Former U.S. Sen. Mitchell at W&J
Confused or dismayed by the United States’ fumbling should-we-or-shouldn’t-we debate on whether to intervene in Syria a few months back?
Then brace yourself. More such debates are looming in the future, according to former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell.
“The greatest challenge the U.S. will face in the next 40 years is whether to respond affirmatively to intervention,” according to Mitchell. There’s little likelihood that the United States will ever be caught up in a conflict on the scale of World War II again, he explained at Washington & Jefferson College Thursday, and whether to step into regional and local conflicts will be the most pressing tests facing the country’s foreign policy and military leadership.
Mitchell, now 80 and retired from the Senate since 1995, was visiting W&J as part of the college’s J. Robert Maxwell Visiting Scholar Series and its integrated semester on conflict and community. He discussed national and international issues in the Dieter-Porter Life Sciences Building in the evening, and with a group of students and faculty a few hours before in the Howard J. Burnett Center.
Mitchell became a familiar figure to most Americans when he was the majority leader in the U.S. Senate from 1989 until his departure, but the Maine Democrat has managed to stay in the headlines in the two decades since thanks to his role in negotiating a peace agreement in Northern Ireland and as the chairman of a committee that looked at violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Mitchell also was the primary author of a 2007 report investigating the use of steroids in Major League Baseball.
Having been able to observe Middle East conflict and sports doping up close, he warned against expecting instant progress on either front. Despite the “Arab Spring” revolts that have seen authoritarian regimes toppled in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, there are no guarantees that “overthrowing a bad government, you’ll get a better government.”
Mitchell added, “You should not expect it like that,” snapping his fingers. He noted that the French and American revolutions brought aftershocks for decades, and “the Arab Spring will play out over a long time.”
Performance-enhancing drugs will continue to bedevil professional sports because, in many cases, the bounty that awaits a high achiever on the field can be worth the risks. “It’s not going to end,” Mitchell explained. “It’s an ongoing human action that has to be managed constantly and rigorously. Throughout human history, some have crossed the line to gain a competitive advantage. … The risk/reward ratio is increasing.”
When asked about snooping and spying by the National Security Agency, Mitchell said that “technology has moved faster than the policy, and this is true in a whole lot of areas in our lives.”
Nonetheless, “I think most people would agree that tapping the cell phone of the chancellor of Germany was not a good idea.”
The J. Robert Maxwell Visiting Scholar Series has previously lured such heavy hitters as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan to the W&J campus. It was the second time Mitchell has been to the college; he received an honorary degree there in 2000.