me. “For the next year national “customary” law pertaining to divider. Inside, tools and electronic parts or so, you might have lingering opinions were scattered across a makeshift work- on whether this is legal, but after a while, the mining of asteroids—not ratified and bench. Kfir picked up a square object. It as more countries join and have their leg- was a small, lightweight consumer satel- islation, that will all stop.” policed international legislation, but gen- lite, which could be launched into near- Earth orbit. The market in cubesats, as the For now, only a few countries have erally agreed-upon practices and customs. small devices are known, is burgeoning. acknowledged publicly that they have Universities, government agencies, and designs on asteroid mining. Still unan- In the case of disputes, companies could even individual consumers can buy the swered is the question of who, in fact, owns devices to conduct their own Earth-imag- space. What will happen when, one day, proceed to arbitration at the national level ing or star-mapping projects. To build the companies from two countries clash over satellites, which contain similar parts to the the same rock? After all, while the U.S. or take their cases to an international asteroid detecting probes DSI eventually Commercial Space Launch Competitive- plans to launch, the firm has partnered ness Act codifies the rights of American court. “If an international asteroid min- with Dutch tech company Innovative Solu- space companies, it won’t do much to pre- tions in Space. Kfir estimates the sale of the vent the emergence of international dis- ing framework is going to emerge, it will devices could help bring in millions for DSI. putes over asteroid rights. be bottom-up,” von der Dunk predicted. “Look, the truth is, there may be When I asked Kfir about that possibil- super-passionate investors out there that ity, he suggested that a multinational body Meanwhile, as the legal debate enters say, ‘OK, here’s the money. Go asteroid might emerge in the mode of the Gene- mine. If it works out in seven to 10 years, va-based International Telecommunica- its next phase, the DSI team is soldiering fantastic, I made a fortune.’ But others tions Union (ITU), which coordinates the want to have an exit strategy of a couple orbital slots for the thousands of satel- on. After my tour of the offices, Kfir and years,” he told me. “With these devices, lites circling Earth. With an asteroid min- we can say, ‘Look, we’re not just an aster- ing equivalent, he said, companies might I climbed into my rental car and drove oid mining company, we’re a technology approach the committee and inform the company.’ We can be working on the sci- secretariat that they are seeking claim to around the Ames campus. Kfir recalled ence with short-term gain.” asteroid X or asteroid Z. Rights would be how four years ago, everyone he met In February, not long before I visited the DSI offices, Luxembourg, home would look at him strangely when he to one of the largest satellite compa- nies in the world, announced plans mentioned “asteroid mining.” DSI was to write its own asteroid mining legislation. a big risk—wouldn’t he have been better staying in aviation law, with its depend- able paycheck? Outside, the shadow of Hangar One, the old blimp garage, flickered past. Kfir smiled. “To me, this is all the fulfillment of something I’d wanted when I was a kid: to be involved in getting further into space, to be part of the space industry,” he explained. “It’s just one step at a time.” Q MATTHEW SHAER (@matthewshaer) is a jour- nalist based in Atlanta.



Before he n a shantytown perched in the was president hilly outskirts of Lima, Peru, people were dying. It was 1994, of the and thousands of squatters— World Bank, many of them rural migrants who had fled from their coun- Jim Yong try’s Maoist guerrilla insur- Kim gency—were crammed into unventilated hovels, living without basic sanitation. advocated its They faced outbreaks of cholera and other abolition. infectious diseases, but a government aus- Today, he’s terity program, which had slashed subsi- roiling the dized health care, forced many residents to forgo medical treatment they couldn’t organization afford. When food ran short, they formed by shuffling ad hoc collectives to stave off starvation. A Catholic priest ministering to a par- staff and ish in the slum went looking for help, and eschewing he found it in Jim Yong Kim, an idealistic old priorities. Korean-American physician and anthro- pologist. In his mid-30s and a recent grad- Is he uate of Harvard Medical School, Kim had destroying helped found Partners in Health, a scrappy the bank—or nonprofit organization whose mission was to bring modern medicine to the world’s saving it poor. The priest had been involved with the from itself? group in Boston, its home base, before serv- ing in Peru, and he asked Kim to help him The set up a clinic to aid his flock. No sooner Evolution of had Kim arrived in Lima, however, than the an Idealist priest contracted a drug-resistant form of tuberculosis and died. By Andrew Rice Kim was devastated, and he thought he knew what to blame: the World Bank. Photographs by John Loomis Like many debt-ridden nations, Peru was going through “structural adjustment,” a period of lender-mandated inflation controls, privatizations, and government cutbacks. President Alberto Fujimori had enacted strict policies, known collectively as “Fujishock,” that made him a darling of neoliberal economists. But Kim saw calamitous trickle-down effects, includ- ing the tuberculosis epidemic that had claimed his friend and threatened to spread through the parish. So Kim helped organize a conference in Lima that was staged like a teach-in. Hun- dreds of shantytown residents met devel- opment experts and vented their anger with the World Bank. “We talked about the privatization of everything: profits and also FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 53

suffering,” Kim recalls. “The argument we World Bank?” Kim asked me in a recent his strongest qualification for his job— an opinion that probably vexes critics who were trying to make is that investment in interview. “I think that is an entirely legit- point out that he knew little about lending before arriving at the bank. “Finance and human beings should not be cast aside in imate question.” macroeconomics are complicated, but you can actually learn them,” he says. “The the name of GDP growth.” Over the next Kim believes he has the existential hardest thing to learn is mud-between- your-toes, on-the-ground development half decade, Kim would become a vocif- answers. During his four years at the work. You can’t learn that quickly. You can’t learn that through trips where you’re erous critic of the World Bank, even call- bank’s monumental headquarters on H treated like a head of state. You have to have kind of done that before.” ing for its abolition. In a 2000 book, Dying Street in Washington, he has reorganized K im talks fast and he walks for Growth, he was lead author of an essay the 15,000-person workforce to reflect a fast. Following him—a lithe, balding 56-year-old attacking the “capriciousness” of interna- shift from managing country portfolios surrounded by a deferen- tial, suited entourage— tional development policies. The “penal- to tackling regional and global crises. He you can easily imagine him in a white coat as a physician making his rounds. ties for failure,” Kim concluded, “have been has redirected large portions of the bank’s At the March conference, a technology summit sponsored by the Department borne by the poor, the infirm, and the vul- resources—it issued $56 billion in loans of Energy, he strode briskly past booths where inventors were shilling ideas. Kim nerable in poor countries that accepted the and other forms of financing last year— peppered them with questions about new methods for breeding sorghum for biofu- experts’ designs.” toward goals that fall outside of the insti- els and “hybridizing photovoltaics and solar thermal power,” as one project man- Kim often tells this story today, with an tution’s traditional mandate: stemming ager described his work. When a couple of entrepreneurs stopped Kim to pitch him air of playful irony, when he introduces climate change, stopping Ebola, addressing a clean-coal project, he brushed them off. “I have an extreme disinterest in coal,” he himself—as the president of the World the conditions driving the Syrian exodus. said. But he showed a geeky fascination with all things renewable when he lingered Bank. “I was actually out protesting and Yet many bank employees see Kim’s with a startup that makes batteries to store solar power. Kim said the World Bank is trying to shut down the World Bank,” Kim ambitions as presumptuous, even reck- setting up 3.5 million home solar systems in Bangladesh. said one March afternoon, sitting on a dais less, and changes undertaken to revitalize “The big problem is the storage tech- before a conference audience at a hotel in a sluggish bureaucracy have wrenched it. nology,” Kim added. “How can you guys compete with Elon Musk?” Maryland’s National Harbor complex. “I’m There have been protests and purges, and Kim has a doctor’s diagnostic mind- very glad we lost that argument.” critics say Kim’s habit of enunciating gran- set; he talks about ascertaining “the prob- lem,” or what public-health experts call the The line always gets a laugh, but Kim diose aspirations comes with a tendency “cause of the causes.” He thinks of poverty as an ailment and is trying to devise a “sci- uses it to illustrate a broader story of evo- toward autocracy. The former bank foe now ence of delivery.” It’s a philosophy built on a lifelong interest in the intersection lution. As he dispenses billions of devel- stands accused of being an invasive agent, of science and humanities. Born in Seoul in 1959 to parents displaced by the Korean opment dollars and tees off at golf outings inflicting his own form of shock therapy on War, Kim’s family immigrated to the United States when he was a child, eventually with Barack Obama—the U.S. president his staff. “The wrong changes have been has confessed jealousy of his impres- done badly,” says Lant Pritchett, a former sive five handicap—Kim is a long way World Bank economist. from Peru. The institution Pritchett argues that, he leads has changed too. beyond issues of personality Structural adjustment, for and style, Kim’s presidency one, has been phased out, has exposed a deep ideolog- and Kim says the bank can ical rift between national be a force for good. Yet he development, which empha- believes it is only just awak- “What is the sizes institution-build- ening to its potential—at a relevance ing and growth, and what precarious moment, no less. of the Pritchett terms “humane” development, or alleviating Last year, the percentage World Bank?” immediate suffering. Kim, of people living in extreme Kim asked. however, sees no sharp dis- poverty dropped below 10 “I think tinction: He contends that percent for the first time. that is an humane development is That’s great news for the entirely national development— world, but it leaves the World legitimate and if the bank persists in Bank somewhat adrift. Many question.” believing otherwise, it could former dependents, such as India, have outgrown their be doomed to obsolescence. reliance on financing. Others, Kim likes to say that namely China, have become as a doctor with experi- lenders in their own right. ence treating the poor, his “What is the relevance of the humanitarian outlook is 54 MAY | JUNE 2016

ending up in Muscatine, Iowa. His was one and Washington needed to be informed resources on a scale that could achieve of two Asian families in the small town. His by ground truths, delivered by the peo- something huge, like curing cancer. Kim mother was an expert in Confucian philos- ple living them. “There was always an left an early mark, overseeing the 2010 cre- ophy, his father, a dentist. Kim excelled inside-outside strategy, and the outside ation of the Center for Health Care Deliv- at his studies while playing quarterback was, and remains, the people who were ery Science, which espouses a philosophy in high school. He attended Brown Uni- excluded,” Farmer says. similar to that of Partners in Health, and versity, where he studied human biology. appealing to students by performing a His father wanted him to be a doctor, but Farmer’s immersive work ethic and moonwalking impersonation of Michael his soulful side gravitated toward anthro- pious demeanor made him famous—and Jackson at the annual “Dartmouth Idol” pology. Because Harvard let him pursue a the subject of Tracy Kidder’s acclaimed competition. With the global recession medical degree and a Ph.D. simultaneously, book, Mountains Beyond Mountains—but at its zenith, however, Kim was forced to he landed there. Kim struck up a friend- Kim was the partner with systemic ambi- spend much of his time focused on saving ship with Paul Farmer, a fellow student, tions. “For Paul, the question is, ‘What does Dartmouth’s endowment. over shared interests in health and justice. it take to solve the problem of giving the In 1987, they formed Partners in Health. best care in the world to my patients?’” Kim He hardly knew the difference between says. “But he doesn’t spend all his time hedge funds and private equity, so a ven- The two came of age when the World thinking about, ‘So, how do you take that ture capitalist on the college’s board would Bank’s influence was arguably at its most to scale in 188 countries?’” (Both men, who drive up from Boston periodically to give powerful and controversial. Conceived remain close friends, have won MacArthur him lessons, scribbling out basic finan- along with the International Monetary “Genius Grants” for their work.) cial concepts on a whiteboard or scratch Fund at the 1944 Bretton Woods con- paper. Kim’s tenure soon turned stormy as ference, the bank was meant to rebuild Kim’s desire to shape policy landed him he proposed slashing $100 million from the Europe but found its central mission as a at the World Health Organization (WHO) school’s budget and clashed with faculty source of startup capital for states emerg- in 2003, overseeing its HIV/AIDS work. who complained about a lack of transpar- ing from the demise of colonial empires. The job required him to relocate to Geneva ency. One student columnist, writing for The bank could borrow money cheaply in with his wife—a pediatrician he had met the campus newspaper, described Kim’s the global markets, thanks to the credit- at Harvard—and a son who was just a tod- leadership as “undemocratic.” Joe Asch, worthiness of its shareholders (the largest dler. (They now have two children, aged a Dartmouth alumnus who writes for a being the U.S. government), and then use 15 and 7.) In the vigorously assertive style widely read blog about the school, was that money to finance the prerequisites that would become his hallmark—going highly critical of Kim. “He is a man who for economic growth—things like roads, where he wants to go even if he’s not sure is very concerned about optics and not so schools, hospitals, and power plants. Struc- how to get there—Kim pledged to meet an concerned about follow-through,” Asch tural adjustment came about in response audacious goal: treating 3 million people in says now. “Everyone’s sense was that he to a raft of debt crises that culminated in the developing world with anti-retroviral was just there to punch his ticket.” the 1980s. The Bretton Woods institutions drugs by 2005, a more than sixfold increase agreed to bail out indebted, developing over just two years. The strategy, in Kim’s Soon enough, a surprising opportunity states if they tightened their belts and sub- own words, was “push, push, push.” The arose. The way Kim tells it, the call came mitted to painful fiscal reforms. “3-by-5 pledge,” as it was known, ended out of the blue one Monday in March 2012. up being impossible to reach, which Kim Dartmouth alumnus Timothy Geithner, To Kim and Farmer, the moral flaw in apologized for publicly on the BBC. But the then the U.S. treasury secretary, was on the bank’s approach was that it imposed world got there in 2007—a direct result, the line asking about Kim’s old nemesis. mandates with little concern for how cut- Kim says, of the pledge’s impact on glob- “Jim,” Geithner asked, “would you con- ting budgets might affect people’s health. al-health policymaking: “You have to set sider being president of the World Bank?” They thought that “the problem” in global a really difficult target and then have that health was economic inequality, and in really difficult target change the way you W hen the government Haiti, Partners in Health pioneered a grass- do your work.” contacted him, Kim roots methodology to tackle it: improve the confesses, he had lives of communities by training locals to Kim left the WHO in 2006. After a stop- only the foggiest provide medical care (thus creating jobs) over at Harvard, where he headed a cen- notion of how devel- and by expanding access to food, sanita- ter for health and human rights, he was opment finance worked. He had seen tion, and other basic necessities. Though hired to be president of Dartmouth College. enough in his career, however, to know hardly insurgents—they were based at Har- He arrived in 2009, with little university that running the bank would give him vard, after all—the friends passionately management experience but character- resources he scarcely could have imag- argued that policy discussions in Geneva istically high hopes: A college president, ined during his years of aid work, or even he believed, had the power to mobilize FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 55

at Dartmouth. Instead of tual monopoly on the devel- said, ‘Let’s change it from a dream to a plan, and then we don’t have to mock it.’” agonizing over every drop of opment-finance market, by But Kim still had to win over another water in the budgetary bath- 2012 its lending represented powerful constituency: his staff. Bank experts consider themselves an elite fra- tub, he could operate a global only about 5 percent of aggre- ternity. Presidents and their mission statements may come and go, but the insti- spigot. “When I really saw “When I gate private-capital flows tutional culture remains largely impervi- what it meant to be a bank really saw to the developing world, ous. “The bank staff,” says Jim Adams, a with a balance sheet, with what it meant according to Georgetown former senior manager, “has never fully a mission to end extreme University economist Mar- accepted the governance.” When Robert poverty,” Kim says, “it’s like, to be tin Ravallion. And while the McNamara expanded the bank’s mission wow.” His interest was bol- a bank with bank possessed a wealth of in the late 1960s, doing things like sending stered by the bank’s adoption, data, technical expertise, and helicopters to spray the African black fly partly in response to 1990s- a balance analytical capabilities, it was larvae that spread river blindness, many era activists, of stringent sheet, with a hampered by red tape. One staffers were “deeply distressed to see “safeguards,” or lending rules mission to top executive kept a chart the institution ‘running off in all direc- intended to protect human end extreme in her office illustrating the tions’…submerging so cheerfully its basic rights and the environment loan process, which looked role as financier of economic infrastruc- in client states. poverty,” like a tangle of spaghetti. ture,” according to a history published in Kim says, 1973. When James Wolfensohn arrived in “it’s like, wow.” the mid-1990s with plans to move away from structural adjustment and remake By custom, the World At Kim’s White House the bank like a consulting firm, employees aired their gripes in the press. “Shake-up Bank had always been run interview, Obama still or cock-up?” asked an Economist head- line. Paul Wolfowitz, whose presidency was by an American, nominated needed some convinc- marred by leaks, was pushed out in 2007 after accusations of cronyism resulted in by the U.S. president for a ing that the global-health a damning internal investigation. five-year term. But in 2012, expert could take on the task Recognizing this fraught history, Kim went on a second listening tour: He met there was a real international race for the of reinvigorating the bank. When asked with every bank department and obtained what he describes, in anthropologist-speak, post. Some emerging-market nations ques- what qualified him over candidates with as “almost a formal ethnography” of the place. What he lacked in economic knowl- tioned deference to the United States, and backgrounds in finance, Kim referenced edge, he made up for in charm. “Dr. Kim is personable, Dr. Kim is articulate, Dr. Kim finance experts from Nigeria and Colombia Obama’s mother’s anthropology disserta- looks very moved by what he has to say,” says Paul Cadario, a former bank execu- announced their candidacies. After con- tion, about Indonesian artisans threatened tive who is now a professor at the Univer- sity of Toronto. sidering political heavyweights like Susan by globalization, to argue that there is no The initial goodwill, however, van- Rice, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton—who substitute for on-the-ground knowledge of ished when Kim announced his own form of structural adjustment: a top-to- were all more interested in other jobs— economic policies’ impact. Two days later, bottom reorganization of the bank. It wasn’t so much the idea of change that Obama decided he needed an American Obama unveiled his pick at a Rose Garden riled up the staff. Even before Kim took office, respected voices were calling for he could present as an outsider to replace ceremony, declaring that it was “time for a shake-up. In 2012, a group of eminent bank alumni had published a report outgoing President Robert Zoellick, a col- a development professional to lead the criticizing an “archaic management orless former Goldman Sachs banker and world’s largest development agency.” Republican trade negotiator. Clinton sug- Kim campaigned for the job with the gested Kim and “championed Jim as can- zeal of a convert: In an interview with didate,” says Farmer. (Partners in Health the New York Times, he praised the fact works with the Clinton Foundation.) that, unlike in the 1990s, “now the notion Embedded within the dispute over of pro-poor development is at the core of superpower prerogatives was a larger anxi- the World Bank.” He also embarked on ety about what role the World Bank should an international “listening” tour to meet play in the 21st century. Extreme poverty with heads of state and finance ministers, had dropped from 37 percent in 1990 to just gathering ideas to shape his priorities in under 13 percent in 2012, so fewer coun- office. Because votes on the bank’s board tries needed the bank’s help. With interest are apportioned according to sharehold- rates at record lows, the states that needed ing, America holds the greatest sway, and aid had more options for borrowing cheap Obama’s candidate was easily elected. Kim capital, often without paternalistic ethical took office in July 2012, with plans to eradi- dictates. New competitors, such as invest- cate extreme poverty. Farmer cites a motto ment banks, were concerned mainly with carved in the World Bank’s entryway—“Our profits, not safeguards. As a result, whereas Dream Is a World Free of Poverty”—that the World Bank had once enjoyed a vir- activists like Kim once snickered at: “Jim 56 MAY | JUNE 2016



structure”; low morale was causing staff of external consultants cobble together an brave enough to say what many of the peo- ple within the bank are thinking.” (Houdart turnover, and there was an overreliance unholy creature resembling no develop- is currently disputing his demotion before an internal administrative tribunal.) on consultants, promotion on the basis of ment bank ever seen before.” Anonymous Kim admits that “it’s never fun when nationality, and a “Balkanization of exper- fliers attacking Kim also began to appear large parts of the organization are criti- cizing you personally,” yet he maintains tise.” Where Kim went awry, opponents around bank headquarters. that his tough decisions were necessary. “In order to do a real change, you have to say, was in imposing his will without first Kim portrayed internal dissent as a petty put jobs at risk,” he says. “And completely understandably, people hate that.” garnering political support. “One famous reaction to perks like travel per diems being I N THE HEAT of the staff revolt, Kim statement is that the World Bank is a big cut. “There’s grumbling about parking and was devoting attention to a very different crisis: Ebola. In contrast village,” says Cadario, now a Kim critic. there’s grumbling about breakfast,” he told with the bank’s historically cau- tious, analytical approach, Kim “And if you live in a village, it is a really the Economist. Meanwhile, bank staffers was pushing it to become more involved in emergency response. He committed bad idea to have enemies.” whispered about imperial indulgences on $400 million to confront the deadly epi- demic immediately, a quarter of which he The bank had been designed around Kim’s part, like chartering a private jet. pushed out in just nine days. He dispatched bank employees to afflicted West African the idea that local needs, assessed by (Kim claims this is a longstanding practice countries and reproached the head of the WHO for the organization’s lack of urgency. staff assigned to particular countries and among bank presidents, which he only uses “Rather than being tied up in bureaucracy, or saying, ‘We don’t do those things,’ Jim regions, should dictate funding; cooper- when there are no other travel options.) is saying that if poor people’s lives are at risk…then it is our business,” says Tim ation across geographical lines required A French country officer named Fabrice Evans, whom Kim hired to run the bank’s new global practice for health. internal wrangling over resources. So Kim Houdart emerged as a lead dissenter, broad- Some bank veterans disagreed, vehe- decided to dismantle existing networks. casting his frustrations with Kim on a blog mently. Nearly two years later, they still worry that in trying to save the day, Kim He brought in McKinsey & Co., which rec- he kept on the World Bank’s intranet. In one runs the risk of diverting the bank from its distinct mission. “Pandemic response ommended regrouping the staff into 14 post, he questioned whether “a frantic race is important—but it’s not the WHO, it’s the World Bank,” says Jean-Louis “global practices,” each of which would to show savings...might lead to irrevers- Sarbib, a former senior vice president at the institution who now runs a nonprofit focus on a policy area, such as trade, agri- ible long-term damages to the institution.” development consultancy. “I don’t think he understands that the World Bank is not a culture, or water. Kim hired outsiders to (This being the World Bank, his sedition very large NGO.” Referencing Kim’s work with Partners in Health, Sarbib adds, “The lead some departments and pushed out was often illustrated with charts and statis- work of the World Bank is to create a sys- tem so that he doesn’t need to come and several formerly powerful bank officials tics.) The staff went into open rebellion after create a clinic in Haiti.” with little explanation. To symbolize that Houdart revealed that Chief Financial Offi- In reply to this critique, Kim likes to cite a study co-written by former World Bank he was knocking down old walls, he had cer Bertrand Badré, whom Kim had hired economist Larry Summers, which found that 24 percent of full-income growth in a palatial, wood-paneled space on the and who was in charge of budget cutting, developing countries between 2000 and World Bank’s executive floor retrofitted as a had received a nearly $100,000 bonus on Silicon Valley-style, open-plan office, top of his $379,000 salary. Kim addressed where he could work alongside his top staff. a raucous town-hall meeting in October Kim also announced that 2014, where he told furious he would cut $400 million in staffers, “I am just as tired of administrative expenses, and “We…bought the change process as all of eliminate about 500 jobs—a into this you are.” necessary measure, he said, because low interest rates notion that A few months later, were cutting into the bank’s development is Houdart was demoted after profits. Kim says he “made a being investigated for leak- very conscious decision to let something ing a privileged document. anyone who wanted…air their that happens The alleged disclosure was grievances.” His opponents unrelated to Kim’s reorga- detected no such tolerance, after the nization—it had to do with however, and their criticisms humanitarian Houdart’s human rights turned ad hominem. Around crisis is over. advocacy, for which he was Halloween in 2014, a satirical well known at the bank— newsletter circulated among I am here and Kim says the investiga- the staff, depicting Kim as to tell you that tion began before Houdart’s Dr. Frankenstein: “Taking denunciations of his pres- we are idency. Critics, however, no longer thinking that way.” random pieces from dead portray it as retaliatory. “Fab- change management theo- rice has become a folk hero,” ries,” it read, “he and his band Cadario says, “because he was 58 MAY | JUNE 2016

2011 was attributable to improved public Long past our allotted interview time, much need in the world that I’m not wor- health. Put simply, Kim says, pandemics Kim told me he had just one more idea: and other health deficits represent enor- “Another huge issue that I want to bring to ried we’re going to run out of projects to mous threats to economic development, the table is childhood stunting.” At Davos so they should be the World Bank’s busi- this year, he explained, everyone was chat- finance,” Kim says. He also hopes the worst ness. The same goes for climate change, tering about a “Fourth Industrial Revolu- which the bank is fighting by funding a tion,” which will center around artificial of the tumult within the bank is over. A few United Nations initiative to expand sus- intelligence, robotics, and other technolog- tainable energy around the world. As for ical leaps. But Kim thinks whole countries elements of his reorganization have been violent conflicts, rather than waiting until are starting out with a brainpower deficit the shooting has stopped and painstakingly because of childhood malnutrition. “These scaled back; after the new administrative preparing a post-conflict assessment— kids have fewer—literally fewer—neuro- as the bank has done in the past—Kim nal connections than their non-stunted structure proved unwieldy, the 14 global wants to risk more capital in insecure classmates,” he said. “For every inch that zones. “We…bought into this notion that you’re below the average height, you lose practices were regrouped into three divi- development is something that happens 2 percent of your income.” after the humanitarian crisis is over,” Kim sions. Some of his more polarizing hires, said at a recent event called the “Fragility “This is fundamentally an economic Forum,” where he sat next to representa- issue,” he continued. “We need to invest including Badré, have also left. tives of various aid groups and the pres- in gray-matter infrastructure. Neuronal ident of the Central African Republic in infrastructure is quite possibly going to be Only now, Kim adds, are the benefits of the World Bank’s sun-soaked atrium. “I the most important infrastructure.” am here to tell you that we are no longer his reforms becoming clear. “There’s all thinking that way.” (A few weeks later, Kim T O WORLD BANK tradition- would visit four Middle Eastern countries, alists, addressing nutri- this great brilliance in the institution, [the including Jordan and Lebanon, where he tion is an example of the announced two $100 million, low-interest sort of mission creep that bank staff have] deep insights into their loans intended to create educational and makes Kim so madden- professional opportunities for Syrian ref- ing. Despite its name and capital, the bank particular area, but they were not mak- ugees, among others.) can’t be expected to solve all the world’s humanitarian problems. (“We are not the ing connections,” he says. As an example After the forum, amid a whirlwind day U.N.” is an informal mantra among some of meetings and speeches, Kim stopped at staffers.) Poor countries may well prefer of change, he cites an initiative that grew a hotel café with me to unwind for a few that the bank stick to gritty infrastructural minutes. As a counterweight to his life’s necessities, even if Kim and his support- from the Ebola effort: Staffers with dispa- demands, he practices Korean Zen-style ers have splashier goals. “The interests meditation, but he also seems to blow off of its rich-country constituencies and its rate expertise are working with the private steam by brainstorming aloud. He was phil- poor-country borrowers are just diverging osophical about Syria, posing and answer- over time,” Pritchett says. “It’s like the bank sector to devise an insurance mechanism ing rhetorical questions. “What is the role has a foot on two boats. Sooner or later, it’s of economic development in preventing going to have to jump on one boat or the that would release billions of dollars as these conflicts and providing a much greater other, or fall in the water. So far, Jim Kim sense of hope and optimism to people who is just doing the splits.” outbreaks emerge, hopefully allowing may get on boats or become extremists?” Kim asked. “We’ve got to find out, right?” Kim’s defenders insist the bank hasn’t responders to head off pandemics. Goals and promises came pouring out of abandoned its core business. In fact, as him like a gusher. Besides eliminating private investment in emerging markets A five-year term, Kim says, is hardly suf- extreme poverty, which he has now prom- has contracted recently, due to instabil- ised will be done by 2030, Kim wants to raise ity in once-booming economies like Bra- ficient to implement his entire agenda, incomes among the bottom 40 percent of zil, countries have found more reason to the population in every country. He also turn to the World Bank. Its primary lend- and he has conveyed his desire to be reap- wants to achieve universal access to bank- ing unit anticipates distributing more than ing services by 2020. $25 billion in loans this fiscal year, a nearly pointed in 2017. Though internal controver- 70 percent increase since 2013. “There is so sies have been damaging, and America’s domination of the bank remains a source of tension, the next U.S. president (quite possibly Kim’s friend Hillary Clinton) will have a strong say in the matter. If he keeps his job, Kim wants to show that the World Bank can serve as a link between great pow- ers and small ones, between economics and aid work—retaining its influence as old rules and boundaries are erased and new ones are scribbled into place. Kim thinks he can succeed, so long as he keeps one foot rooted in his experiences as a doctor with mud between his toes. But he also wants to share his revelations about capital with his old comrades. “I really feel a responsibility to have this conversation with development actors who, like me 10 years ago, didn’t really understand the power of leverage,” Kim says with a guileless air. “God,” he adds, “it is just such a pow- erful tool.” Q ANDREW RICE (@riceid) is a journalist based in New York. FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 59

Lionel Gelber Prize 2016 Winner OBJECTIVE TROY: A TERRORIST, A PRESIDENT, AND THE RISE OF THE DRONE by SCOTT SHANE Published by Tim Duggan Books The Lionel Gelber Prize was H[FHVVHVRIWKH%XVKFRXQWHU WHUURULVPSURJUDPVDQG founded in 1989 by Canadian HYHQWXDOHPEUDFHRIWKH WDUJHWHGNLOOLQJRIVXVSHFWHG diplomat Lionel Gelber. The prize PLOLWDQWV$QGLWUHFRXQWV KRZWKH3UHVLGHQWGLUHFWHG is a literary award for the world’s WKHPDPPRWKPDFKLQHU\\RI EHVWQRQÀFWLRQERRNLQ(QJOLVK VS\\DJHQFLHVWRKXQW$ZODNL RQIRUHLJQDIIDLUVWKDWVHHNV GRZQLQDIUDQWLFSXUVXLWWKDW WRGHHSHQSXEOLFGHEDWHRQ ZRXOGHQGZLWKDPLVVLOHÀUHG VLJQLÀFDQWLQWHUQDWLRQDOLVVXHV XVLQJWKHURERWLFWHFKQRORJ\\ WKDWKDVFKDQJHGZDUIDUH² the drone. 6FRWW6KDQHLVDUHSRUWHULQWKH:DVKLQJWRQEXUHDX “Shane’s masterpiece is a of 7KH1HZ<RUN7LPHVZKHUHKHKDVFRYHUHG rarity among foreign affairs QDWLRQDOVHFXULW\\VLQFH ERRNVÁRZLQJGUDPDWLFDOO\\ like a novel, carrying the %DVHGRQ\\HDUVRIUHSRUWLQJWKLVERRNWHOOVWKHJULS- DFDGHPLFZHLJKWRIDWKHVLV SLQJVWRU\\RI$QZDUDO$ZODNLWKHRQFHFHOHEUDWHG DQGOD\\LQJRXWHQRXJKSROLF\\GLOHPPDVWRÀOOD $PHULFDQLPDPZKRFDOOHGIRUPRGHUDWLRQDIWHU PRQWKRI6XQGD\\WDONVKRZV7KHVWRU\\RI$QZDU EXWXOWLPDWHO\\GLUHFWHGKLVRXWVL]HWDOHQWVWR DO$ZODNLLVLQVRPHZD\\VWKHVWRU\\RI$PHULFDQV WKHPDVVPXUGHURIKLVIHOORZFLWL]HQV,WIROORZV DQG$UDEVLQWKHDJHRIWHUURUEURXJKWLQWRVKDUS 3UHVLGHQW%DUDFN2EDPD·VFDPSDLJQDJDLQVWWKH relief by the Obama administration and its unpre- GLFWHG²DQGXQSUHGLFWDEOH²GURQHSROLF\\ZKLFKKDV UHGHÀQHGWKHPHDQLQJRIZDUDQGUHVHWLWVSULFHµ ³-RKQ6WDFNKRXVH-XU\\&KDLU 7KH/LRQHO*HOEHU3UL]HLVSUHVHQWHGE\\7KH/LRQHO*HOEHU)RXQGDWLRQLQSDUWQHUVKLSZLWKWKH0XQN6FKRRORI Global Affairs at the University of Toronto and Foreign PolicyPDJD]LQH Follow us on Twitter and THE LIONEL GELBER ÀQGXVRQ)DFHERRN FOUNDATION PXQNVFKRROXWRURQWRFDJHOEHU

MAPPA MUNDI NATIONAL SECURITY ECONOMICS BOOKS CULTURE THE FIXER STEM education It may be too late The era of conver- The lessons of New museums Samir Daoudi in today’s Digital to keep the Islamic gence is here. Claudia Rankine: across Rwanda on where to spot Age might State from weapon- If old-school com- Modern poetry don’t memorialize bigwigs in be missing one izing drones—and panies don’t doesn’t have to be the country’s Tangier and feel critical ingredient: that’s America’s adapt, can they at odds with mod- history. They the ancient art. | P. 62 fault. | P. 66 survive? | P. 68 ern politics. | P. 70 revise it. | P. 72 city’s ghosts. | P. 74 Illustration by ANTHONY RUSS0

mappa mundi by DAVID ROTHKOPF AHeadof STEAM The case for teaching arts in the Digital Age. 62 MAY | JUNE 2016 Regular readers of this column may recall that my father was a scientist at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Beginning his work in the 1950s, when computers were the size of classrooms and programming was something that was done by executives at one of the television or radio networks, he was a pioneer in the study of how computers could be used in education. By the late 1970s and early ’80s—just before Bell Labs was rocked by the court ruling that broke up its parent company, AT&T, ultimately ending its reign as the world’s foremost cor- porate research facility—the world viewed computing as the future. Regularly, politicians and even more credible prognos- ticators insisted that in order to compete and meet the needs of tomorrow’s information technology field, America had to raise a generation with extraordinary math and science skills. Illustration by MATTHEW HOLLISTER

OBSERVATION DECK This argument drove my father, who had contemporary society seemingly wants teries of life and venture to places that we a tendency toward irascibility to begin with, them to feel good about themselves. A seldom take ourselves in our daily work- to distraction. At home, he railed—as he had Washington Post op-ed likened this phe- aday existence. at conferences—that while math and sci- nomenon to giving out trophies to compet- ence skills would be important in this new itors “just for showing up” to play.) Yet over the past decade in the United age, it was fundamentally wrong to think States, schools have been forced to make that we would actually need more students Yet since my father’s days at Bell, the major cuts to arts education as a result of in the future who had them: Ever-more pow- rationale for hoarding prospective STEM the enhanced focus on testing that was erful computers, he argued, would actually students into a classroom hasn’t changed: mandated by the Bush era’s No Child Left do much of the work that had required sci- Computers are still driving tomorrow’s Behind program. Of the nation’s elemen- entific, mathematical, and technical skills development. Yes, the world is wired tary schools, for example, only 3 percent in people. If anything, we might need together, which has created more eco- offered dance classes and just 4 percent fewer people who could crunch a number nomic opportunity and activity via the offered theater instruction during the or design a program, he said. (To be clear, Internet. And, yes, powerful computers 2009-10 school year; however, in 1999- he certainly acknowledged that some math and sensors—not to mention access to data 2000, both of these numbers were at 20 and science skills would be needed; and, as and the ability to analyze it—have empow- percent, according to the National Center a scientist, he valued those talents above all ered scientific breakthroughs. But is push- for Education Statistics. Such dramatic cut- others, notes his son, the English major.) ing STEM, and STEM alone, still the right approach? The answer is yes and no: That But to this very moment, his point— is, what we are going to need is a modern right though I believe it to be—is not fully reality that requires STEAM power—add- appreciated. ing arts to the mix—in order to thrive in the new environment. Today, there remains good reason to cultivate these skills, particularly in WE NEED TO FOCUS ON ARTS schools where an increasing number of students seem to be less willing to chal- EDUCATION FOR PROFOUNDLY lenge themselves and more inclined to FUNDAMENTAL REASONS: WE NEED take the path of least resistance to col- THE ARTS IN ORDER TO BE HUMAN. leges and careers. (And that seems to be every path: A former Duke University Often the argument in favor of arts edu- backs in arts-education funding seem to professor, scrutinizing transcript records cation centers on the idea that it helps pro- suggest that, in this new world of micropro- between 1940 and 2013 from more than mote creativity. While this is no doubt true, cessors and artificial intelligence, musical, 400 U.S. colleges, recently found that the case seems to suggest that science and literary, theatrical, dance, and other capa- today’s coddled students are three times math education does not do the same— bilities are not as important as they once more likely to be awarded A’s in course which is ridiculous. Some of the greatest were or that somehow the United States grades as those 70 years ago. The study examples of creativity in human history cannot afford them as it instead prioritizes also notes that this is not because students have come from scientists, mathematicians, “harder” pursuits. are getting smarter: Rather, it is because engineers, and others who have reimag- ined, reinterpreted, and remade our world. But think about the new world we are entering: Within a decade perhaps every We need to focus on arts education person on the planet will be connected in for different, profoundly fundamental, one cultural ecosystem for the first time. reasons: We need the arts in order to be Historically, cultures have stopped at bor- human. Artists help us explore the mys- ders, natural and imagined, and in so FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 63

mappa mundi OBSERVATION DECK doing they have played a role in defining Your computer hardware, remarkable because it produces well-rounded stu- communities and the differences among as it is, does not shape how people view us; these cultural differences have driven one another, their feelings about the great dents; because it produces more humane conflict and tension—something exempli- issues of the day, their moods, or the sub- fied in today’s headlines about the clash jects they discuss in their communities. people; because it protects our cultural between Islam and the West, or a fear of Neither do switches, routers, the Internet, refugees, or a need to build walls to sep- or even great software packages. Human heritage and enables students to under- arate people. connections continue to be made through the expression of human feelings. stand some of the great creations that have But we now have an opportunity—and an imperative—to use these technologies Think of the big changes in public atti- shaped the growth of civilization; because to help us imagine cultures without bor- tudes of the past decade or so. Big sweep- ders: That is, through creative expression, ing changes like altered views on LGBT the arts play a big role in our economies. we can link people, regardless of where rights, women’s rights, climate change, they live or what ancient biases they hold. or the Arab Spring. Were these changes But we also need to do it because we are New technologies, from virtual reality to really driven by political speeches alone, artificial intelligence to tech-driven phe- or were they also and sometimes primarily at an unprecedented technological and cul- nomena like the ubiquity of recording and driven by the movies, songs, novels, car- website-building tools, enable individu- toons, humor, and other forms of artistic tural watershed, when not only the arts will als to express themselves and to distrib- expression about these issues? ute their work to global audiences, of an change, but the potential that each indi- unlimited size, with the push of a button. We need to invest in arts education, along with science and tech education, vidual artist has for changing the world will become even greater. It does not take a great creative mind to see the world needs such change. But it will take great and well- trained creative minds to drive that change and to ensure that it takes us to the better future we all seek. Q DAVID ROTHKOPF (@djrothkopf) is CEO and editor of the FP Group. “GMAP is more than a master’s degree – it is a global community of colleagues and lifelong friends.” – Ignatius Puguh Priambodo, GMAP 14 First Secretary – Embassy of Indonesia in Brussels љ ќ я ю љ ȱ  ю Ѡ ѡ ђ џ ȱ ќ ѓȱ For the past 15 years, GMAP has set the standard for international џѡѠȱџќєџюњ leadership in and out of the classroom. An intensive, one-year master’s degree program in international affairs, GMAP brings together Courses Include: International Negotiation distinguished mid- and senior-level leaders to examine issues at the Corporate Finance and International Politics intersection of business, law, diplomacy, finance, development, and International Trade geopolitics. The GMAP hybrid learning format offers the ability to pursue Global Financial Markets Leadership and Management an executive-level graduate degree program without career interruption Foreign Policy Leadership Security Studies or relocation. Join us today. International Business Transnational Social Issues ’œ’ȱžœȱŠȱ̎Œ‘Ž›ǯžœǯŽžȦ  and Economic Law International Macroeconomics CLASSES START JANUARY AND JULY. 64 MAY | JUNE 2016

Columbia SIPA Educating Future Leaders in Global Policy SIPA prepares students to lead and make an impact in government, private enterprise, and nonprofit organizations worldwide. Our rigorous curriculum emphasizes the analytic and practical while training future policymakers to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges— from finance and economic development to energy and environment, from international security to urban and social policy, and more. sipa.columbia.edu Richard K. Betts Merit E. Janow Jan Svejnar Joseph E. Stiglitz https://sipa.columbia.edu/70

national security by JAMES BAMFORD What America Hath Wrought The Obama administration can’t wash its hands of the drones’ ruinous impacts—or responsibility for terrorists’ pursuit of those weapons. Hanging in an atrium of the Smith- have used drones in combat, and in 2015, defense consulting firm sonian’s National Air and Space Teal Group estimated that drone production would total $93 bil- Museum, home to the Wright lion over the next decade—reaching more than three times the brothers’ plane and the Mercury current market value. capsule that first carried an Amer- ican into space, is a Predator drone Experts fear that sinister actors may be obtaining the technol- with the tail number 3034. Like the ogy as well. In a report issued this January, the Oxford Research other vehicles on display, it made Group’s Remote Control Project, which analyzes developments in history by launching a revolution: military technology, warned that the Islamic State “is reportedly Nearly one month after 9/11, in the obsessed with launching a synchronized multi-drone attack on skies above Afghanistan, 3034 large numbers of people in order to re-create the horrors of 9/11.” became the first unmanned aerial The report’s lead author has said, “Drones are a game-changer vehicle (UAV) to kill humans with in the wrong hands.” a remotely fired missile. ¶ Once little more than novelties, mili- Are there any safe hands, though? The United States is the moti- tarized drones are now buzzing vating force behind UAVs’ increasing sophistication and deadli- around the globe like locusts. ness. Since taking office, President Barack Obama has attacked According to New America, “the more countries than any president since World War II, launch- virtual monopoly on drones that ing drone strikes against at least seven nations and killing thou- the States once enjoyed is long gone.” Eighty-six countries have some drone capability, with 19 either possessing armed drones or acquiring the technology. At least six countries other than America 66 MAY | JUNE 2016 Illustration by MATTHEW HOLLISTER

OBSERVATION DECK sands of people, many of them innocent rorists to adopt unmanned tools. It’s not The Justice Department refused, however, civilians. According to a February report just that the Islamic State is watching and because “the government could not confirm by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, learning the tricks of the drone game from or deny” that the attack had even occurred. the Pentagon makes little effort to deter- the country that invented it. The organiza- mine whom UAVs are slaying: “Just 10 of tion is also angry about the lives claimed WHEN AMERICA launched its drone wars, it the scores killed by U.S. drones in Paki- in American strikes. doubtless did not anticipate that terrorists stan last year have so far been identified.” might want to strike the United States with a That was the conclusion of four former weapon of its own making. Nor did the gov- It may be too late to stuff the drone U.S. Air Force servicemen, with decades of ernment likely expect veteran drone oper- genie back into the bottle. Yet the Obama experience among them operating drones, ators would assert that the White House is administration has six months before leav- who wrote an impassioned letter to Obama “lying publicly about the effectiveness of ing office to at least do some damage con- last November. “[T]he innocent civilians the drone program.” Yet here we are. trol. It could start by telling the truth—not we were killing only fueled the feelings of just cautioning people about the dangers hatred that ignited terrorism and groups The only move the Obama adminis- drones could pose when deployed by ter- like ISIS, while also serving as a fundamen- tration can make to set things right is to rorists, but also admitting to the toll that tal recruitment tool,” they argued. “The remove its cloak of secrecy. At a mini- unmanned weapons have exacted under administration and its predecessors have mum, it owes apologies to the families of U.S. command. built a drone program that is one of the guiltless victims. But only by providing most devastating driving forces for terror- the public with long-overdue answers— ism and destabilization around the world.” The government has deliberately kept Americans in the dark about this cause and effect. Victims of strikes die in obscurity; their broken bodies are buried in remote ANXIETY ABOUT THE Islamic State’s access THERE IS EVIDENCE THAT to drones has increased over the past few years. In 2014, the group employed UAVs to AMERICA’S OWN DRONE PROGRAM shoot propaganda video of fierce fighting IS COMPELLING TERRORISTS in Kobane, Syria. In March 2015, coalition TO ADOPT UNMANNED TOOLS. forces said they witnessed the Islamic State using a drone for reconnaissance near Fal- towns in the Middle East and South Asia. about deaths caused by UAV strikes, their lujah. Then, in December, Kurdish fight- Whistleblowers have leaked documents to ers shared pictures purporting to show the Intercept showing that upward of 90 impact on terrorist recruitment, and other the wreckage of UAVs; the Kurds claimed percent of victims may be unintended yet terrorists may have begun experiment- labeled “enemies killed in action,” making salient issues—can there at last be a seri- ing with explosives to weaponize drones. it easy for the government (if asked at all) to deny responsibility for civilian deaths. ous debate about whether the benefits of Fear has also hit U.S. soil. In 2014, the RAND Corporation reported, “[I]t is possi- Last summer, Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a unmanned warfare outweigh its detri- ble that a terrorist group could launch an 57-year-old Yemeni engineer whose fam- expendable armed UAV attack from within ily members (including an anti-al Qaeda ments. For how can America hope to quell the United States or a neighboring coun- cleric) were killed in a 2012 U.S. drone try.” Last July, as the number of domestic attack, sued the Obama administration to the threat of an Islamic State armed with arrests of Islamic State sympathizers was establish that the strike had been unlaw- growing, the Department of Homeland ful. In September, his lawyers proposed to drones if it cannot first admit the role it Security warned police units nationwide settle in exchange for “an apology and an about drones being “used by adversaries… explanation as to why a strike that killed may have played in landing the weapons as part of an attack.” two innocent civilians was authorized.” in terrorists’ hands? Q Ironically, there is evidence that Ameri- ca’s own drone program is compelling ter- JAMES BAMFORD (@WashAuthor) is a colum- nist for FOREIGN POLICY and the author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on Amer- ica. He also writes and produces docu- mentaries for PBS. FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 67

economics by GILLIAN TETT The “C” Word Forget disruption— convergence is what really has corporations fearing for their lives. These days, the trendy word “dis- legacy in consumer music. Two decades ago, the Japanese com- ruption” casts fear into many pany’s Walkman was so popular that it not only sold extraordi- business leaders’ hearts. As the narily well, but also defined an entire product category. (This is Internet has reordered commerce the holy grail of consumer marketing, achieved by only a few other with startling speed, mighty com- brands, such as Hoover and Band-Aid.) Most observers assumed panies have found themselves Sony would parlay its success in analog devices into domina- upstaged by tech newcomers, tion of online music. After all, Sony seemed to have everything from Spotify to Amazon to Uber, it needed to create a digital Walkman: departments specializing which see a fresh way to meet an in computing, consumer electronics, and brand design—and an old demand. As this revolution in-house music label to boot. gathers pace, however, there is a second word that deserves more But there was one hitch. Sony’s units operated as silos because attention than it currently gets: the business sectors to which they pertained traditionally had “convergence.” ¶ The “c” word is been distinct. There was so little collaboration among the com- generally understood in geograph- pany’s corporate tribes that when it started experimenting with ical terms—the Internet links dis- the concept of a digital Walkman, engineers from different depart- parate parts of the world, and ments worked discretely. As a result, in November 1999, Sony so economies are drawn closer together. But there is a second, equally important meaning: the collapsing together of product categories and business sectors. In this sense, convergence poses a huge headache for incumbent companies, particularly those with big bureaucracies that rig- idly resist change. ¶ To understand the phenomenon, look at Sony’s 68 MAY | JUNE 2016 Illustration by MATTHEW HOLLISTER

OBSERVATION DECK launched two competing versions of the ever buying cars. The spread of electric To be sure, some veteran corporations product. (Just to add to the confusion, it vehicles, moreover, is raising policy ques- are trying to adapt to the era of conver- would eventually create a third.) Unsur- tions about fossil fuels that will require gence. General Electric, for instance, is prisingly, these items cannibalized each firms to bring “green issues” out of “cor- seeking to include software innovation in other on the market and failed. porate and social responsibility” and place every part of its business, cutting across them at the heart of business plans. vertical departments with horizontal Into the fray leapt Apple, with an inno- teams. It announced in January that it is vative approach. The company saw that The auto industry is scrambling to taking the drastic step of moving its head- the businesses of software, hardware, and respond. In the past decade, GM and Ford quarters from Fairfield, Connecticut, to content (in this case, music) were converg- have opened departments in Silicon Val- Boston to be near research centers at Har- ing rapidly, so it created a single team to ley charged with developing new ways of vard and MIT. It is one thing, however, to develop a holistic product. The result embedding software into cars. Auto giants acknowledge the need for convergence and was the iPod-iTunes combination, which are also hiring anthropologists to study the strive for it. It is quite another to actually stormed the market in 2001. Sony was left nature of transportation from the consum- smash the old way of doing things, particu- in the dust. er’s perspective; researchers watch how larly when certain structures and methods people behave in cars to ascertain how they made a company successful in the past and Viewed in 2016, this saga might look like feel. Whereas an engineer might view a car are still favored by employees. ancient history, particularly in a corpo- primarily as an efficient mode of travel rate world obsessed with quarterly earn- comprised of metal and horsepower, a con- The fate of corporations—doomed to ings. Yet it has profound implications for sumer might also see it as an entertain- fall ever further behind newcomers, or companies that today seem as powerful as ment system or home office. The research Sony once did. goal is to figure out the features, comforts, and connectivity that consumers crave, In the automotive sector, for instance, and then build machines that have them. leaders are touting record sales as Amer- icans rediscover their love affair with the Even as companies try to think outside car and people in emerging markets pur- the box, however, they are bedeviled by chase more vehicles too. Behind the scenes, however, the hot topic is whether the likes CAN A DEEPLY ENTRENCHED of Ford and Toyota will be disrupted by Silicon Valley. For as the Internet makes BUREAUCRACY EVER STOP VIEWING it possible to build self-driving smart cars ITS DEPARTMENTS AS and other new transportation technologies, SEPARATE, IF NOT RIVAL, SPHERES? entrepreneurs at Google and Tesla are mus- cling into territory once controlled by the the question that torpedoed Sony: Can a capable of embracing and profiting from behemoths of Detroit, Germany, and Japan. deeply entrenched bureaucracy ever stop viewing its departments as separate, if not convergence—depends on the minds that But disruption is only part of the story. rival, spheres? Corporate divisions have Convergence is happening here too. Infor- long competed for resources and clout. One populate them. But it hinges even more mation technology (IT) no longer exists reason why Sony’s units were unable to as a sideshow in the auto sector. Cars cooperate was that each had its own profit strongly on the mettle of leaders: how are becoming tantamount to computing and loss statement (P&L), and senior man- devices that have as much to do with soft- agers were paid relative to those numbers. far they’re willing to go to recapture the ware as they do with chrome. This is chang- At Apple, by contrast, Steve Jobs would ing how consumers and urban planners not let divisions have their own P&Ls and edge their firms once had. To promote imagine transportation systems, as is the demanded that his managers collaborate rise of Uber and Lyft, which make it pos- with other teams. To introduce similar brands the public can trust (and maybe sible for people to be on the road without rules into hardened bureaucracies would be radical—an earthquake that would even see as cool), corporate titans will first undoubtedly be met with dissent. have to realign their own ranks, fighting and winning all the internal battles that might require. Q GILLIAN TETT (@gilliantett) is U.S. managing editor of the Financial Times and author of The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers. FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 69

books by ADAM KIRSCH Lines of Resistance Will America see a rebirth of political verse? In her 2014 book Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia convince her readers, especially white Rankine combines verse, prose, and images to create Americans, that their lives are already a powerful record of the black American experience. deeply implicated in politics, whether She offers many anecdotes of insult and erasure, or not they want to admit it. This is per- such as when a man cuts in line at a drugstore. “Oh haps an unusual exercise for a contem- my God, I didn’t see you,” he says to the poet. But it is porary American poet, but Citizen is the the failure to be seen and known that, in Rankine’s rare book of poems that has actually man- analysis, accounts for much more serious injustices, aged to shape political discussion: It made including the fatal police shootings of young black news headlines last November, when a men. Indeed, to read Citizen is to realize that, when black woman read it demonstratively at Rankine writes about politics, her first task is to a Donald Trump rally—a clear rebuke to the Republican presidential candidate’s exclusionary rhetoric. Poetry and politics might seem to lie at opposite poles of human nature. After all, politics is the world of argument and huge populations, while poetry deals in imagination and addresses its readers one by one. Yet ever since Plato banned the poets from his Republic, both poets and political thinkers have intuited that there is some deep connection between the two pursuits. Percy Bysshe Shelley, a Roman- tic revolutionary who lived during an age of conservative repression in England, famously claimed that “Poets are the unac- knowledged legislators of mankind,” the visionaries charged with the power to see and shape the future. But on the brink of World War II, Anglo-American poet W.H. Auden retracted that boast, when he wrote in an elegy to the Irish poet and political activist W.B. Yeats: “Poetry makes noth- ing happen.” Does poetry make nothing happen today only because poets have lost confi- dence in their ability to change the world? That was the thesis critic Mark Edmundson advanced in a controversial 2013 essay in Harper’s magazine. “At a time when col- lective issues—communal issues, politi- cal issues—are pressing, [American] poets have become ever more private, idiosyn- 70 MAY | JUNE 2016 Illustration by EDMON DE HARO

OBSERVATION DECK cratic, and withdrawn,” he wrote. “Their The American-backed leader of Afghani- Under Szymborska’s circumstances, the poetry is not heard but overheard, and stan, Hamid Karzai, comes in for criticism political is omnipresent precisely because sometimes is too hermetic even to over- by name: “Hamid Karzai came to Kabul/to it is invisible and unnamable; the poet and hear with anything like comprehension.” teach our girls to dress in dollars.” her reader are both aware of its subtle bur- Many poets themselves agree. David Bies- den. Her poetry insists on the possibility piel, for instance, observed in the May 2010 Landays name friend and enemy; they of privacy and freedom, even when the issue of Poetry that “American poetry and praise and curse. They also pour out grief state and its force seem to control all of life. America’s poets remain amazingly incon- for those who have been killed in war: “The sequential to the rest of the nation’s civic, talib’s body lies under the dirt./His orphans Both Szymborska’s poetry and landay democratic, political, and public life.” grieve at the head of his grave.” Here, there show that it is possible for poets to speak is no question that the poet is personally effectively about public issues. Perhaps Such is the charge that has been lev- addressing a real public, seeking to build what has distinguished the United States eled against modern American poetry for solidarity and resistance in a way that is from other countries is that, until recently, generations: It is too difficult, too special- essentially political. it seemed insulated from the war, terror, ized, and uninterested in communication and poverty that plagued so much of the or audience. A poet who is turned entirely The poet and audience are living inward, critics argue, has no concern for through the same trials, and the poet func- history or politics. tions as the voice of her people. The same can be said of the late Polish poet Wisl- In other parts of the world, by contrast, poetry remains at the intersection of pol- A POET WHO IS TURNED itics and culture. In 2014, the American poet and journalist Eliza Griswold edited ENTIRELY INWARD, CRITICS I Am the Beggar of the World, in which she ARGUE, HAS NO CONCERN introduced the English-speaking world to FOR HISTORY OR POLITICS. landay, an ancient form of oral poetry that flourishes in Afghanistan among Pash- awa Szymborska, who spent most of her globe. And so, with the exception of a few to-speaking women. Consisting of two lines career under communist censorship and outstanding poets like Allen Ginsberg and and a total of 22 syllables, landays, Griswold repression. Her work, which won the Nobel Adrienne Rich, most American poets have discovered, were flexible enough to be used Prize in 1996, reached a broad readership in not seen their own task as essentially politi- for both love poetry and political commen- Poland. Her posthumously published Map: cal. But in the 21st century that confidence tary. Many poems in the book respond, Collected and Last Poems, translated by has been under siege. with bitter simplicity, to the seemingly end- Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, less American bombing campaign against reveals a poet so deeply engaged with pol- The success of Rankine’s Citizen, which the Taliban: “When drones come, only the itics that public matters weave themselves distinguished itself by becoming the first Taliban’s sons/are brave enough to answer into her most private meditations. As she poetry book to land on the New York Times them,” runs one couplet. Others threaten writes in “Children of Our Age”: best-seller list for nonfiction, suggests that divine vengeance against the enemy: “May Americans may be ready to hear truths from God destroy your tank and your drone,/you We are children of our age, poetry that they would have ignored before. who’ve destroyed my village, my home.” it’s a political age. And, as America’s political predicament becomes increasingly poisonous and fright- All day long, all through the night, ening, more of its poets might start pro- all affairs—yours, ours, theirs— ducing work that, like Rankine’s, responds are political affairs.... to—and drives—a civic awakening. Q Whatever you say reverberates, ADAM KIRSCH is a poet and critic. He is the whatever you don’t say speaks for itself. author, most recently, of Emblems of the So either way you’re talking politics. Passing World: Poems after Photographs by August Sander. FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 71

culture by MICHELA WRONG False Idols these guests, the museum delivers a clear Is the Rwandan government message on behalf of the Rwandan Patri- otic Front (RPF), the country’s ruling force using museums for more than two decades: “Never again.” to commemorate the past—or Over the past several years, however, a cement its grip on power? new breed of museum has appeared across Rwanda. These government-run sites—for- In Rwanda, April 7 is a public holiday of the most mer historical homes and headquarters of tragic kind: the annual commemoration of the 1994 the country’s rich, powerful, and royal— genocide of nearly a million people. One of the sites have received just a fraction of the global that host remembrances is the Kigali Genocide publicity given to genocide memorials. Memorial, a museum honoring victims—includ- And the media have largely overlooked the ing some 250,000 buried in mass graves beneath the sites’ troubling, if subtle, messages: signals facility. Rwanda’s most prominent genocide tribute of Rwanda’s increasing authoritarianism. attracts plenty of international attention. On the mass slaughter’s 20th anniversary, U.N. Secretary- In December 2015, the government General Ban Ki-moon lit a flame there; Lonely staged a rushed referendum on a consti- Planet recommends it as a “top choice” for tour- tutional change allowing President Paul ists, tens of thousands of whom visit it each year. To Kagame to run for three more terms; he has already served more than 15 years. Against this backdrop, the new generation of memorials suggests a regime quietly bent on anchoring its legacy in brick and mortar and justifying its continued existence with a selective view of Rwandan history—one citizens know better than to contradict. Take former President Juvenal Hab- yarimana’s villa in Kigali, opened as the Presidential Palace Museum in 2009. Hab- yarimana, an army chief of staff who led a presidential coup in 1973, lived in paranoid anticipation that his own turn would come: His palace is a mini-fortress equipped with motion sensors on its stairs and a fake wall in a TV room that opens to reveal a con- cealed rifle rack and secret staircase—an escape route for his family. Habyarimana famously perished alongside his Burundian counterpart when a jet they were traveling in was shot down in April 1994, the event that triggered the genocide. The plane fell right next to the presidential villa, which lies in an elegant Kigali suburb underneath the main flight path into the capital’s air- port. A British TV crew that visited the site soon after the double assassination spotted what looked like human brains spattered on Habyarimana’s Mercedes-Benz. Today, the plane’s twisted, rusting debris still sits where it crashed, just outside the villa’s garden walls. Museum visitors can 72 MAY | JUNE 2016 Illustration by EDMON DE HARO

OBSERVATION DECK wander around it as they please. So can the ning the grounds, a cable car will eventu- that the mwami inhabited before being per- Rwandan couples who choose the villa as a ally hoist visitors up to the site. suaded by the colonial administration to venue for their wedding receptions, often upgrade to stone. The traditional round mud held in a marquee on the lawn. “We must know where we come from hut with a thatched roof speaks of court to know where we are going,” Kagame ritual, dynastic legitimacy, and ancient The anxiety-infused home and declared at the museum’s inauguration bloodlines; it is a memento of days when untouched plane wreckage serve as in 2012. A cynic, however, might view the leaders were chosen by God, not voters. implicit warnings to anyone contemplating memorial as a carefully tailored exercise in a change in Rwanda’s leadership. Officially, political nostalgia, rich in historical irony. Rwanda’s two types of museum could be the Kagame-helmed RPF insists it had For the RPF is no longer a close-knit band said to represent the paradox that is Kag- nothing to do with Habyarimana’s assassi- of brothers sharing good times and bad. ame. The country’s recovery from one of nation; a 2010 government inquiry pointed Many of Kagame’s Mulindi bunker-mates the 20th century’s most grotesque massa- the finger at extremists within Habyarima- have been among those denounced as trai- cres once seemed all but impossible. The na’s own inner circle. Yet the regime per- tors, forced into exile, and even assassi- versely benefits from dogged suspicions nated. Moreover, the museum is a reminder of its guilt, voiced by its critics, because not only of the formidable military force they are reminders of the RPF’s capacity to Kagame led in the early 1990s, but also of destroy its enemies. And destroy it does: As the powerful one he now commands. The Human Rights Watch reported in 2014, the government “does not tolerate opposition, A CYNIC, HOWEVER, MIGHT challenge, or criticism” and uses “arbitrary arrests, detentions, prosecutions, killings, VIEW THE MEMORIAL AS A torture, enforced disappearances, threats, CAREFULLY TAILORED EXERCISE harassment, and intimidation against gov- IN POLITICAL NOSTALGIA, ernment opponents and critics.” It has RICH IN HISTORICAL IRONY. allegedly sent emissaries as far as Kenya, the United Kingdom, and South Africa to RPF sees itself as a regional chess master, Kigali Genocide Memorial and other sites track down dissidents who, like Habyari- free to first topple, then prop up, then chal- mana in his villa, live in constant fear that lenge successive administrations in neigh- dedicated to that 1994 tragedy underline the the end is nigh. boring Democratic Republic of the Congo. It also stands accused by U.N. experts of image—embraced by the likes of Bill Clin- The National Liberation Museum Park meddling in troubled Burundi. in Mulindi also carries a trenchant sub- ton, Bill Gates, and Tony Blair—of a benign text. A two-hour drive north of Kigali, the Reaching back further in time than park occupies a former tea estate that RPF do other museums, the King’s Palace in technocrat who rebuilt a traumatized state rebels, who invaded from Uganda in 1990, Nyanza, southwest of Kigali, commemo- claimed as their main military base. The rates Rwanda’s centuries-old Tutsi mon- and miraculously delivered peace, stabil- hilltop locale offered the RPF views in all archy, the king of which was called the directions, excellent radio signals, and easy mwami. The Modernist palace was built ity, and economic growth rates routinely access to friendly forces back across the by the Belgians for the 1931 enthronement border. Braced for possible air attacks, Kag- of Mutara III Rudahigwa—an ancestor of exceeding 5 percent each year. The newer ame and his trusted commanders retired at Kagame. Today, a display of black-and-white night to sandbagged bunkers; today, muse- photos captures the 7-foot Mwami Mutara museums point instead to an iron-willed umgoers can stand in the dark, grave-like and his father as etiolated figures: toothy, burrows, just large enough to hold a single hair coiffed to make them look even taller. strongman consolidating indefinite rule. mattress each. According to a guide man- Next door to the palace, the government has erected a replica of the giant rondavel From the latter vantage point, the mes- sage projected by the King’s Palace since it opened nearly eight years ago—perhaps the most sinister message of those delivered by Rwanda’s memorials—is surely intended for Kagame’s constituents: I am the new mwami, it seems to declare. Q MICHELA WRONG (@michelawrong) is a col- umnist for FOREIGNPOLICY.com. FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 73

the fixer interview by AIDA ALAMI Tangier, Morocco Samir Daoudi on how to vacation like Elizabeth Taylor and where to eat lamb-brain sandwiches. WHERE TO HEAR MUSIC TANGIER HAS KNOWN many masters. After WHERE TO FEEL its establishment over 2,000 years ago, One of my favor- the Moroccan city perched on the Strait HISTORY ite places is TABA of Gibraltar, just 17 miles south of Spain, DOUL, which is in the served as a key trading post for a parade The medina, which old city. The name of imperial powers, including the Phoe- was built by the Por- means “exchange” nicians, Romans, and Portuguese. This tuguese in the 15th in Arabic, and the diverse colonial past left its mark. In the century, is the city’s venue really lives 20th century, Tangier’s reputation as a cul- historic heartbeat. up to its billing. It tural melting pot—as well as its Mediter- Just wandering tends to host art- ranean climate, white-sand beaches, and around, you will get ists who like to fuse plentiful hashish—attracted a slew of nota- a strong sense of all Moroccan sounds ble bohemians. Paul Bowles and William the ghosts of people with other kinds S. Burroughs both called it home at one who lived in Tang- of music, such as time. Today, the city is defined as much ier. One of the best soul or jazz. Mostly by European architecture as by its tradi- museums in the local musicians tional mosques. Locals gab in a fluid mix city, KASBAH MUSEUM, perform, but some- of Arabic, Spanish, and sometimes French. is in the heart of times acts from the medina. It used Europe play as well. According to fixer Samir Daoudi, Tang- to be a palace, and ier’s cosmopolitan legacy is evident “at each room has WWW.TABADOUL.ORG every turn,” particularly in the medina, a an exhibition—from constellation of medieval alleyways, tra- Roman ceramics ditional markets, and outdoor cafes. But to Arabic jewelry— recent infrastructural developments have representing differ- added a modern touch to the city, offering a ent periods in glimpse of its economic potential. And the the city’s history. nearby port of Tanger-Med, in operation since 2007, is now one of the Mediterra- +212 5399 32097 nean’s largest cargo harbors. The Moroc- can government is building a rapid-transit WHERE TO RELAX system that will link Tangier to Rabat and to Casablanca. “The idea is that Tangier Everyone from local can be more than a way station between Moroccan kids to North Africa and Europe,” says 39-year-old European expats go Daoudi. Even with investment, however, to public beaches. the city can’t escape the significance of its I’d suggest SIDI geography: Hundreds of African migrants KACEM and ACHAKAR have set up impromptu camps on Tangier’s BEACH, which are fringes—final stops on their way to Europe. both about 12 miles from the Daoudi, who has fixed for a range of city’s center. People media outlets, gave FOREIGN POLICY a tour usually start going of the city that has long been a refuge—for to the water in displaced persons and vagabonds alike. May. But no matter what season, it’s a great place to eat— the restaurants by the sea have some of the best grilled fish in the city. Photographs by HICHAM GARDAF 74 MAY | JUNE 2016

OBSERVATION DECK WHERE TO ADMIRE WHERE TO SEE AND WHERE TO VIEW ART LOGISTICS ARCHITECTURE BE SEEN Don’t miss the LAST CALL bookstore and art The CINEMATHEQUE EL MINZAH HOTEL, gallery called Between 3 and 4 DE TANGER was built a.m. for clubs. in the 1930s. It located between the LIBRAIRIE LES INSO was renovated in old and the new city, NIGHTLY EXPENSES 2006 after Moroc- is one of the nicest LITES. It was opened can photographer in Tangier. Many less than 10 years It depends on how Yto Barrada raised famous people ago by a local writer much you can money for the have stayed there: and it’s got a nice afford. Expenses face-lift. Berrada is Winston Churchill, collection of art. can run from $2, if pretty involved in Rita Hayworth, you just sip tea the country’s film Elizabeth Taylor, WWW.LESINSOLITES and people-watch, industry; in fact, Farrah Fawcett. TANGER.COM/ to $100, if you go her husband, Even today, many for drinks at a fancy American director politicians and WHERE TO EAT club or hotel bar. Sean Gullette, shot elected officials can a film in Tangier be spotted there. People in Tang- RESPECT titled Traitors. ier like to eat out; +212 5393 33444 maybe that’s Non-Muslims are WWW.CINEMA another Spanish forbidden to enter influence on mosques. A group THEQUEDETANGER.COM/ our culture. One of journalists thing not to miss: I was with once bocadillos, tradi- entered a mosque tional Spanish with cameras and sandwiches, at people got angry. IBRAHIM ADDELMALIK. MOST POPULAR TOURIST ATTRACTION They come with all kinds of fillings— If you have a car, sometimes even drive to the Caves lamb brains! of Hercules, which is about 9 miles 16 RUE DE MEXIQUE from Tangier. Legend has it that Hercules slept there. It’s pretty cheap to get in, only about 50 cents. FP (ISSN 0015-7228) May/June 2016, issue number 218. Published six times each year, in January, March, May, July, September, and November, by The FP Group, a division of Graham Holdings Company, at 11 Dupont Circle NW, Suite 600, Washington, D.C. 20036. Sub- scriptions: U.S., $59.99 per year; Canada and other countries, $59.99. Periodicals Postage Paid in Washington, D.C., and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send U.S. address changes to: FP, P.O. Box 283, Congers, NY 10920-0283. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: P.O. Box 503, RPO West Beaver Creek, Richmond Hill, ON L4B 4R6. Printed in the USA. FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 75

the final word by JAAN TALLINN This principle, which means ensuring that intelligent technologies’ val- ues match those of humanity as closely as possible, is something we need to address if we want to survive this century. ¶ We can no longer trust the control mechanisms we’ve traditionally relied upon—market forces, regulations, and the like—to keep up with the speed of techno- logical advances. If machines make decisions autonomously, we need to figure out a trajectory where technologies, as they get more power- ful (especially AI), better track human values. ¶ Think, for instance, of the 2010 “flash crash” in the financial sector. Now just imagine an unforeseen behavior of a component or algorithm in an intelligent sys- tem that is powerful enough to control, say, the Earth’s atmosphere or a cache of nuclear weapons. ¶ Instead of treating technology and con- trol mechanisms as separate categories, innovators must design and build machines capable of aligning their utility functions to human values even as they operate and evolve under shifting circumstances. Part of the challenge here will be to figure out what humanity wants, in general, even in situations engineers cannot foresee while program- ming these systems. If humanity cannot achieve this feat, it would not just be a game-changing failure; it would likely be game over. JAAN TALLINN IS CO FOUNDER OF SKYPE, KAZAA, THE CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF EXISTENTIAL RISK AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, AND THE FUTURE OF LIFE INSTITUTE IN MASSACHUSETTS. 76 MAY | JUNE 2016

Addressing the critical issues facing Asia in the 21st century Violence against women is pervasive in Cambodia. Inspired by the country’s rapid adoption of technology and social media—nearly 100% of Cambodians now own a mobile phone, and smart phone ownership grew by 41% last year—The Asia Foundation is bringing mobile technology to the front lines in the fight to combat violence against women. We just built and launched the first mobile apps to help victims, including providing personal network alerts, legal information, peer support, and anonymous reporting. READ MORE ABOUT EMPOWERING WOMEN AT ASIAFOUNDATION.ORG