Here are a few particular gems that seem timely, making things seem a bit "Orwellian" regardless of whether one think there are significant similarities between an Orwellian police state and the United States (a stance I would certainly argue against quite strongly given the freedoms we still protect!):

1. “Up to a point, the sense of national unity is a substitute for a ‘world view.”

2. “The left wing writers who denounce the whole of the ruling class as ‘pro-Fascist’ are grossly oversimplifying. Even among the inner clique of politicians who brought us to our present pass, it is doubtful whether there were many conscious traitors. The corruption that happens…is seldom of that kind. Nearly always it is more in the nature of self-deception, of the right hand not knowing what the left hand doeth.”

3. “…everyone described as an ‘intellectual’ has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing order.”

Are Orwell’s characterizations seemingly relevant now because they’re specific to countries that are – or at least, believe themselves to be – at war? To countries with common religious and cultural heritages in such a situation? Or perhaps, even more specifically, these quotes seem to resonate today because of common characteristics of a point in power and time: two great global leaders, afraid their influence is on the wane, seeking to mobilize a citizenry uneven in its interest or awareness of the greater world but at the same time fearful of how external trends threaten internal stability and prosperity.

Perhaps “Orwellian” has a whole other useful meaning today.

Reason 1: McCain Won’t Walk Away and Others Will Follow His Lead
Many democrats fall down due to the jelly-ness of their foreign policy – it’s almost trite to say as much. Republicans have and will likely continue to win national elections in part due to their perceived sure-footed, tough-mindedness on the use and maintenance of American might. Even beyond this though, the front-runner Republican nominee for President, Arizona Senator John McCain, possesses not only unrivaled foreign policy credentials, wide-spread adoration as a tough-minded independent, but also a long voting and speaking record that shows his general alignment with the President on the topic of American withdrawal from Iraq. In the campaign, John McCain can politically not – and is personally unlikely to -- commit to a withdrawal from Iraq that could in any way be cast as hasty. Under McCain we’d stay the course – and against McCain, very few other potential Republican candidates would likely use a “strategy of withdrawal” as a way to differentiate their political planks. Thus, if a Republican wins – be it McCain or otherwise – the ensuing administration would be in promise, if not outright belief, bound to stay the course in Iraq.

Reason 2: The Frontrunner Democratic Contenders Wouldn’t Pull Out Either, Even if They Could
Arguably, there are two lead contenders for the Democratic nomination for President: Senator Hillary Clinton and Virginia Governor Mark Warner. This is not to say that other Dems won’t toss their hats into the ring, but these two will likely be two of the first to do so, and at our early vantage point, seem best positioned to take the nomination. Ignoring for a moment that both will have to play to a moderate base to hope to win against McCain or a likewise-positioned Republican candidate, HRC would, for one, likely (a) come out neutral on the topic of American withdrawal on Iraq or (b) argue to stay the course – both because to-date she’s largely supported the war, and won’t want to be cast, Kerry-style, as wobbly and because she may actually think that staying the course is the right thing to do. As to Warner? Well, blessed with the clean foreign policy slate that equally blesses and curses many a hopeful Governor, it’s rather tough to say. His only public indications on the topic seem to put him in the withdrawl upon "vistory" camp. In a recent public address he argued, "To set an arbitrary deadline or specific date is not appropriate...It is incumbent on the president to set milestones for what he believes will be the conclusion." Given the ambiguity and infrequency of statements like these, it seems tough to argue that he has a firm commitment to staying in or getting out of Iraq in the near-term, meaning that out of his record alone he could chose as his personal beliefs and political connivances direct him. Lacking a window onto his worldview, one can only speculate as to how political craftiness would influence his stated goals: in the lead up to the Democratic nomination, he might be tempted to distance himself from the war – and from candidates who support or are wishy-washy on it – to win less hawkish moderates and adamant neo-con haters. This choice might be risky for the general election, however, where Republican tacticians might very well combine a stated desire for withdrawal with Warner’s general foreign and military policy inexperience into a dangerous “untried yet still weak” message. As such, Warner – and any Democratic candidate with thin or debatable foreign policy and security credentials – may very likely come out neutral or steadfast on Iraq as well.

Reason 3: The Rhetoric of Victory is Powerful
“Victory” is slippery – especially for a war that has already been declared as “won.” Victory over what? Whom? Seemingly, victory is what vocal and powerful policy makers and observers will make of it – and it will happen when they call it. And they won’t act in unison. “Victory” is a reasonable aspiration, but a difficult, metric-less standard by which to gauge and set policy. Politically, it will define the debate over the war for a long time to come, because the opposite of victory is “defeat,” and no politician can bear to accept defeat or to be labeled with defeatism. Thus, for rhetorical reasons alone, the United States seems bound to stay deeply involved in Iraq until a broad set of influential people have strong reason to believe and argue that victory is now – and it isn’t now, nor by most analysts’ best estimate is it likely soon to come.

Conclusion: Lessons from History Are Easily Forgotten and Misapplied
In the December 4th New York Times op-ed piece, Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argue that President Bush should take a cue from a beloved President of whom we’ve been long-bereft: John F. Kennedy, in his belief and gradual articulation of how the United States must get out of Vietnam. Without getting into the ongoing counterfactual debate of “what Kennedy would have done,” it is useful to illustrate (which Sorensen and Schlesinger hint at but don’t fully address) how tied Kennedy’s hands really were in the unraveling situation in Southeast Asia, and how incremental military escalation in the region almost irrecoverably bound the United States to stay out its bloody intervention under President Johnson. As they write of one option available to Kennedy: “Renege on the previous Eisenhower commitment, which Kennedy had initially reinforced, to help the beleaguered government of South Vietnam with American military instructors and advisors? No, he knew the American people would not permit him to do that.” Beneath Kennedy’s sense that the American people would not permit a withdrawal, lies a clear (and elsewhere-documented) concern that withdrawal would undermine his candidacy for a second term. He was committed – and commitments are hard to break, for reasons of credibility internationally, as well as domestically. Bush is now likewise committed, and this commitment may very well bind the hands of all those who can reasonably hope to succeed Bush in 2008. Bound to "victory."

The Illogic of Deterrence in Application
As Alexander George writes in Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice, “[i]n its most general form, deterrence is simply the persuasion of one’s opponent that the costs and/or risks of a given course of action he might take outweigh its benefits.” Deterrence theory, in turn, is the body of theory which scholars and policy makers developed to address how best to ‘deter.’ Deterrence theory fits within the rubric of ‘game theory’ as applied in mixed-motive international interactions where there is a genuine possibility for the use of force. The use of ‘deterrence’ involves a high degree of communication (both implicit and explicit) between the ‘players’ in this ‘game.’ As an early developr of this area of foreign policy thinking, Schelling wrote, “[d]eterrence…is concerned with influencing the choices that another party will make, and doing it by influencing his expectations of how we will behave. It involves confronting him with evidence for believing that our behavior will be determined by his behavior.”
Above all else, ‘deterrence theory’ is concerned with how states can best use threats to get their way, while avoiding the ‘need’ to act upon these threats. As Schelling wrote, “a theory of deterrence would be, in effect, a theory of the skillful nonuse of military forces, and for this purpose deterrence requires something broader than military skills.” What are those skills? Because successful deterrence (conventional or nuclear) relies not only on the ability to inflict harm, but also the ability to effectively communicate the threat of such harm, deterrence’s successful implementation relies on the effective communication of threats. Communicating threats is challenging for deterrence ‘users’ because it requires careful signaling regarding potential ‘consequences,’ should these threats go ignored. In most situations where deterrence might be used, channels for such precise signaling are often lacking; furthermore, different states will receive and construe threats in different ways depending on their leaders’ views, these leaders’ perception of the hopeful deterring state, and a multitude of other factors. Thus, the first challenge for achieving ‘deterrence’ is one of threat communication.
However, even after overcoming the challenges inherent in conveying ‘deterring threats,’ deterrence requires something more: threats must be seen as credible and ‘potent’ by the state that is to be deterred. As such, ‘deterrence credibility’ was one of the most important concerns of policy makers during apex of applied deterrence theory -- the 1960s and 1970s, including the Kennedy phase of the Vietnam War. About credibility’s role in deterrence, Ned Lebow writes, “[b]ecause deterrence places so much emphasis on the credibility of commitments, it assumes that statesmen engage in an ongoing effort to maintain the credibility of their own commitments and to monitor and periodically update and review their assessments of the commitments of others.” Thus, for deterrence to ‘work’ a state must show itself credible in the commitments it has already made. Because of this, within deterrence theory there is a direct relationship between upholding the commitments a state has already made – showing that state’s ‘credibility’ – and the effectiveness of its deterrent shield.
On a theoretical level the imperative of deterrence is clear enough: make commitments you can and will keep, and keep them, lest you undermine those you commitments (e.g. threats) you make in the future. In practice, however, these restrictions on decision can run counter to choosing the best – and most ‘rational’ –option. Following the logic of deterrence, we must bind ourselves to options we’d rather not chose, to demonstrate our resolve to keep promises we’ve not yet made. On entering Vietnam the United States bound itself to fight there, lest we signal our irresolve the world over.

From Games to Decisions
Beyond their theoretical work, Schelling and a set of other deterrence theorists possessed tremendous clout within the set of policymakers at the pinnacle of American foreign policy in the 1960s. Evidence to the depth of policy maker-to-deterrence theorist ties is provided by the list of consultants employed by the Departments of State and Defense at the time, which serve as a virtual role-call of political and economic scholars who had written, or were writing about deterrence. For example, in fall 1963, the Department of State listed Thomas Schelling at Harvard, R. Dahl from Yale, and (at think-tanks) Mort Halpern, Albert Wohlstetter and Herman Kahn on its payroll. Not only did these deterrence theorists serve as policy-consultants, some of them were charged with conceiving of and controlling the war games used to prepare American policy makers for the ‘challenges’ faced specifically in Indochina. Excellent example to such games are the February 1962 ones coordinated by Albert Wohlstetter, one of the intellectual architects of abstract deterrence theory. After designing and serving as the ‘control’ for an inter-departmental war-game, attended by high-level policy-makers from the State and Defense Departments, Wohlstetter wrote, in a State Department brief:
"Red [Communists] followed almost the same course that the NLF and North Vietnam were following; no escalation, but continual low-level hostilities and infiltration. [Blue’s, the Americans’] intentions was [sic] to convince Red that it would fight if necessary to prevent Communist control of Southeast Asia – that it viewed the situation in the area with greatest seriousness."

Given this ‘result’ for the game, it is of little surprise that, in the fact book he prepared for participants, Wohlstetter’s “Resume of the Importance of Indochina in World Politics” he set forth the ‘fact’ that:

"Like the proverbial house of cards, IndoChina is capable of a soft collapse. Any further loss of western (US) prestige could swing the pendulum of uncertain Asian newly-independent countries into the communist orbit, sucking in Indonesia and Burma, cutting the lines of communication between the Pacific and Africa, isolating a lonely Australia-New Zealand, looming darkly over the Philippines and Japan."

While none of the ‘top level’ decision makers for Vietnam – Kennedy, McNamara, Taylor, McGeorge Bundy – participated in Wohlstetter’s games, or seem to have been acutely aware of their results, many penultimate Vietnam policy makers did, and were. Roswell Gilpatric, Deputy Secretary of Defense, and an important Vietnam policy maker, for example, was responsible for summarizing the ‘lessons learned’ during Wohlstetter’s 1962 game in a report distributed within the State and Defense Departments.
The explosion of deterrence theory during this period aligned with what Bruce Jentleson, in his historical analysis of American foreign policy thinking since WWII, terms the institutionalization of a “global commitments theory” in American foreign policy. The central tenet of this ‘theory’ was that the U.S.’ commitments to third world allies serve two functions beyond the narrow objective to-be secured through a specific promise: First, such promises help stabilize the particular ally to whom a commitment is made. In providing stability, a commitment protects the American ‘interests’ at stake in good relations with that country. Second, and even more important for Vietnam policy under Kennedy, commitments, as a more general demonstration of American ‘resolve,’ were thought to enhance the credibility of American power, thereby contributing to, what Jentleson refers to as, “global deterrence against other potential threats to other allies.”
An excellent example of a scholarly argument that buttressed such deterrence-based defense policy is provided in Schelling’s Arms and Influence, when he argued that:
"the main reason why we are committed in many of these places [including Vietnam] is that our threats are interdependent. Essentially, we tell the Soviets we have to react here because, if we did not, they would not believe us when we say that we will react there."

In the years since Kennedy’s administration this argument for commitments’ importance has fallen under significant critique. For example, Robert Johnson, who was on the National Security Council Staff from 1952-62, and on the State Department’s Policy Planning staff from 1962-67, argued that, “[c]oncern with credibility itself defines U.S. interests and plays the major role in determining the particular commitments the United States undertakes and the resolve with which it carries out those commitments; the specific situation is relatively less influential.” Operating under the ‘global commitments’ theory, the United States model of national interest during the period often became: Credibility --> Commitments --> Resolve --> Interests. The desire for overarching credibility drove American foreign policy makers to extend defensive commitments, oftentimes in the form of deterrent threats, whose keeping was transformed into a national ‘interest’ in its own right. In turn, the reason why ‘credibility’ drove this process was that U.S. foreign policy makers believed both that they needed to provide ‘global deterrence’ against potential threats from communist aggression upon the United States and its allies, and that broadly showing American credibility would do just this.
Moreover, even beyond their consulting positions, some of these theorists – including Schelling -- had a direct line to the most powerful members of the Kennedy administration. On the end of one such line was John McNaughton, Secretary McNamara’s top civilian advisor in the Department of Defense. Under President Johnson, McNaughton drafted a memo in which he recalled the original reason for going into Vietnam was 70 percent to “avoid a humiliating US defeat [emphasis mine].” However, not only did he view Vietnam as a mere test of wills between the ideologically opposed powers, he also incorporated Schelling’s work directly into his policy recommendations; before his Defense Department stint McNaughton had befriended the game-theorist and defense intellectual, while they were both teaching at Harvard. During the same period, Schelling wrote that, “face is one of the few things worth fighting for;” though “few parts of the world are intrinsically worth the risk of serious war by themselves… defending them or running them may preserve one’s commitments to actions in other parts of the world and at later times.” This argument quickly found policy ‘legs,’ through incorporation into McNaughton’s and the Bundy brothers,’ as well as many other civilian planners,’ policy recommendations.
In sum, at the same time as American defense policy began calling for greater military response flexibility across the spectrum from nuclear to sub-limited war, the deterrence theory spun by Schelling and others was gaining prominence in academic foreign policy circles. In turn many of these deterrence theorists, Schelling especially, were gaining new influence in the Whitehouse, State and Defense Departments. For all of these reasons, the need to maintain the ‘credibility’ of American deterrence against Communist ploys – at all levels of possible military conflict, from nuclear to sub-limited – was brought to the forefront of American foreign policy. Due to this, Vietnam was seen by many influential foreign policy makers as a critical test of the United States’ deterring credibility. The implication of this thinking was the steady escalation of United States’ involvement in Vietnam, from under 1000 advisors and troops in 1961, to around 16,000 at the time of Kennedy’s assassination. The Johnson administration, unmitigated heir to much of the thinkers and analysis of Kennedy-era foreign policy was mired -- in mind and in mud -- from the outset.

Schelling’s Continued Legacy: Several Wars and a Noble Later
A study of Schelling’s legacy is useful beyond the limited realm of ‘American policy formation toward Vietnam 1961-63.’ In the lead-up to the United States near-unilateral, and ‘pre-emptive’ 2003 invasion of Iraq, there were two primary components of public U.S. argument: (1) that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction; (2) that it had direct ties to terrorists, including Al Qaeda, was harboring terrorists within its borders, and was interested in sponsoring future acts of ‘terror’ – in short, that it was a ‘terrorist state.’ As U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell argued before the U.N. Security Council on February 5th, 2003:
My friends, the information I have presented to you about these terrible weapons…links to a subject I now want to spend a little bit of time on. And that has to do with terrorism. Our concern is not just about these illicit weapons. It's the way that these illicit weapons can be connected to terrorists and terrorist organizations that have no compunction about using such devices against innocent people around the world.

What is interesting about this two-part, ‘weapons and terror,’ justification, is that there were – and, of course, still are – many other countries in the world with nuclear weapons, including the United States and many of its ‘allies.’ Likewise, there were many countries in the process of developing weapons of mass destruction. India and Pakistan, of course, already had nukes, but there was little question that both were expanding these arsenals and their arsenals of other weapons, as well as their numbers and types of weapon delivery systems. True, the United States was working with leaders from India and Pakistan to encourage scale-backs in WMD development programs, but in spring 2003 the U.S. administration was not arguing – not in any public forum at least – that the ‘free world’ should do what was ‘necessary’ by military means to ensure that Indian and Pakistan states gave up their bombs, or their development programs.
Thus, what made Iraq different for American foreign policy was that it was a ‘terrorist state.’ Because it was thought to possess WMDs, the fact that Iraq ‘was’ a ‘terrorist state’ made it threatening to U.S. interests. Merely the ‘fact’ (which now appears to have been untrue, or, at least, grossly overstated) that it had weapons and was developing more would not – standing without the terrorist charge – would not have justified the argument that it posed a clear and present threat to American interests. Thus, a key question for those who study American policy arguments for Iraq in the fall of 2003 is: what justifications were used for the argument that Iraq was a ‘terrorist state?’ In turn, why did the identity and position of Iraq necessitate a pre-emptive military attack? These are much the same questions as: what justifications were used by policy makers under Kennedy to argue that guerillas in South Vietnam were part of some global communist plot to test American credibility at the level of limited war? And, why did the identity and positioning of the involved actors there necessitate a demonstration of American ‘resolve?’
Thus, for scholars forty years from now – and hopefully far earlier than that – this study, of deterrence theory and theorists in Vietnam, reinforces the notion that it might be helpful to ask: what concept binds together the vast array of policy arguments made in the Departments of State and Defense, Whitehouse, and various intelligence agencies in the lead-up to the U.S. assault on Iraq? What conception of national interest – defined in terms of ‘security’ – was shared by these arguments? Indeed, might there be some way to crystallize a shared understanding that explains how – long before Iraq was brought to trial before the American people or the UN Security Council – Iraq came to be thought of as a “terrorist state requiring pre-emption” in policy arguments? These are, of course, questions for another place – and, perhaps, for another time as well, after spring 2003 policy arguments become accessible for analysis.
As President Bush argued in January 2004: “We can no longer take gathering threats for granted. If we see a threat gathering overseas, the lesson of September the 11th says, we must pay attention to it…We cannot assume that oceans protect us anymore.” In the same address Bush even admitted, “[September 2001] affected our psychology in America.” Not surprising is that in a public address urging that the U.N. Security Council approve of sending troops Bush argued:
Saddam Hussein has longstanding, direct and continuing ties to terrorist networks. Senior members of Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda have met at least eight times since the early 1990s. Iraq has sent bomb-making and document forgery experts to work with al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training…We also know that Iraq is harboring a terrorist network, headed by a senior al Qaeda terrorist planner. The network runs a poison and explosive training center in northeast Iraq, and many of its leaders are known to be in Baghdad…On September the 11th, 2001, the American people saw what terrorists could do, by turning four airplanes into weapons. We will not wait to see what terrorists or terrorist states could do with chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons.

As Ivo Daadler and James Lindsay argue in America Unbound, in this speech – as in many others – Bush conflated, “terrorism, tyrants, and technologies of mass destruction.” Might the world now be seeing the memory of September 11th hardening into some ‘logic of American pre-emption, relying on this threat ‘identification?’ If so, this would be particularly interesting in light of this study: ‘pre-emption’ is an instrumental antithesis of ‘deterrence.’ However, only future scholars will be able to tell whether policy arguments made internally within Bush’s administration functioned along assumptive vectors drawn out by a few policy elite.

The lesson of Schelling (and others who have been positioned like him) must make us question the direct application of broad, deep and ill-transferable ideas directly into the policy papers that direct American lives and power. Thus, in honoring Schelling, those in the world of defense and policy might also ask: who are the ghost writers of our current policy? In what way have their arguments, uprooted from their theoretical or historical planes, been construed and potentially misapplied?

Whoops, where'd the F-18s go? Admittedly, I don't know all the details on this, but if CNN.com's framing is at all reflective of reality, this seems pretty bad -- albeit in a sadly funny way. True, there's fog of war, and tragic accidents befall the best trained troops, but I thought radar, radio, satellites and all were supposed to reduce the uncertainty surrounding this sort of thing.

Worse, I think, is the story of the revealed spy. Perhaps the U.S. military has entered a joint-venture with a cereal company to produce spy decoder rings, and somehow sent one box to an Italian hacker, and the other errantly to some poor kid in Iowa. Of course the BBC seems to be the first media outlet picking this up.

So the world has its next Pope -- one, who as a Cardinal and protector of the liturgy did little to impress liberal Catholics, seculars and members of other religions of his willingness to compromise his principles for dealing with them. Thus, one might ask, will he a prove a divisive force at a time when major religious leaders may have the purivew and pulpit for great and beneficial influence? And how will he deal with growing secularism in Europe and non-Catholic relgious growth in the U.S. I dunno.

(For an interesting (and perhaps pre-written) response to this announcement check out: Slate's article)

Friedman's thesis is quite simple (drawn from "The World is Flat," his most recent book, coming out this week)-- the method to compete globally in coming years will be innovation; competition will require significant investment in technical understanding -- and, perhaps more importantly, societal focus on education, creativity, and innovation. This is, of course, a pretty significant change away from the competitive field of the cold war -- which, apparently, is the field in which the nuclear gamers of Broad's article still play.

The W-76 was a smallish nuke developed in the early 1970's for destroying targets like military bases. The warheads are now the primary weapon for the U.S. nuclear sub fleet, sitting atop hundreds of missiles hidden beneath the waves worldwide. Approximately 1,500 of the 5,000 or so nukes in the U.S. active arsenal are W-76's. As Broad observes, the weapon's genesis came when "American bomb makers sought to win the arms race with designs that made nuclear arms lightweight, very powerful and in some cases so small that a dozen or more could fit atop a slender missile." And now they need updating, at a projected cost of about $2BB.

The telling irony of this is that while other countries' leaders and students are investing to level the innovation playing field, many of our government's leaders are re-investing in weapons systems that can, in a flash, flatten it, them, and anything else that happens to lie within 7400km of a major waterway.

I digress, for this is, after all, (supposed to be) a blog on "international relations." What prompted the above paragraph-long ramble on the NPV of the life sciences building was, in fact, a product of two things: (a) work-related research into innovation practices for highly-trained knowledge workers and, (b) attempted procrastination by looking at a recent supplementary report in Nature Biotechnology. on "Health Biotechnology Innovation in Developing Countries" (a list that included, somehow, South Korea -- but the other members seemed reasonable). What caught my eye was the report's discussion of legal and regulatory influences on Biotechnological innovation in Brazil. As far as I can remember, little notice was given in main media last December when President da Silva signed into a law a bill tellingly titled the "Innovation Law." At core, the bill aims to:
1. Encourage the public and private sectors to share staff, funding and facilities such as laboratories.
2. Allow funding by private companies to public institutions to carry out research on their behalf.
From either an economic growth, or business innovation perspective this only makes sense.

What's interesting here is that full details won't be released until April 2005; and Biotech private industry spokespeople -- both Brazilian and global -- seem to be withholding full judgement until the government provides its fine-print. Still, if the bill's bespoken goals are even marginally met, the country's ability to participate actively in Biotech (as well as other knowledge-intensive research fields) will likely increase. According to the WIPO, 70% of Brazilian R&D expenses are currently financed with public resources, and 80% of Brazilian researchers carry out their activities within public institutions (universities or research centers), concentrating on the production of scientific papers -- that is, not currently on life-improving or coffer- and pocket-lining products and services. Because this will be a change in line with da Silva's pro-technology, pro-public involvement in private innovation policies, once-fleshed, the bill seems likely to come as full as promised. Whether the result is increased focus on profitable scientific ventures (given market sizes and wealth: cardiovascular, endocrinological, or consumer health -- all top selling therapeutic areas in the US, Japan, and western Europe) or research on issues closer to home (HIVS/AIDS, Chagas, etc) of course, remains to be seen. From a pure growth or economic development standpoint, probably either route would be a good one.

In my first international client project at a small consultancy I shifted from business casual to formal, and spent two months on-site at the headquarters of Switzerland-based pharmaceutical company. I enjoyed the work, the team, and the clients: and on first arriving thought Switzerland wouldn’t be all that different from the various places I’ve worked and lived in the United States – and much less different than many places where I’ve wandered. Suissedeutch is a bit hard to understand, true, and cheese and cream grate a Santa Barbarian stomach – but with a relatively commensurate GDP per capita, similar or better educational attainment levels, and common western European-oriented history and culture, my first jet-lagged days made Switzerland seem less foreign than, say, Mexico might after just a few minutes just across my home state’s border in Tijuana.

Fewer than 15% of Swiss citizens own real estate property. From college friends who’d spent a week canoneering in Interlaken I’d heard that Switzerland was, “the perfect almost classless society. Everyone’s smart. There’s not much crime. And it’s beautiful.” Rather than classless I found Switzerland to be of two classes: almost everyone and the jetsetters. And everyone I met was impressively smart and educated – my company’s client, our client’s direct reports, and those reports’ secretaries were all analytically clever, well-spoken polyglots. The Starbucks baristas were the most articulate I’ve ever met – and, apparently, the most expensive: high minimum wages make for 5 dollar cappuccinos. After two sequential weekends wandering through the Alps I had to wonder whether it was the country’s general equality, crisp air, or merely its altitude that made its citizenry seem…well…uniformly satisfied.

In my early weeks of work on the group – and even the day before my initial JFK-Zurich non-stop -- I took my manager’s first two recommendations to heart: I was happy to dress-up for awhile, and it wasn’t surprising to me that the world’s premier clock country valued time precision – but I didn’t understand his third point: no passion? It wasn’t until I spent two weeks back in New York, sloshing through a blizzard’s residual mess, passing by bankers and bums, that his comment started to resonate. The main difference between the smart, extremely competent and educated Swiss I spent two months working with and their American analogues was the former group’s distinct lack of emotional involvement with their work. Motivated, yes. Exceptionally competent, also, yes. Emotionally driven – seemingly no. Even in my company’s home office people tend to occasionally wear their disaffected days on their sleeves – likewise with their passionate push-buttons. In my (admittedly, relatively short, still) time on the group not one Swiss Pharma worker, VP or secretary, so visibly flew a work-related emotional flag.

To pose one hypothesis for this: might this lack of workplace emotion be tied to Switzerland’s general social equality? If the difference between a good year and a great year has no tie to whether a middle manager will be able to afford a house (because almost no one gets to buy a house), could this explain why he or she will neither be overly excited or defeated in response to workplace outcomes? I’m not fully convinced by this argument, given the subtle signs of social disquiet I encountered (notably the prevalence of anti-Semitic graffiti, the thorough disparagement of the recent Turkish immigrants in the city where I worked, and the prevalence and open use of an odiferous banned substance) – but from a material point of view, where the “American workplace” (epitomized in NYC) seems to purposefully tie employee emotions into their own subtle social and economic scramble, the Swiss seem satisfied giving lower managerial payouts, providing everyone strong educations, and ensuring high gainful employment rates. Or maybe it’s just that, due to their years of practice, they don't need passion to make perfect fondues and oversee several of the world’s most visible product sets -- watches, food products, and pharmaceuticals, for example.