howl at pluto

Break

2012-01-23T08:00:00.002-05:00

I'll be taking one of my periodic breaks from posting. Duration uncertain -- probably a month or two. Happy trails until then.

How moderate Republicans became extinct

2012-01-22T14:53:00.001-05:00

From the NYT Bk Rev of a couple of weeks ago, Timothy Noah on two books, the first about what this post's title says, the second about the Tea Party.

New (to me) word of the day

2012-01-20T17:44:00.000-05:00

Decoct = to extract the essence of something by boiling; boil down; concentrate.

Ran across it in James Wood's piece in the Jan. 23 New Yorker on the novelist Michel Houellebecq:

The power of Houellebecq's critique has less to do with its persuasiveness as social theory than with the spectacle it offers of the author's bared wounds. His relentless prosecution of his parental abandonment and his wild historicizing of what is only a personal fate give him license to decoct an uneasy mixture of Rousseau and Schopenhauer.

Fact stranger than fiction

2012-01-20T09:00:00.003-05:00

On the one hand I shouldn't write about the Republican primary campaign because I have nothing original to say about it and I haven't been watching the debates (except short excerpts). On the other hand, who could possibly resist writing about it in view of what happened yesterday, with Perry dropping out while solemnly assuring everyone that his now-favored candidate, Gingrich, while "not perfect," was not beyond the mercies of forgiveness and redemption which define his (Perry's) own Christian faith, while (pause for breath) Gingrich, who at least tends to speak in complete, grammatical English sentences (have to give him that) told Gwen Ifill that he would not respond to his ex-wife's statements about their marriage but added that his daughters had sent a letter to ABC protesting the unfair portrayal of their father (or something like that). Somewhere there are novelists and writers of screenplays figuratively banging their heads against the wall, saying to themselves: "Criminy, if I wrote this as a movie treatment no one would believe it." Well, on second thought maybe not; that movie with Clooney and Gosling did feature a presidential candidate who goes a little too far with an intern. Still, this is rather amazing for a real-life campaign. (And throw in the business about Santorum now being declared the winner in Iowa even though some precincts' tallies have permanently vanished.)

And I haven't even mentioned Romney. There is something that bothers me about him. It's not the millions in Cayman Islands offshore accounts, it's not Bain Capital, it's not the $300,000-plus in speaking fees being described by him as "not very much." Yes, of course, those things bother me but what bothers me perhaps even more is that I have no idea why he is running for president. Gingrich clearly likes power for its own sake and maybe even sincerely believes in his retrograde policy prescriptions. Santorum is a true believer, as is Ron Paul. But what about Romney? Why is he running? His New Hampshire post-primary victory speech, which I heard on the radio, seemed mostly perfunctory. He only really got into it when he accused Obama of taking his inspiration from -- gasp -- Europe and its welfare states, while he (Romney) takes his inspiration from the USA. He charged Obama with being an appeaser for wanting a slightly more rational defense budget. Really, is this the best his speechwriters can do?

American presidential campaigns often have a bizarre, circus-like quality. One of the campaigns I remember best, because it was the first one I paid really close day-to-day attention to and got personally involved in, was the '72 campaign. The Eagleton episode there certainly had a bizarre, sad aspect. Muskie crying in the snow in New Hampshire. Nixon and Agnew: can you imagine two more bizarre candidates? The '76 campaign also had its bizarreries. (My favored candidate that year, former Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris, went down in flames pretty early.) I'll stop there. (Bet you thought I was going to go through every campaign of the last 30 years, didn't you?)

Anyway, I hope the Republicans carry on as they've begun. None of them looks remotely presidential right now. I hope it stays that way.

Sovereign debt in historical perspective

2012-01-19T10:48:00.003-05:00

The recent focus on sovereign debt crises has reinforced our understandable tendency to associate national debt with state weakness. Originally, however, the incurring of debt was a sign not of state weakness but of state strength. A government could not borrow until it could convince lenders that it had the ability and intent both to pay interest and (eventually) to repay the principal.

The French king Francis I, who reigned from 1515 to 1547 and presided over a period of relative growth, borrowed and ran a budget deficit. [1] Francis I's contemporary Henry VIII also incurred crown debts (or so I recall; too lazy to find a cite for this). So did Charles V, who "financed his campaign [to be elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1519] through loans from the banker Jacob Fugger, which saddled him with significant debts." [2]

Borrowing by monarchs happened even before that. In his discussion of sovereign lending in Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, Stephen Krasner notes that "Edward III of England repudiated his debts in 1339 precipitating a financial crisis in Italy and leading to the first clearly recognizable business cycle in Europe" [3] Desmond Seward writes: "Edward III...raised vast loans from Lombard bankers,...from merchants in the Netherlands, from English wool merchants, pledging either English wool or the duties on Guyennois wine as security. Almost everyone who lent him money went bankrupt." [4]

These rulers all had their problems, and some had more serious problems than others. But those who lent them money must have thought that they were good risks. If a monarch was viewed as weak, or where there was "uncertainty of succession" [5], state borrowing was close to impossible. Only a relatively strong sovereign, or at least one perceived as such, could be an indebted sovereign. Eventually borrowing would contribute -- under certain specific conditions and in certain cases -- to severe weaknesses. But there was a long period in which sovereign borrowing tended to go hand-in-hand with economic growth and state-building.

Does this little bit of history have any implications for how one views today's financial crises? Probably not. But I've had this post hanging around in draft for a long time, and I figured I might as well put it up.

Notes
1. I. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System v.1 (1974), p.138, citing M. Wolfe, "Fiscal and Economic Policy in Renaissance France," Third Int'l Conference of Economic History, Munich 1965 (Paris: Mouton, 1968).

2. D. Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe (2009), p.141.

3. S. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (1999), p.129.

4. D. Seward, The Hundred Years War (pb. ed. 1999), p.33.

5. Wallerstein, op. cit., p. 138.

Book review: Winning the War on War

2012-01-16T10:04:00.000-05:00

Joshua S. Goldstein, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide. Dutton, 2011. 385 pp.

"The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party." -- William James, "The Moral Equivalent of War" (1910)

"What dramatic vision of hell can compete with the events of twentieth-century war?" -- C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959), p.17

Introduction

War is on the decline: in particular, the years since the end of the Cold War, although obviously not free from deadly conflict, have been less violent than the years that came before. A main purpose of Joshua Goldstein’s Winning the War on War (hereafter WWW) is to convey this message to a broad audience. The book also aims to persuade readers that peacekeeping, through the UN and other organizations, is succeeding and deserves much more financial and political support.

This review will not cover all the elements of the book; rather, I will summarize several of its main points and then offer some thoughts on why the decline in armed conflict has happened, focusing on certain historical aspects of the question. While agreeing with Prof. Goldstein that the decline in conflict is not irreversible, I will suggest (unoriginally) that future large-scale interstate war, or so-called hegemonic war, is very unlikely, for reasons that have partly to do with the impact and consequences of the twentieth century’s world wars. As the word "partly" suggests, I acknowledge at the outset that this explanation for the decline of conflict, and of interstate war in particular, is not a full one. Although the fact of the decline in conflict is clear, the reasons for it will remain an area of disagreement among scholars and other observers.

A related point of disagreement is whether to view the twentieth century as a uniquely violent era. Writing in 2002, Mark Mazower observed that "the twentieth century is increasingly characterized by scholars in terms of its historically unprecedented levels of bloodshed." ("Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century" (review essay), American Historical Review, v.107, no.4) However, it is clear that certain parts of the century were considerably worse than others. After comparing the twentieth to previous centuries, Goldstein concludes that "the twentieth century may indeed have been the bloodiest relative to population but is not really much different in character than earlier ‘bad’ centuries" (WWW, p.37). The twentieth century’s bloodshed, however, is arguably somewhat fresher in the collective memory than that of previous centuries, which may be significant.

Peacekeeping and the Decline of War

Winning the War on War begins with the story of the one occasion on which its author personally witnessed gunfire in a war zone: Beirut, 1980. Residents of the city, Goldstein observes, managed to live relatively normal lives in the midst of a low-level civil conflict. This story immediately engages the reader’s interest and is also a way to introduce the basic point that war exists on a scale, or a continuum, of destructiveness.

Interstate wars, in which two or more countries’ regular armies fight each other, are usually more destructive than civil wars, and the decline in interstate wars is the main reason that "battle-related deaths" – i.e., violent deaths that occur during armed conflicts -- have fallen over the last several decades. Such deaths averaged more than 200,000 a year during the 1980s, whereas from 2000 to 2008 they were on the order of 55,000 a year (WWW, p.238). Looking at longer periods, there were roughly 215,000 average annual battle deaths from 1970 to 1989, and this came down to an average of 75,000 annually from 1990 to 2009 (p.16). Furthermore: "More wars are ending than beginning, once ended they are less likely to restart, and the remaining wars are more localized than in the past" (p.4). On the other hand, military spending has not seen correspondingly sharp reductions (p.19), and "the problem of civil wars may remain in some fundamental way unsolved" (p.247).

While acknowledging multiple causes of the decline in conflict (see further discussion below), Goldstein takes peacekeeping as the "central thread" (p.44) in his account. He gives a history of UN peace operations from the days of their founder, Ralph Bunche, to the secretary-generalship of Kofi Annan and into the present. A key early moment was the 1956 Suez crisis, which resulted in the deployment of the first armed peacekeeping force. Since then, peacekeeping missions have become increasingly "multidimensional," involving not just observing or enforcing cease-fires but a range of other tasks, from disarming and demobilizing combatants to, in a few cases, temporarily running a government. There are 150,000 peacekeepers (about 100,000 UN and 50,000 non-UN) currently deployed at the relatively low cost of $8 billion a year (pp.308-9).

Although some peacekeeping missions have succeeded while others have failed -- and the failures, such as Bosnia or Rwanda, perhaps have tended to linger in the public memory longer than the successes, such as Sierra Leone or Namibia or (in a more qualified way) Cambodia – on the whole peacekeeping missions significantly reduce the chances that war will restart after a cease-fire (pp.105ff., citing the work of Page Fortna, Paul Collier, and Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis). As one would expect, the more peacekeepers there are relative to a country’s population the more likely it is the mission will succeed (at least eventually), as is evident from a comparison of the mission in Sierra Leone (which ended in 2005) with the ongoing mission in Dem. Rep. of Congo. Each mission had roughly the same number of peacekeepers, but Congo has ten times Sierra Leone’s population (p.176). Indeed, the number of peacekeepers in Congo (now roughly 17,000) has been absurdly inadequate given the country’s size. That is not the only reason for the shortcomings of the Congo mission but it is a significant one.

The revival of an active UN role in resolving difficult armed conflicts dates from the late 1980s, when a confluence of developments, including Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’, enabled the Security Council to pass Res. 598, demanding an immediate cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq war, then in its seventh year. A good deal of credit for this revival belongs to then-Sec. Gen. Pérez de Cuéllar, who at an informal meeting on Jan. 16, 1987 -- 25 years ago to the day -- prodded the representatives of the permanent members of the Security Council to act on the Iran-Iraq war. Goldstein’s account of this period draws on Giandomenico Picco’s 1999 memoir Man without a Gun. (To supplement it, see Cameron R. Hume, The United Nations, Iran, and Iraq: How Peacemaking Changed, reviewed in: Paul Lewis, "Rise of the Blue Helmets," N.Y. Times Book Review, Nov. 6, 1994. I have taken the detail about the Jan. 16, 1987 meeting hosted by Pérez de Cuéllar from Lewis; he calls it a "tea party," a phrase which now has other overtones.)

Winning the War on War contains not just description and analysis but also prescription. The peace movement, Goldstein argues, should focus directly on supporting efforts that contribute to the decline of conflict rather than following Pope Paul VI’s maxim "If you want peace, work for justice" (p.208). While peace is "almost always a necessary step" toward "prosperity, human rights, and social justice" (p.77; cf. p.169), peace should be treated as an independent goal and the peace movement should pay much more attention to strengthening institutions like the UN, Goldstein maintains. He argues that targeting "big corporations, oil companies, and globalization," as some in the peace movement do, is not an effective way to advance peace (p.208); however, given what he writes about the causes of civil wars, pressing for more economic assistance to poor countries might very well be (see pp.293, 307).

Causality and Learning

What is responsible for the decline in war? A number of plausible causes suggest themselves. Goldstein mentions a 2007 article by Louis Kriesberg that "identifies eight 'peace factors'…underlying the decline in wars…since 1990: the end of the Cold War; the dominance of U.S. power; the economic benefits of globalization (which war would disrupt); spreading norms about peace and human rights; spreading democracy; the proliferation of NGOs; the increased participation of women in politics; and the growing field of conflict resolution" (p.15). Later in the book he mentions the combination of factors identified by the 'democratic peace' theorists Bruce Russett and John Oneal: "democracy, economic interdependence, and...the development of international organizations, including the UN" (p.278). Thus for Goldstein the downward trend in war has "multiple causes, not easily untangled" (p.44) but, as already seen, he gives the UN and peacekeeping pride of place among the contributing causes. (See e.g. p.278, where he writes that the development of international organizations is the "most important, in my view" of the various factors.)

To say that the UN, and international organization more generally, is the most important cause of the decline in conflict raises the question: what "caused" the UN? I don’t mean what caused the UN in a proximate historical or ideological sense, a subject on which historians disagree. Rather: What if the UN, as it eventually came to function, is an institutional consequence of a process of learning from experience?

Goldstein writes (p.42):

Several possible causes [of the decline in war] come to mind. First is the notion that civilization has evolved over the long course of human history in a way that has gradually strengthened norms of behavior that discourage violence. Later in the book I will discuss evidence that changing norms have reduced barbarity in general, from torture and slavery to capital punishment, while building up an idea of human rights and the responsibility of governments to their people. As part of this process, war has gone from a standard and even attractive policy option to a last resort, at least in political rhetoric. One trouble with this explanation is that it would predict a gradual diminishing of war over the centuries, whereas instead we have found a long series of ups and downs culminating in the horrific World Wars.

Of course it is true that the twentieth-century world wars, and all the associated horrors, make it extremely difficult to tell a convincing story about linear normative progress from pre-history to the present. But it seems highly likely that the twentieth-century world wars themselves had an impact on subsequent normative and institutional development and on basic assumptions about war (a point Goldstein acknowledges but does not, in my opinion, emphasize enough). Thus, although an "evolving norms" or "learning" explanation does not work well for "the long course of human history," it may nonetheless help to explain the war-and-peace trajectory of the last century or so. (This in turn raises the question of why at least some human groups appear to have learned from the twentieth-century world wars, and from mass killings not connected with the world wars, what they failed to learn from earlier conflicts -- a question that might require an entire book to answer and so will be left to one side here.)

Consider the impact of the First World War, "a catastrophe of unbelievable horror, suffering, and destruction," in P. Kennedy’s words, in which armies suffered enormous casualties quite often for no good strategic or other reason. (Revisionist historians might disagree with this statement; so be it.) Goldstein remarks that "the senseless slaughter [of World War I] swung public opinion in the West against the idea of war as a good in itself" (WWW, p.224), but this statement is buried in the middle of the book and is not given much emphasis in the discussion of causality.

It took a while for revulsion about the 1914-18 war to set in fully, but once it had done so, World War I "permanently discredited major war both as an appealing activity and as a potentially profitable instrument of national policy" in the view of many "in the developed world" (John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday, p.30). (One might qualify this statement inasmuch as reactions to the war were somewhat different in France, e.g., than in Germany.)

Mueller also argues that the experience of WW1 persuaded most "normal" political leaders, including those of Britain and France, that another major war on that scale was almost inconceivable. They were aware of Hitler's bellicose statements in Mein Kampf and elsewhere but could not take them seriously. As Mueller observes (Retreat from Doomsday, p.69):

…Hitler’s opponents in Europe were horrified by the experience of the Great War and appalled by the prospect of going through anything like that again. They had concluded that only a monster or a lunatic could want, or even want to risk, another Great War, and they paid Hitler the undue compliment of assuming that he did not fall into those categories…. There was thus broad consensus – shared even by the curmudgeonly Winston Churchill, then out of office – that great efforts should be expended to reach a general peaceful settlement of any remaining grievances in Europe.

Similarly, referring to the British and French "decision to abandon Czechoslovakia [at the Munich conference] in September 1938," James Joll wrote: "Above all it was the result of an intense desire for peace, a deep horror aroused by memories of the First World War and a reluctance to believe that Hitler actually envisaged war as a means of attaining his ends." (Europe Since 1870, p.373)

And a final quotation, from William Rock:

… [for the British] the historical lesson of the First World War was clearly writ: the total nature of that great struggle had rendered war in its traditional role as senseless beyond contemplation. It was not that the whole nation had converted to philosophical pacifism, for only a wing of the Labour party had taken that route…. It was simply a poignant realization of the terrible destruction wrought by modern war; a keen appreciation that its costs vastly exceeded any benefits which might accrue to a prospective victor, in name only; a plain recognition that Europe had reached a stage of moral development where war must be considered a barbarity incompatible with civilized life…. War, in short, had emerged in the British mind as the ultimate evil. Nothing would justify another one.

(Rock, British Appeasement in the 1930s, p.41, as quoted in Randall L. Schweller, “The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-39: Why a Concert Didn’t Arise,” in Elman and Elman, eds., Bridges and Boundaries, p.202)

Granted, there were increasing divisions in the British elite, as the 1930s progressed, about what policy to adopt toward Hitler; many bitter memoirs were later written about those divisions. But this doesn’t invalidate the points made in the passages quoted above.

Thus, the conviction, shared by many, that World War I had rendered great-power war illegitimate as a tool of statecraft (see Schweller, op. cit., pp. 200ff.) was an important moment in normative evolution.[1] Tragically, it took another great-power war, bringing with it more and indeed almost unimaginable horrors, before that conviction became widespread enough to have a significant influence on the behavior of the great powers as a group.

This argument should be distinguished from that of a commenter here a few years ago who suggested, in the comments thread to this post, that "the modern reduction in violence…reflect[s] a sort of hangover from the two World Wars and their grisly and prolonged aftermath (Korea, Vietnam, de-colonization, etc.)." A hangover, of course, is a very temporary phenomenon; by contrast, the ‘learning’ from the two world wars and subsequent conflicts has become institutionalized in various ways (peacekeeping being, of course, an important one).

Finally, it’s possible that some may view the preceding discussion as too Eurocentric or 'Western' in its emphasis, and too focused on the great powers. Perhaps it is. However, the decline in armed conflict, whatever its causes, is a global phenomenon, one that is definitely not confined to Europe and North America, and thus to draw attention to it cannot be seen as furthering a Eurocentric perspective on the world. (I’m sure Goldstein, who pays considerable attention to Africa in WWW, would agree.)

Conclusion

When one thinks of the armed violence still blighting some parts of the planet, it may seem hard to believe that the world is becoming more peaceful. But it is.

Winning the War on War describes this development while also offering a thorough analysis of peacekeeping and peace movements, along with prescriptions for strengthening them. Goldstein's proposals include a standing UN rapid deployment force with troop contributions from the permanent members of the Security Council. (This latter element is unlikely to happen, since most of the major powers have never shown much or any inclination to put their forces under UN command, although the UN Charter envisaged this.) The author’s feel for data is put to persuasive use, e.g. in ch. 10 ("Three Myths"), and the book manages to address four different audiences: general readers (especially in the U.S.), peace activists, students, and scholars.

In addition to presenting a lot of information and the findings of the relevant scholarly work (interspersed with personal stories), Goldstein is not shy about stating his own views. His attitude of hard-headed optimism is congruent with what might be called, with a bow to the late John Herz, a sort of realist liberalism. Even someone in general sympathy with the book's argument will not agree with every single statement in it; at least, I do not (e.g., was Fidel Castro's endorsement of the Tobin tax really a "kiss of death"? - p.312). The main thing, however, is the book's basic message, which is solid and well supported and deserves a wide hearing.

Footnote

1. How the much-maligned Kellogg-Briand Pact fits in here, or doesn’t, would have to be the subject of a separate post.

References mentioned/cited in this post

James Joll, Europe since 1870. Harper & Row, 1973.

Paul Kennedy, "In the Shadow of the Great War," New York Review of Books, Aug. 12, 1999.

Louis Kriesberg, "Long Peace or Long War: A Conflict Resolution Perspective," Negotiation Journal, April 2007.

Paul Lewis, "Rise of the Blue Helmets," New York Times Book Review, Nov. 6, 1994.

Mark Mazower, "Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century" (review essay), American Historical Review v.107, no.4, 2002. Available here

John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War. Basic Books, 1989.

William R. Rock, British Appeasement in the 1930s. Norton, 1977.

Randall L. Schweller, "The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-39: Why a Concert Didn't Arise," in Colin Elman and Miriam F. Elman, eds., Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations. MIT Press, 2001.

------

For more on WWW, see the author's blog: here.

Tintin's 'American moment'

2012-01-13T15:30:00.002-05:00

Like Gregory Cowles and his brothers, my brother and I were fans of the Tintin books as kids. (It was only much later that it dawned on me why they might provoke criticism.)

Beneath the headlines

2012-01-09T21:25:00.000-05:00

On any day, one can find interesting, odd stories being reported beneath the headline stories, so to speak. Here's one I just happened to notice.

Bumper sticker of the day

2012-01-08T16:44:00.000-05:00

Honk If You Believe the Reimann Hypothesis

(spotted in a parking lot this afternoon)

The Asian "pivot" revisited: show me the threat

2012-01-06T21:33:00.001-05:00

You may remember the line that Cuba Gooding uttered in that Tom-Cruise-as-sports-agent movie (yeah, 'Jerry MacGuire' or whatever it was called): "Show me the money."

Well, here's a slight tweak: Show me the threat.

Last September, Aaron Friedberg wrote an NYT piece (h/t here) in which he asserted that China's military preparations

...do not mean that China wants war with the United States. To the contrary, they seem intended mostly to overawe its neighbors while dissuading Washington from coming to their aid if there is ever a clash. Uncertain of whether they can rely on American support, and unable to match China’s power on their own, other countries may decide they must accommodate China’s wishes.
In the words of the ancient military theorist Sun Tzu, China is acquiring the means to “win without fighting” — to establish itself as Asia’s dominant power by eroding the credibility of America’s security guarantees, hollowing out its alliances and eventually easing it out of the region.
If the United States and its Asian friends look to their own defenses and coordinate their efforts, there is no reason they cannot maintain a favorable balance of power, even as China’s strength grows. But if they fail to respond to China’s buildup, there is a danger that Beijing could miscalculate, throw its weight around and increase the risk of confrontation and even armed conflict. Indeed, China’s recent behavior in disputes over resources and maritime boundaries with Japan and the smaller states that ring the South China Sea suggest [sic; should be "suggests"] that this already may be starting to happen.

I sort of, kind of get this argument, which seems to provide the theoretical basis, such as it is, for the Obama admin's much-ballyhooed pivot to Asia. The argument is: if China thinks the U.S. is withdrawing in some way from the region, China may go a step too far, tell Japan to get off some tiny goat island that's hiding a ton of oil (or whatever), whereupon Japan mobilizes its navy (such as it is), and all of a sudden they're on the verge of, or into, what IR types are wont to call a militarized interstate dispute. Solution: strengthen U.S. presence in the region, put Marines in Australia, sell jets to Indonesia, etcetera, and China will be less likely to, in Friedberg's words, "miscalculate."

I am not fully convinced, however. By Friedberg's own estimate, China does not want war with the U.S., it just wants to be "Asia's dominant power." Well, yes. And the U.S. wants to be, and is, the Western hemisphere's dominant power. And it's OK for the U.S. to be the Western hemisphere's dominant power but evidently it's not OK for China to be Asia's dominant power. Why not? Because China is an authoritarian regime? Because it puts dissidents in jail and suppresses bloggers it doesn't like? Because it wants the Spratly Islands for itself? Because it's not serious about reducing its greenhouse gas emissions? Because its construction codes are shoddy, with the result that large numbers of its people die in earthquakes? Because its government takes land from peasants without compensation for development? What exactly is the problem with China being Asia's dominant power? Don't just hand-wave about maritime boundaries. Show me the threat, in concrete terms, to U.S. national security and to regional "stability". To be impolite about it: put up or shut up.

P.s. See this and this.

The end of "big realism"?

2012-01-06T13:54:00.003-05:00

From Dan Nexon's review (in Perspectives on Politics, Dec. 2011) of Barkin's Realist Constructivism and Glaser's Rational Theory of International Politics:

...Glaser's book occupies an important Janus-faced position. It stands as a (possibly definitive) coda for a series of debates that dominated the security subfield in the 1980s and 1990s. In its self-conscious transcendence of realism and presentation as a strategic-choice theory (albeit with realist roots), it may reflect the beginning of the end for "Big Realism" as a substantively distinctive mode of inquiry.

By "big realism" here, I assume Nexon means 'grand theory' of the last 30 years à la Waltz, Gilpin, Mearsheimer, and some others.

For other reactions to Glaser's book, see the video of the APSA roundtable which I linked in this post.

The U.S. employment picture

2012-01-06T09:33:00.000-05:00

Outsourced to E. Klein: here.

Missing the systemic forest for the unipolar trees

2012-01-05T09:58:00.003-05:00

I've read (rather quickly) the exchange between J. Busby (at Duck of Minerva) and N. Monteiro about the latter's recent article in International Security, which argues that, to quote Monteiro's blog post, "the conventional view (largely based on Wohlforth’s work) that unipolarity is peaceful misses some important conflict-producing mechanisms particular to a unipolar world."

Later in the same post, Monteiro writes:

My argument that unipolarity makes room for particular conflict-producing mechanisms — involving the unipole in case it does not disengage from the world — is indeed compatible with different assessments of the overall level of conflict in the system, as well as of the lethality of those wars.

Let's assume for the sake of argument, as the Busby/Monteiro exchange assumes, that the system is currently unipolar (this is a definitional question and there is a case to be made that the system is not unipolar, but we'll set that aside). Here's the situation (at least as it appears to me): the period since the onset of this assumed unipolarity (i.e., since the end of bipolarity with the end of the Cold War) has been unusually peaceful for the system as a whole, but not for the 'unipole' (i.e., the U.S.) itself. Monteiro's empirical focus, from what I gather, is the second part of this situation -- the wars the U.S. has been involved in recently -- rather than the first part, namely the level of violence in the system as a whole. But it's the first part that's more important.

In other words, if the current system is trending in a peaceful direction, as seems to be the case (see J. Goldstein's recent book, which I will be posting a fairly long review of here soon), then it becomes somewhat irrelevant that unipolarity may "make room for...conflict-producing mechanisms." In a system that, for reasons other than polarity, is becoming more peaceful, those "conflict-producing mechanisms" are just not going to be producing much conflict.

Romney's "victory" rally

2012-01-04T22:01:00.000-05:00

Dana Milbank:

Romney sat through most of the ambush with a tight grin and raised eyebrows....
The Occupy Wall Street guy began heckling. “The U.S. has the highest income inequality in the entire developed world!” [true]
Romney tried to regain control. “Excuse me,” he said. “You’ve had your chance.”
McCain walked toward the Occupy guy. “Be quiet,” he said, menacingly.

Wow. Sounds like a great rally.

Unintended consequences

2012-01-04T15:14:00.001-05:00

The defense authorization legislation signed recently by Pres. Obama (and previously mentioned here) contains a provision imposing sanctions on Iran's central bank. Before these sanctions have even had time to go into effect, their prospect has helped drive down the Iranian currency, the rial, and seems to have helped provoke (although, yes, correlation is not necessarily causation) the threat from Tehran to exert control over the passage of vessels through the Strait of Hormuz. I wonder if anyone thought to plot out this unfortunate unfolding scenario when the sanctions component of the bill was being debated and passed.

Update: Not sure how this fares as analysis, but Karim Sadjadpour got off a good line on the NewsHour tonight when he said that Iran (or more precisely, its government) "has delusions of grandeur and profound insecurities -- might call it the Sarah Palin of nations."

LeCarré note

2012-01-02T08:00:00.011-05:00

I saw Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy about a week ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was in a packed theater and everyone seemed mesmerized. There was no whispering, no coughing, barely, or so it seemed at times, any breathing. I think people are perhaps just starved for old-fashioned (in the best sense) movies that are well-acted, intelligently scripted, suspenseful, and (at least to an extent) emotionally involving.

That the Cold War is long over turns out not to make much difference in how one takes in -- or I guess I should say, in how I take in -- Cold War espionage tales. They are, in essence, morality plays, however layered over by ambiguities, and morality plays are a very old genre. Their appeal doesn't depend on the contemporaneity of the factual setting.

The absence in Tinker of the sorts of 'action' scenes (car chases, explosions, etc.) that a Bond or a Bourne movie contains is an advantage in several ways; for one thing, the tension is heightened gradually, incrementally, rather than being interrupted periodically by gigantic pieces of metal being blown up (or whatever). The focus is on humans and what they are saying and doing, rather than on gadgets, things, and special effects. (There is a gun fired in one scene at the beginning and in one at the end, and that's it as far as on-screen discharges of a weapon are concerned.) This movie is, to get very pretentious (but only for a second), an unalienated spy movie, one that has not been estranged from the genre's essence.

Apart from The Russia House, which I don't remember too well, I haven't read much LeCarré. This afternoon (I'm writing this on Sunday evening) I picked up a paperback of Tinker, Tailor. Yes, the movie tie-in edition, but what can you do? It was the only one on the bookstore's shelf.

P.s. For another and somewhat more -- how shall I put it? -- baroque take on the movie, see here. That post has, among other things, the near-mandatory historical allusions (e.g., the Cambridge spies) that I've omitted here.

A bit of nonsense from Mark Lilla

2012-01-01T07:00:00.001-05:00

Reviewing Corey Robin's book The Reactionary Mind in the New York Review of Books, Mark Lilla prefaces his critical remarks with a swipe at political scientists:

Though it sounds dull, we actually need taxonomy. It is what renders the political present legible to us. Getting it right, though, requires a certain art, a kind of dispassionate alertness and historical perspective, a sense of the moment, and a sense that this, too, shall pass. Political scientists, intent on aping the methods of the hard sciences, stopped cultivating this art half a century ago, just as things started getting interesting, as new kinds of political movements and coalitions were developing in democratic societies.

Mark Lilla must know that Corey Robin is a political theorist and that, whatever else they can be accused of, most political theorists cannot plausibly be accused of aping the hard sciences. So this passage, in the context of this review, is irrelevant rhetoric. I have no opinion on Robin's book, which I haven't read, but I think it fair to say that someone whose CV reveals that he is advising a dissertation entitled "Civilization of the Living Dead: The Zombie as Mirror of U.S. Self-Destruction" is probably not too "intent on aping the methods of the hard sciences."

Happy new year, etcetera

2011-12-31T19:48:00.002-05:00

As 2011 draws to a close (it's already drawn to a close in some parts of the world), I would like to thank everyone who has stopped by here this year -- especially the small group of regular or semi-regular readers -- and wish all of you a good 2012.

This blog had roughly 2,500 'unique visitors' in 2011, which is the traffic that some other blogs get in a single day or a single week. Still, it represents about a 50 percent increase over the traffic here in 2010, no doubt partly because I did more posting in 2011 (there having been a lot, obviously, to write about).

I'd been hoping to put up the long post I've been promising before the end of 2011; however, that's not going to happen. So it will appear in early January.

Bonne année!

Iraq: the clouded crystal ball

2011-12-26T22:04:00.004-05:00

U.S. military forces have left Iraq, but it is evident that the U.S. will be dealing with the consequences of the Iraq war for some years to come. The widely-reported recent political turmoil and the increase in violence raise questions about the country's stability, while kidnapping threats issued against U.S. civilian workers in Baghdad suggest that conditions may be less than propitious for the kind of future U.S. civilian operation that the Obama administration envisages. The Green Zone, home to the largest U.S. embassy in the world, may be as much a space of confinement, albeit -- for at least some -- apparently rather luxurious confinement, in 2012 and beyond as it was during the previous years. And unresolved issues between the U.S. and Iraq's government persist, including the fate of the Iranians in the MEK group, resident in Iraq since 1986 and protected by the U.S. military until 2009. A UN-arranged deal for their voluntary emigration is in the works, but the linked article indicates that complications remain.

Four U.S. veterans of the Iraq war were interviewed on the PBS NewsHour tonight. Asked if it was "worth it" and if they would do it again, two basically answered in the negative and other two -- the two Marines on the panel -- said yes. All four agreed that there was a "disconnect" (and imbalance of sacrifice) between veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, less than one percent of the U.S. population, and the rest of society.

The debate about the Iraq war will probably never end, just as the debate about the Vietnam war has never really ended. It is doubtless possible to pile up anecdotes on both sides of the question. For every story about tens (or was it hundreds?) of thousands of dollars that were wasted in translating classics of American literature into Arabic (the books ended up in an unused pile behind an Iraqi school), there are probably stories about development projects that worked. For every instance of U.S. soldiers mistreating or even (in at least a few cases) deliberately and premeditatedly killing Iraqi civilians, there are probably cases of kindness toward and support for civilians.

It seems clear enough to me that the Iraq war was a tragic, unnecessary venture whose original justifications were either flimsy or fabricated and whose costs -- in lives, money and disruption -- could not be outweighed by the removal of Saddam Hussein, awful as he was, and by his replacement by what may or may not turn out to be a functioning polity and society. But it is, in a sense, easy for someone who sat at home and observed things from a distance to reach this judgment. Even the very well-informed journalists who covered the conflict at first hand and wrote books about it (Packer, Filkins, Chandrasekaran, et al.) probably cannot be viewed as having produced much more than, as the cliché has it, the first draft of history. It's difficult to engage in the careful comparative weighing of misery, which, along with painstaking research, is what any more definitive judgment on the conflict will require. But one thing that seems fairly certain is that it will be a long time before the U.S. embarks on another such undertaking.

Airline carbon emissions tax: latest EU-U.S. dispute

2011-12-23T18:39:00.001-05:00

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) recently upheld the EU's levying of a carbon emissions tax on non-EU planes flying to EU destinations. The U.S., Canada, and China strongly object, with the U.S. arguing that the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is the proper body to deal with this.

A couple of thoughts. First, when it comes to concerns over climate change versus concerns over the balance sheets of U.S. airlines, the latter wins out in the Obama admin, it seems. Second, whatever objections are being advanced to the ECJ's ruling, it is probably hard to fault the court's reasoning that sovereignty is not in question here: the planes are flying into EU airspace, after all. But large amounts of money are apparently involved, so this dispute will no doubt continue.

Kroenig on Iran

2011-12-22T18:11:00.001-05:00

It's a bad article. I've commented on it at Duck of Minerva (where you can find other relevant links), so I won't repeat myself here.

What are the worst U.S. foreign policy decisions of the last 50 years?

2011-12-20T08:51:00.001-05:00

As a first cut and being very telegraphic:

1. Vietnam 1965
2. Cambodia 1969-70
3. Chile 1973
4. Iraq 2003
5. Nicaragua and El Salvador 1980s

Number 5 is a series of decisions (or course of policy) rather than a discrete decision. Same for what might be my number 6, the backing of the resistance to the Soviets in Afghanistan and then forgetting about the country after that (until 9/11). Number 7 might be the failure to stop the Rwandan genocide.

Update to the list: The Bay of Pigs (as Hank mentions) and subsequent Cuba policy. Some might want to throw in the failed Iranian hostage rescue mission, but that was a question more of implementation/execution or just bad luck, I think. Open to correction though. Then there are the omissions rather than the acts, e.g., failure to do anything very effective about al Qaeda until after 9/11.

Bangladesh is 40

2011-12-19T08:00:00.004-05:00

This past Friday was the fortieth anniversary of Bangladesh's independence: Dec. 16, 1971 was the day on which the war of liberation ended. Unfortunately the celebrations were marred by some violence.

Regular readers of this blog may be aware of my interest in the country, which stems from having lived there as a child in the early '60s (when it was still East Pakistan). As a 14-year-old in the U.S., I was aware of and followed the events that led to Bangladesh's independence. The infamous Nixon-Kissinger "tilt" toward Pakistan, at time when its ruler Yahya Khan was engaged in a brutal, indeed quasi-genocidal effort to put down the independence movement, partly reflected the way in which so much in the Nixon White House was seen through the lens of Cold War politics, even in the era of detente. (See, e.g., Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger, pp. 341-42 [these two pages are available on Google Books]).

I have not been following developments in Bangladesh very closely (maybe switching my home page back to the BBC would help), but on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of its independence I extend an obscure blogger's best wishes and the hope that there will be many more anniversaries.

Add reference to "instability," stir, season to taste

2011-12-18T23:18:00.001-05:00

Sunday night here, and I take a last check of the news before shutting off the computer, which I probably should have done a while ago.

What do I find? An AP story informing me that Kim Jong Il has died and going on to say that the S. Korean military is on high alert and that Asian stock markets have moved down, fearful that this may mean increased "instability" on the Korean peninsula. N. Korea is of course a closed, highly authoritarian regime in which the leader had already handpicked a successor, who happens to be one of his sons. There may be jockeying for power among factions of N. Korea's elite, and the son in question is rather young. So what? Why should this mean more instability on the Korean peninsula? Does anyone actually think about these things or is this just a pre-scripted quasi-robotic scenario in which an editor on the AP desk says to one of his subordinates: "Hey Joe (or Mary, or Pedro, or Li or whoever), make sure you throw in the word 'instability'." And the subordinate replies: "aye aye sir, one reference to 'instability', coming right up."

Addendum (added later): Commentary over the last couple of days indicates people see various reasons for concern, including possible difficulties of the 'great successor' in consolidating his power. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Update: defense bill

2011-12-15T20:51:00.000-05:00

The U.S. DOD authorization bill, containing detention provisions that I blogged about earlier, has now cleared both houses of Congress and is headed to the Pres.'s desk, the detention provisions having been reworked just enough, apparently, to avoid a veto. The measure includes sanctions against the Central Bank of Iran, application of which, according to the linked WaPo piece, threatens to disrupt oil supplies and to cause shortages and price increases. Good one.

Abstract of the day

2011-12-14T17:21:00.000-05:00

(That's a variation on Quote of the Day, in case you were wondering)

Sebastian Rosato and John Schuessler, "A Realist Foreign Policy for the United States," Perspectives on Politics (Dec. 2011). I haven't read the article, but here's the abstract:

What kind of policy can the United States pursue that ensures its security while minimizing the likelihood of war? We describe and defend a realist theory of foreign policy to guide American decision makers. Briefly, the theory says that if they want to ensure their security, great powers such as the United States should balance against other great powers. They should also take a relaxed view toward developments involving minor powers and, at most, should balance against hostile minor powers that inhabit strategically important regions of the world. We then show that had the great powers followed our theory's prescriptions, some of the most important wars of the past century might have been averted. Specifically, the world wars might not have occurred, and the United States might not have gone to war in either Vietnam or Iraq. In other words, realism as we conceive it offers the prospect of security without war. At the same time, we also argue that if the United States adopts an alternative liberal foreign policy, this is likely to result in more, rather than fewer, wars. We conclude by offering some theoretically-based proposals about how US decision makers should deal with China and Iran.

Stop the presses!! Did you know that if the great powers had balanced against Nazi Germany before '39, WW2 might have been averted?! Film at 11!! (or maybe that should be: Newsreel at 11!)

Ok, I'm sorry (sort of) for the sarcasm, but there were reasons -- very understandable ones in the historical context -- that there wasn't more balancing in the '30s. (Maybe the authors make that point and there wasn't space to put it in the abstract.) And I know, it's unfair to dump on an article solely on the basis of the abstract. (Blogging means having to say you're sorry ... again and again...)

The question at the beginning is, to be serious, a good one: "What kind of policy can the United States pursue that ensures its security while minimizing the likelihood of war?"

Here is, arguably, a better question: "In a world in which the likelihood of great-power war is vanishingly small, how should the U.S. reorient its foreign and defense policy to: (1) take account of that reality, (2) stop acting as if it's 1947 instead of 2011, and (3) generally come to its senses?"

The new European treaty vs. social democracy

2011-12-13T13:12:00.000-05:00

C. Bertram:

The Euro treaty..., assuming it goes ahead as planned and is enforced, mandates balanced budgets and empowers the Eurocrats to vet national budgets and punish offenders. Social democracy is thereby effectively rendered illegal in the Eurozone in both its “social” and “democracy” aspects.

Whole post here.

Should we wish for an Obama-Gingrich contest?

2011-12-12T18:39:00.000-05:00

Michael Kazin thinks so. He writes that Gingrich-Obama debates would be a true clash of ideas that would "expose the moral and logical defects of the conservative ideology that has been mostly dominant in the U.S. since 1980, even under Democratic presidents. Then, perhaps, a true liberal revival could begin."

I'm not completely convinced. From a selfish standpoint, I can't stand listening to Gingrich and the idea of having to endure his yammering for an entire general election campaign is hardly pleasing. But something a little more substantive seems to be bothering me about this, though at the moment I'm not sure exactly what it is.

More on Kennan

2011-12-08T17:42:00.002-05:00

I heard a talk by Gaddis this afternoon about his Kennan bio (save the first ten minutes or so, which I missed). On the question of Kennan's feelings about America (raised by a commenter here on an earlier post), Gaddis (and I assume this is also what he says in the book) views Kennan's critique of American culture (i.e., materialism, consumerism, the automobile, advertising, all of which Kennan loathed) as being akin to that of a "prophet" who holds his country to "an impossibly high standard." But Kennan did not "hate America," in Gaddis's view, quite the contrary. Personally I think the question whether Kennan "hated" or "loved" America is actually not a very interesting question. His criticisms of American culture are interesting, however, and one author (not Gaddis) has suggested that Kennan would have found some of the cultural criticism of the Frankfurt School (esp. Adorno and Horkheimer) congenial, had he read it. (More on this later, perhaps.)

A couple of other points that struck me as noteworthy from the talk: Gaddis emphasized how deeply Kennan was influenced by Russian literature, above all Chekhov, in the way he formulated his thoughts about the future evolution of the USSR, e.g. in the X article. (Don't have time to go into the details now.) The other thing that struck me was Gaddis's statement that although Kennan despised Ronald Reagan, the latter was actually the president who came closest to implementing Kennan's strategic vision. This I found, to put it mildly, less than persuasive (or at least very debatable), and I was tempted to ask Gaddis a question about it, but I didn't. (Which was probably just as well.)

Gaddis interview on ATC

2011-12-07T22:05:00.003-05:00

I stopped by the All Things Considered site for another reason, and I found that they just aired an interview with Gaddis about his Kennan biography. Haven't had a chance to listen to it yet (I'm planning to do so this weekend if not before), but here's the link for those who might be interested.

Quote of the day

2011-12-06T10:59:00.001-05:00

Peter Tomsen, in the Fall 2011 World Policy Journal (p.89):

A more realistic and tougher American policy towards Pakistan should take into account a number of regional geopolitical trends.... Duplicating a geopolitical pattern in the 1990s, the closer the predominantly Pashtun Taliban get to the Amu Darya River, dividing Afghanistan from the former Soviet Stans, the more Russia, Central Asian states, India, and Iran will coordinate to assist Afghan Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara anti-Taliban resistance groups.... Counterproductive results of Pakistan's proxy wars in Afghanistan will also be felt at home as Pakistan surrenders the extensive regional economic benefits an Afghan peace accord could deliver to Pakistan.

-----
There's also some other interesting material in the same issue, e.g. "Kenya: Phoning It In" (on the transforming effects of money transfers by cell phone in Kenya -- pp. 8 and 9 of the hard-copy issue).

A tale of two candidates and one ambassador

2011-12-05T07:30:00.002-05:00

Gingrich and Romney are calling on the Obama administration to fire the U.S. ambassador to Belgium. His transgression, from what I can gather from this article, seems to have been (at most) perhaps some bad choice of words when describing the effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on attitudes among Muslims in Europe.

The article quotes him as saying:

"Throughout the Muslim communities that I visit, and indeed throughout Europe, there is significant anger and resentment and, yes, perhaps sometimes hatred and indeed sometimes an all-too-growing intimidation and violence directed at Jews generally as a result of the continuing tensions between Israel and the Palestinian territories and other Arab neighbors in the Middle East."

This quote doesn't excuse the anger, resentment, and "perhaps sometimes hatred"; it simply describes his perception. Ditto for another quote in the article in which Amb. Gutman appears to be simply describing the cycle of violence in the Middle East. His mistake was to use the charged word "anti-Semitism." (If he had made the same remarks without reference to "two forms of anti-Semitism," the remarks probably would have passed without too much notice.) The article says the ambassador has now issued a statement on his website, regretting that his remarks might have been misconstrued, etc.

In addition to the reactions from Romney and Gingrich, the remarks have prompted other reactions, including (again according to the Wash. Post article) a statement from the Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors that refers to the "ongoing campaign by the White House to undermine Israel."

The U.S. gives Israel on the order of $3 billion a year, a very large portion of which, I believe, is military/security assistance. Obama administration officials, from Hillary Clinton on down, have said repeatedly that the U.S. is firmly and unwaveringly committed to ensuring that Israel maintains its QME (that's 'qualitative military edge'). Pres. Obama himself has made this clear on more than one occasion. The Obama administration wasted (in retrospect) about a year-and-a-half or so urging Israel to curtail construction of settlements. There was a brief-ish moratorium, after which settlement construction resumed (though perhaps at a slower pace than before). The admin appointed former Sen. George Mitchell its special envoy to the region tasked with bringing the conflict to a resolution, as he had in N. Ireland. Sen. Mitchell butted his head against brick walls for a while and then resigned. As long as the $3 billion per year remains untouchable, which it does because Congress sees to that, nothing the Obama administration says can in any way "undermine" Israel because everyone understands that the administration's words, unlike some words in international politics, are empty. No leverage will be brought to bear in connection with them. Since the Six Day War, Israel has been primus inter pares among U.S. allies. This has been true no matter who is in the White House and no matter what they have said about the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The word "undermining" in the statement quoted seems to mean "ineffectually disagreeing with certain aspects of Israeli government policy while tacitly communicating that such disagreement is indeed ineffectual because it will not be accompanied by any actions of consequence."

There are very good reasons for the U.S. to support Israel. Whether there are good reasons for the U.S. to support Israel in the particular way that it does is a legitimate subject of public debate (although if you try to debate it you will have all kinds of accusations leveled at you; viz. Walt and Mearsheimer). In any case, the charge that the Obama administration has an "ongoing campaign" to "undermine" Israel is, to put it mildly, groundless.

Wolff on Gingrich's dissertation

2011-12-03T00:34:00.000-05:00

Here.

Question for Stephen Walt: Who is a "genuine" realist?

2011-12-02T16:53:00.003-05:00

Stephen Walt, in a recent post at his blog, applauds (with some qualifications) Peter Beinart for endorsing offshore balancing as a U.S. strategy, but bemoans the fact that Beinart fails to mention the various scholars (e.g., Mearsheimer, Layne, Porter, Walt himself, etc.) who have been advocating offshore balancing for the last decade or more.

Walt is upset by Beinart's omission because he claims it contributes to the continuing "marginalization" of realists in U.S. foreign policy debates. Walt seems to think that realists represent a distinctive position in those debates, being less inclined to "hubristic" interventionism than necons on the one hand and liberal internationalists on the other. Walt says that there are no "genuine" realists writing for any major media outlet in the United States. I guess he must not consider Kissinger, who writes (or least use to write) quite regular op-eds in the Wash. Post, a "genuine" realist.

Walt would better off, IMHO, if he advocated his preferred policies -- with many of which I'm largely in agreement -- without trying to appropriate the label "realism" exclusively for himself and those with whom he agrees. This muddies the waters without clarifying much and also distorts the disciplinary history of International Relations, a fairly cursory glance at which makes clear that there is far more encompassed by "realism" than is dreamt of in Walt's philosophy. Realism has meant different things to different people in different contexts, and for Walt to effectively narrow its meaning to "people in the U.S. academy who agree with me about the merits of a particular grand strategy [i.e., offshore balancing] " is itself arguably somewhat hubristic. Notice how he sneaks in the adjective "genuine" to qualify "realist". Presumably a genuine realist is someone who agrees with Walt and a false realist is someone who doesn't.

The maxims and phrases typically associated with realism, and especially its emphasis on the national interest, are so vague that they can accommodate a range of policy views. George Kennan, Walter Lippmann, Dean Acheson, Reinhold Neibuhr, and Hans Morgenthau were all realists, and as Joel Rosenthal has argued (Righteous Realists, 1991) they might have shared certain assumptions, e.g. that power brings with it responsibility (itself not the most specific of notions), but they certainly did not always agree on U.S. foreign policy. Walt's effort to associate realism with a particular set of policy prescriptions ignores that realism, like several other 'isms' one might mention, is too slippery and elusive a designation to be tied down in this way. I don't object to Walt's calling himself a realist ("a realist in an ideological age," as his blog's masthead proclaims). I object to his implication that he is a genuine realist and that others who might want to use the label, but who might disagree with him on some policy matter or other, are not genuine realists. This risks inviting fruitless discussions and detracting attention from the very policy prescriptions Walt wants to advance.

P.s. To further illustrate my point about the protean character of realism, consider this description, from a publisher's recent catalog, of The Realist Case for Global Reform, by William Scheuerman (whose book on Morgenthau, by the way, I think is very good). According to the Polity Books catalog description, Scheuerman reveals "a neglected tradition of Progressive Realism" and "concludes by considering how Progressive Realism informs the foreign policies of US President Barack Obama." So the President who one scholar (Walt) considers too influenced by liberal internationalism, another scholar (Scheuerman) sees as influenced by a version of realism! I rest my case (for now, at least).

Why is the U.S. Senate (and one Senator in particular) so dismissive of the rights of terrorism suspects?

2011-11-30T17:30:00.005-05:00

Update: The original post has been changed to correct an error (or two).

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

Oops.

I meant: a long time ago, i.e. before 9/11, one could assume that an ideologically middle-of-the-roadish Democratic Senator would support the notion that those suspected of crimes, even of terrorist activity, had certain rights, including the right not to be detained indefinitely without trial.

No longer. The Senate yesterday kept in the defense authorization bill provisions on detention that Pres. Obama has threatened to veto. According to this NYT article:

The most disputed provision would require the government to place into military custody any suspected member of Al Qaeda or one of its allies connected to a plot against the United States or its allies. The provision would exempt American citizens, but would otherwise extend to arrests on United States soil. The executive branch could issue a waiver and keep such a prisoner in the civilian system.
A related provision would create a federal statute saying the government has the legal authority to keep people suspected of terrorism in military custody, indefinitely and without trial. It contains no exception for American citizens. It is intended to bolster the authorization to use military force against the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which lawmakers enacted a decade ago.

Among the supporters of these provisions is Sen. Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. According to an Agence-France Presse article which I saw at Raw Story (and which I'm not linking to because my browser is having trouble with it), Levin denied the provisions would harm civil liberties (!) and (the NYT story also has this) cited a Supreme Court ruling that a so-called enemy combatant, even if a U.S. citizen, may be held indefinitely without trial (this must be Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, but that case also said the detainee had to have the right to challenge his designation as an unlawful combatant).

Interestingly, the Pentagon itself is opposed to these provisions, according to the AFP piece, and the NYT says even some former Bush admin counterterrorism officials oppose them. Why is Levin supporting them? Why did he agree to their being part of the defense authorization package? He's not up for re-election until 2014, so immediate political considerations would not seem to be the answer. Has he always been this bad on these issues?

Last week's Repub foreign policy debate: links to others' commentaries

2011-11-28T09:09:00.001-05:00

Here and here.

How not to think about the obsolescence (or non-obsolescence) of "industrial" war

2011-11-25T14:49:00.006-05:00

Scott Wolford argues, in effect, that we aren't seeing traditional interstate wars because big "industrial" armies are "cancelling each other out," not because interstate war is obsolete. (H/t Phil Arena, here, for directing my attention to this post.)

(Update: Scott Wolford writes in the comments to this post that I have misconstrued his point. I may well have. One of the hazards of blogging.)

This ignores several things. First, states are simply less interested now than they used to be in territorial conquest, which is what big armies have traditionally been used for. Look at the figures: Between 1945 and 1996, the percentage of armed conflicts in which territory was redistributed -- i.e. conquered -- was 23 percent; by contrast, between 1648 (I don't like to use this over-emphasized date btw, but anyway) and 1945, the percentage was in the range of 80 percent. This strongly suggests, although it admittedly doesn't definitively prove, that post-1945 armed conflicts have mostly been about matters other than traditional territorial acquisition. (Source: M. Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention, p.126, citing Robert Jackson & Mark Zacher, "The Territorial Covenant," Univ. of Br. Columbia Inst. of IR, working paper no.5, 1997; see also Zacher's Int'l. Org. article on the territorial integrity norm.) For the period since 1996, I believe the figures would be even lower though I don't have them to hand.

Second, Wolford's post ignores the argument that (at least some) states have progressively internalized norms against permanent territorial acquisition and conquest, and that great-power war has become progressively unthinkable as a live policy option for leaders -- so much so that Mueller (Retreat from Doomsday) argues it doesn't even appear in their minds ("subrationally unthinkable").

Third, Wolford's point that big wars aren't obsolete because you have to consider what would occur in the absence of "industrial" armies is a bit weird. It's weird because there's no proof that if A and B are having a territorial dispute, A would take the disputed territory by force if B didn't have a big industrial army. I'm not sure it's even likely. But to make his point convincingly Wolford would have to cite an instance or two where this has actually happened in fairly recent years (and surely it's possible to find cases of territorial disputes between very unequally armed adversaries), not just speculate about what might happen.

P.s. Off the top of my head, possible examples supporting Wolford's view are the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (except that Saddam was hardly a typical leader) and maybe the Russia-Georgia war of '08. I don't find either too convincing. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in '03, although a very bad idea, is not directly relevant here because its major aim was forcible regime change not territorial acquisition.

Pepper spray and Seurat: a Pointillist Event (Pointillist or pointless?)

2011-11-23T18:46:00.002-05:00

Pablo K at The Disorder of Things has a long post on "body politics" which reproduces, toward the end, several "meme-ifications" of the "pepper spray policeman" -- in Guernica, in Tienanmen Square, in Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and so forth.

(Click here for the Seurat image.)

What is the point of this particular juxtaposition? The linked post refers to it and similar images as "jovial and sardonic in the face of callousness, but also now repeated for their own sake." I think the post and comments are worth reading, though written in a style not everyone will take to. The author asks parenthetically in comments: "Does someone want to theorise this in terms of the Event?" Thanks, but I think I'll pass on that. For now, at any rate.

Is Walt right about China?

2011-11-23T12:35:00.003-05:00

Short answer: I don't think so. (Hat tip here for drawing my attention to Walt's post.)

Elaboration: Walt says that if China were to establish a secure sphere of influence in its region, that would free up China to devote more attention to the stirring up of trouble in the western hemisphere. It could forge closer ties with countries in the U.S. backyard and ratchet up tensions. Remember the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Etc. I'm not convinced by this notion that the U.S. must prevent any other great power from achieving a regional sphere of influence. (Walt reaches back for authority to Kennan's American Diplomacy but a more recent statement of this view is in Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.)

In my view, this is the most misleading paragraph in Walt's post:

... this logic reflects the realist view that it is to U.S. advantage to keep Eurasia divided among many separate powers, and to help prevent any single power from establishing the same sort of regional hegemony that the United States has long enjoyed in the Western hemisphere. That is why the United States eventually entered World War I (to prevent a German victory), and it is why Roosevelt began preparing the nation for war in the late 1930s and entered with enthusiasm after Pearl Harbor. In each case, powerful countries were threatening to establish regional hegemony in a key area, and so the United States joined with others to prevent this.

The problem with this analysis is that Nazi Germany and imperial Japan were not just seeking "to establish regional hegemony in a key area"; they were expanding by military aggression and conquering and occupying other sovereign states. Nazi domination of Europe was unacceptable not only on strategic but also on moral grounds. Until someone comes up with a more detailed, convincing scenario about how a Chinese sphere of influence or regional hegemony threatens the U.S., I will remain skeptical.

However, I will concede this much to Walt's view: intentions are difficult to read precisely and there is a case for hedging bets by maintaining U.S. alliances with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and other countries in the region. But does the U.S. need to send Marines to northern Australia? Does it need to sell advanced F-16 jets to Indonesia? For that matter, does it need as many as 28,500 soldiers in South Korea?

Views that emphasize a "contest" between the U.S. and China (see e.g. W.R. Mead's recent post) can be self-fulfilling prophecies, as Walt himself acknowledges in passing. In the lingo of contemporary bureaucratic diplomat-ese, this is unhelpful.

Clichés 101: "a tense time in the region"

2011-11-21T22:16:00.001-05:00

The opening graph of an AP story in WaPo headlined "Hezbollah unravels CIA spy network in Lebanon as agency contains damage":

Hezbollah has partially unraveled the CIA’s spy network in Lebanon, severely damaging the intelligence agency’s ability to gather vital information on the terrorist organization at a tense time in the region, former and current U.S. officials said.

Two questions:
(1) When is it not "a tense time" in that region?
(2) What "vital information"? Well, of course we don't know because the article's sources, "former and current U.S. officials," no doubt wouldn't say. The result is an article about a putative intelligence disaster that never really explains why it's a disaster -- except insofar as some people working with the CIA may have gotten killed. But the article doesn't even confirm that since, as someone quoted toward the end mentions, Hezbollah treats different captured spies differently: some it "disappears," some it apparently doesn't.

Why has the Obama admin avoided major scandals (so far)?

2011-11-20T23:11:00.003-05:00

A piece by Jonathan Alter in The Washington Monthly, deploying political science as well as the author's own experience and insights to speculate on the reasons why the Obama administration has been largely free of scandal. Also included is a quick tour of scandals of past administrations (remember Anne Burford? I didn't think so). One scandal that, on a fast reading of the piece, I didn't see mentioned is the substandard-facilities-at-Walter-Reed story -- but I'm pretty sure that broke under G.W. Bush not Obama, so it doesn't undercut the premise.

P.s. Of course there are those on both left and right who consider some administration policies to be criminal (e.g., use of drones, targeted assassinations) or unconstitutional (or what have you), but that's not what this is about.

Quotes of the weekend

2011-11-19T20:17:00.001-05:00

(1) From Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (via):

"Well, I was there. They wasn't no agitators. What they call reds. What the hell is these reds anyways?"

Timothy scraped a little hill level in the bottom of the ditch. The sun made his white bristle beard shine. "They's a lot a fellas wanta know what reds is." He laughed. "One of our boys foun' out." He patted the piled earth gently with his shovel. "Fella named Hines - got 'bout thirty thousan' acres, peaches and grapes - got a cannery an' a winery. Well, he's all a time talkin' about 'them goddamn reds.' 'Goddamn reds is drivin' the country to ruin,' he says, an 'We got to drive these here red bastards out.' Well, they were a young fella jus' come out west here, an' he's listenin' one day. He kinda scratched his head an' he says, 'Mr. Hines, I ain't been here long. What is these goddamn reds?' Well, sir, Hines says, 'A red is any son-of-a-bitch that wants thirty cents an hour when we're payin' twenty-five!' Well, this young fella he thinks about her, an' he scratches his head, an' he says, 'Well, Jesus, Mr. Hines. I ain't a son-of-a-bitch, but if that's what a red is - why, I want thirty cents an hour. Ever'body does. Hell, Mr. Hines, we're all reds.'" Timothy drove his shovel along the ditch bottom, and the solid earth shone where the shovel cut it.

Tom laughed. "Me too, I guess."

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(2) From the beginning of another post at the same blog:

My brother-in-law graduated from Freeport High School in Freeport, Illinois, and my favorite part about this rather mundane fact is that the school's mascot is the Pretzel. The Freeport Pretzels. At sporting events the students liked to chant "You can eat us but you'll never beat us."

Competitive authoritarianism and oligarchical democracy

2011-11-18T08:12:00.001-05:00

Political scientists love classifications, of course. This is the opening paragraph of Michael Bernhard's review of Jonathan Steinberg's Bismarck (in the current Foreign Affairs):

Over the last two decades, a distinctive regime type has emerged across the developing world, one that scholars have come to call competitive authoritarianism. This sort of political system allows for the contestation of power among different social groups, but with so many violations of electoral fairness and so little regard for liberal norms that it cannot be called a true democracy. From Russia to Peru, Cambodia to Cameroon, such regimes are now located in almost every region of the world, and how they develop will determine the shape of the twenty-first century.

Maybe it's time to recognize yet another new regime type: oligarchical democracy. Exemplar: the current United States. Features: Severe inequalities of wealth and income; grossly disproportionate power in the political process exercised by the wealthiest; polarized parties masking a fairly narrow range of "respectable" policy debate; money enshrined as constitutionally protected speech. Etcetera.

"Oligarchical democracy" sounds contradictory and no doubt goes against Plato's and Aristotle's classifications of regimes (and many subsequent classifications). Well, tough s**t.

Bizarre remark of the day

2011-11-17T18:32:00.000-05:00

From a comment in a CT thread:
"Whatever OWS is, it is not a Leninist Vanguard Party such as dominated both the Old and New Left movements in the US."

Excuse me? What was the "Leninist vanguard party" that "dominated" the New Left in the U.S.?

Chinese "aggression"?

2011-11-16T18:38:00.001-05:00

English is a funny language. You can be a competent native speaker and still not grasp anywhere near all the nuances.

Item: I just heard a brief three-minute top-of-the-hour NPR news broadcast. The announcer said that the new U.S. 'security arrangement' with Australia is widely seen as a response to "growing Chinese aggression." My inner antenna switched on: What Chinese aggression? Nothing China has done recently (or not so recently, for that matter) amounts to aggression as I use the word -- that was my reaction.

Then I went to my dictionary. (Dictionaries are not deities, of course, but they're better than nothing.) The first definition of "aggression": "an unprovoked attack or warlike act; specif., the use of armed force by a state in violation of its international obligations" -- yes, that was the sense of the word I had in mind. There is also a second definition: "the practice or habit of being aggressive or quarrelsome" -- that's somewhat looser or broader. Then I went down to the adjective "aggressive"; one of the definitions is: "full of enterprise and initiative; bold and active; pushing." Then there is a little further section which draws fine distinctions among aggressive, militant, assertive, and pushing.

Bottom line? Where I might have said "growing Chinese assertiveness," the NPR guy said "growing Chinese aggression." Is that wrong? Strictly speaking, perhaps not. But I think it's misleading, since "aggression" triggers in most hearers the first sense of the word (unprovoked attack, etc.).

As is well known, China is a rising power in terms of economic and demographic weight (though it also has many problems, which I won't go into here). Rising powers tend to be somewhat "assertive". It's par for the course. That doesn't mean China is going to start a war. Its military is still well behind technologically. Chinese leaders have shown no evidence of exceptional bellicosity. Yes, there are a few possible flash points, but it's nothing to get one's knickers all in a bunch about. Scholars who study Chinese foreign policy closely, like Taylor Fravel of MIT, have shown that China's stance on territorial disputes has been one of compromise more often than not.
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Btw, I think having U.S. Marines in northern Australia is not an especially good idea.

Keep him far away from us

2011-11-14T13:39:00.002-05:00

Hard to find the right words to describe Rick Perry. In the interview linked in the previous post, Joshua Cohen says Perry wants to "roll back the twentieth century" in terms of domestic policy. That may be, if anything, too charitable. Kate Weaver at Duck of Minerva mentions Perry remarking in a recent debate that the U.S. ought to "zero out foreign aid." A commenter says this remark occurred in a discussion of Pakistan, so maybe all Perry meant is that the U.S. should cut aid to Pakistan. This raises the question: Does Perry himself know what he means? Maybe he's just flailing around -- abolish this, cut that, zero out the other -- in what one hopes is the soon-to-be-end-game of a losing candidacy. Texas apparently likes him, and one hopes that Texas will keep him... far away from the rest of us.

(Apologies to the author of that line from Fiddler on the Roof: "God bless and keep the Czar -- far away from us.")

Joshua Cohen interview on Rawls and OWS

2011-11-12T00:56:00.001-05:00

Here (audio).

(via Occupy the Airwaves)

Packer on the broken U.S. social contract

2011-11-10T12:06:00.003-05:00

In the current issue of Foreign Affairs (here); looks like one has to register to get the whole thing.

Excerpts:

...in or around 1978, American life changed.... It was, like this moment, a time of widespread pessimism -- high inflation, high unemployment, high gas prices. And the country reacted to its sense of decline by moving away from the social arrangement that had been in place since the 1930s and 1940s....

This is a story about the perverse effects of democratization.... Once Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and Walter Wriston of Citicorp stopped sitting together on Commissions to Make the World a Better Place and started paying lobbyists to fight for their separate interests in Congress, the balance of power tilted heavily toward business.

Of course the move to neoliberalism occurred across much of the world, not just in the U.S., but the consequences in terms of inequality were worse here.

Update: See also Zakaria in today's WaPo on social mobility in U.S. compared to Europe. (Link to be added later)

Housekeeping note

2011-11-10T11:35:00.000-05:00

With apologies to those who were listed, I've deleted the 'followers' feature because, in non-technical language, it was screwing things up.

Guest commentary by HC: Obama 'gave' too early on the deficit

2011-11-07T17:22:00.001-05:00

Re the Dem-Rep deadlock over deficit reduction and Obama’s strategy: his grand-bargain offer to cut entitlements (compromising a basic Dem principle, and indeed embracing a Rep one), if only the Reps would raise taxes (compromising their basic principle), was a bad mistake for at least two reasons.

First, it relied on a strategy of public shaming ("look, we are being flexible, now it is your turn") that does not work with stubborn and proud people, indeed only makes them more so.

But more important, once the offer to cut entitlements was out there, the public soon forgot that it was a great sacrifice by the Dems. The result was an asymmetry in perception whereby it was only the Reps who ever had a clear and principled position, so why should they abandon it? Plus their position is three words ("no new taxes" or "starve the beast") while the Dem position involves more and longer words.

If Obama had hung just as tough as the Reps, at least in public, the stage would now be set for a private deal in which each party could save face with its constituents by saying it was only giving something because the other was. But since the Dems "gave" too early, and too publicly, the Reps will just look weak if they give now. And the reason Obama gave too early, as we know from inside accounts, was that he was unwilling to take things to the brink. Bad way to negotiate with someone intractable. If he had never offered anything but a populist line about changing an unfair tax structure that benefits the rich and corporations at the expense of working people and the safety net and stimulus, he would be in a much better bargaining position. Instead, he has come to that message too late, and it is now muddied by his standing offer to cut social programs, so instead of looking bold (which his offer actually was, but only a great rhetorician, not Obama, could have sold it as such), he has both emboldened the Reps and alienated his base.

(Underlying dynamic: libertarianism is historically stronger than populism in the USA, or at least so Obama believes, and believing is what counts.)

So no matter how many experts and reasonable Reps point out that Boehner and company are holding the country hostage, the latter have no reason to compromise. Instead they can just hang tough and look strong while Obama looks weak and unprincipled (which is always the fate of the premature compromiser). And everyone knows that a "weak" president is to blame for everything.

Obama looks so weak at this point that if the Reps do give in at the last minute, they might look like heroes in comparison. But even that will not tempt them, because they are looking strong now and the economy is going to hell "under Obama" so why fix it if it ain’t broke?

-- HC

Pakistan reacts to charges about the security of its nukes

2011-11-07T12:56:00.000-05:00

Via WaPo's Karen Brulliard:

...a story in this week’s Atlantic magazine...cast strong doubt on the security of [Pakistan's nuclear] weapons. According to the article, Pakistan moves its nukes in unmarked trucks on public roads – the same used by militant groups that have attacked military bases – while a worried United States hones plans to secure them in the event of a terrorist takeover.
In a statement on Sunday, Pakistan’s foreign ministry slammed the article, dismissing it [as] “pure fiction, baseless” and “part of a deliberate propaganda campaign meant to mislead opinion.”

Diamonds are forever; or, Institutional arrogance, 1970s edition

2011-11-05T23:48:00.015-04:00

[title revised on 11/7]

A Crooked Timber thread about a recent student walk-out from Harvard's intro economics course (Ec 10), currently taught by Gregory Mankiw, elicited comments from a number of people who had taken the course in the past, sometimes the quite distant past. I was one of those commenting, having taken Ec 10 sometime in the mid-1970s (no need to get too specific for these purposes).

Late in the CT thread, one commenter suggested that having so many students in one course, albeit with numerous TA-led sections, was evidence of institutional arrogance. My response, which I'm posting here rather than at CT: if you think Harvard officialdom is arrogant today, you should have been there in the late 60s -- which I did not experience but have read a bit about -- or a decade later in the 70s.

Emblematic of the latter period for me, and no doubt for others, is a statement by the then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Henry Rosovsky. I remember this statement one way; I just discovered that Google (or, more precisely, an article I found via Google) remembers it slightly differently. Thus I'm going to give it in two versions. As I recall it, Rosovsky, probably responding to a question from a probably disgruntled student, intoned: "You are here for four years, I am here for life, and the institution is here forever."

Typing "you are here for four years..." into Google produces, among other things, a Feb. 28, 2005 NYT piece by Adam Cohen about the controversy then raging over Lawrence Summers's remarks about women in science. Here is how the piece opens:

"You are here for four years," Henry Rosovsky, who long served as Harvard's dean of faculty, once told a group of students. "The faculty is here for life. And the institution is here forever." The quote became part of Harvard lore: a campus film society promoted a James Bond movie with the slogan, "You are here for four years; Dean Rosovsky is here for life; and Diamonds Are Forever." But it also came to embody, for my generation of students and alumni, Harvard's imperious view of its place in the world.

It hardly matters whether my version or Cohen's version of the Rosovsky quote is correct. The point is that one would be rather unlikely to find a university administrator making a comparably patronizing, dismissive statement today, not because administrators necessarily have become more benign and enlightened but for reasons of survival in a changed climate in which, among other things, student opinion probably matters more than it used to. Btw, if you read down to the end of Cohen's piece you'll see that he managed to riff neatly on the statement in his last paragraph.

Will gets something right

2011-11-05T17:05:00.000-04:00

It's fairly unusual for me to agree with George Will, but this column rightly insists that the Republican presidential candidates should spell out how many American soldiers they would keep in Iraq and for how long. He also expresses proper skepticism about some current U.S. troop deployments, such as the 54,000 soldiers the U.S. has in Germany. What purpose are they serving?

Gaddis's Kennan bio due out next week

2011-11-02T11:58:00.002-04:00

Following a tip from a friend, I see that J.L. Gaddis's biography of Kennan is scheduled to be published by Penguin on Nov. 10. Long in preparation, this should be the definitive biography.
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Note to readers: I have a long post in the works and I hope it will be up sometime in the next two or three weeks.

France votes 'yes' on UNESCO seat for Palestine

2011-10-31T20:11:00.002-04:00

Glancing through this AP story on the vote giving the Palestinian Authority full membership in UNESCO, what really jumped out at me was that France voted in favor. The article calls this a surprise. I suppose on some level it was, but France, no matter what party holds its presidency, has long prided itself on having an independent foreign policy. Sarkozy brought France back into NATO's integrated command a few years ago (and France took a lead role in the recent Libya campaign); however, this vote is a signal, if any were needed, that the Sarkozy government will follow its own course on certain issues. The U.S. reaction, predictably, was to call the PA's admission to UNESCO membership "regrettable" and "premature" and to cut off its funding to UNESCO, which a law requires it to do in these circumstances, apparently. Sigh.

Kabul bombing is further evidence of changing Taliban tactics

2011-10-29T17:39:00.000-04:00

Here.

The Keystone XL pipeline

2011-10-27T11:53:00.002-04:00

I haven't been following the details of the controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline, but I'm aware that it's aroused some passionate opposition. A demonstration is planned for Nov. 6 in front of the White House. For those interested, the Tar Sands Action site is here.

In case you missed this...

2011-10-25T12:11:00.004-04:00

Anwar al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, a U.S. citizen, was killed in a recent drone strike in Yemen that also killed the media chief of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). (H/t V. Yadav) This will raise further questions about drones and whether their increasing use accords with accepted principles of the law of armed conflict.

Related (added 10/27): Drone strikes in the Pakistan border regions earlier this month killed several al-Qaeda figures and a "top deputy" in the Haqqani network, according to this piece.

Break briefly interrupted

2011-10-21T21:57:00.001-04:00

Commenting on Gaddafi's demise etc., David Brooks on the NewsHour tonight said Obama deserved credit for U.S. policy vis-a-vis Libya -- a judgment with which I basically agree, though I think there could and should have been more consultation of Congress. (This is the same Brooks, btw, who wrote last January that Obama was Nero fiddling while Rome burns [I'd probably write that post a little differently if I were writing it today, but never mind]).

Then Brooks went on to say that he thought foreign policy might have an impact on the 2012 election; it won't all be the economy, he said. But this really depends to a substantial extent on what happens to be leading the news cycle a year from now, which is of course impossible to predict.

Another break

2011-10-15T09:00:00.000-04:00

I have some other things to catch up on, so will be taking a break from posting. At least a couple of longer, meatier posts will be on the agenda when I return.

Theorists and others have at OWS

2011-10-13T14:28:00.004-04:00

In a column at the Foreign Affairs site (h/t The Monkey Cage), Sidney Tarrow compares Occupy Wall St. to the women's movement of the '70s, calling it a "we are here" movement whose aim is to dramatize that something is wrong in the "system of economic relations" rather than specifically to "target" capitalism. (Not sure if this is a convincing distinction.) Tarrow is a leading theorist and scholar of "social movements and contentious politics" (to quote the subtitle of one of his books) but I can't say this particular analysis bowled me over.

Btw at the same site you can find a piece by Hardt and Negri, which I haven't read. And then, if masochistic, you can go to Wash. Post and read George Will's silly column on OWS today, which I raced through and figuratively consigned to the dustbin. (Maybe even the dustbin of history.)

Update: Via here: Mayor Bloomberg is apparently planning to clear Zuccotti Park tomorrow at 7 a.m. There is a petition (see the link) that can be signed, though I doubt it will prevent Bloomberg from doing whatever he's planning to do.
Further update: The 'clean-up' has been postponed.

Political opening in Burma

2011-10-11T20:37:00.000-04:00

See here and here.

"Sign...said private property"

2011-10-11T08:00:00.003-04:00

This comment in a CT thread, with its reference to Pete Seeger, reminded me that he had sung "This Land is Your Land" (along with his grandson and Bruce Springsteen) at the Obama inaugural concert in Jan. '09 and had included a verse with a political edge that is sometimes omitted -- but I couldn't quite remember the verse.

Wikipedia to the rescue:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;

Sign was painted, it said private property;

But on the back side it didn't say nothing;

This land was made for you and me.

I recall that the historian Michael Kazin, in a Wash. Post piece not too long after the inaugural concert, noted approvingly the inclusion of this verse. Some of those now in the 'occupy Wall Street' protests might wish that the verse's general spirit had exercised more of an influence on certain administration policies, though I understand their main complaints are directed elsewhere (properly, in my view).

Don't write off 'people power' in ME just yet

2011-10-10T09:53:00.000-04:00

Looking at events in Syria and Yemen, Jackson Diehl asserts that "people power [in the Middle East] isn't working." The judgment seems premature and much of the rest of the column rather weird. Of course, this is the same columnist who said that the PA's bid for statehood at the UN was tantamount to a declaration of war against Israel.

What happened to the Palestinian statehood thing, btw? The General Assembly's September session is long over (isn't it?) so something should have been voted on in the way of enhanced observer status. If it was reported on, however, I missed it. Haven't been following the right sites, evidently. (A blogger confessing ignorance -- my my, what is the world coming to?)

Worth reading

2011-10-09T01:19:00.000-04:00

One human angle on the Afghan war: here.

James Rosenau (in memoriam notice)

2011-10-08T22:24:00.004-04:00

Since Duck of Minerva doesn't seem to have picked this up, I figured I'd link to it: here.

Rosenau was a prolific IR scholar who had a long career, ranging from foreign policy analysis (early on) to, later, big-picture theory focusing on the roles of non-state actors and individuals in a globalized world. His later work uses concrete examples, often culled from journalistic sources, to illustrate broad concepts (sometimes designated with neologisms, e.g. fragmegration). Several of his books are on my shelves: Turbulence in World Politics (1990); Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier (1997); and the 1969 volume he edited with Klaus Knorr, Contending Approaches to International Politics, behind whose bland title lie the key pieces in what is sometimes referred to as the 'second great debate'. [added later]: I also recall an article of his from the '80s on 'habit-driven' actors. [added still later]: I also have Czempiel & Rosenau, eds., Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges (Lexington Books, 1989).
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P.s. Another recent passing, completely unrelated: here (via A. Rudalevige at The Monkey Cage).

Romney's vacuous foreign policy

2011-10-07T20:23:00.003-04:00

Mitt Romney's interview with Judy Woodruff on the NewsHour tonight revealed someone who hasn't thought much about foreign policy and is content to repeat platitudes and, worse, nonsense. The U.S. shouldn't let any country 'balance' against it, he said. This is a dumb statement for a bunch of reasons, one being that the statement raises a non-existent problem because there hasn't been much (or any) traditional 'hard' balancing against the U.S. He said he would "listen" to the generals. What President wouldn't? He said the defense budget should consume roughly 20 percent of the federal budget or roughly 4 percent of GDP. Regardless of what's happening in the world? After the wind-down of the Afghanistan and Iraq involvements it is hard to see why this level of defense spending would be required; but in any event, defense spending should respond to conditions, not be set at an arbitrary figure. He said the U.S. should never "publicly" disagree with its allies, specifically Israel. Why not? He said Israel had never found itself in a more "fragile" setting than it does now. Come on. And then there was the usual stuff about the U.S.'s unique and special responsibility to ensure peace and prosperity in the world, blah blah. There are interesting foreign policy questions involving immigration, trade, economic relations e.g. with China (see under currency wars), U.S. policy in Latin America, attitudes toward the new regimes in the Arab world, and none of this came up in the interview. Instead he painted an outdated, vacuous picture of a "threatened" U.S. that must continue to spend huge sums on defense for no compelling reason. No wonder no one is excited about his candidacy.
Update: A dissection of his speech at The Citadel, here.

The noise of a sick society

2011-10-07T12:35:00.003-04:00

A few months ago some idiot in the corporate hierarchy at 7-Eleven decided that the chain of convenience stores needed to be equipped with large ceiling-mounted TVs. These TVs emit what is best described as irritating noise. They are not effective advertising tools. They do not enhance the customer "experience." They make it worse.

It is impossible to walk into most public spaces in the U.S. and not be met with programmed noise. I once spent an hour in Logan Airport waiting for a flight. I wanted to read but I couldn't because there was a TV on the wall telling me over and over what a great place Boston is. I wanted to rip the damn thing out and stomp on it while screaming: "Boston would be a much nicer place if you would shut the **** up." Many (not all) restaurants have noise coming out of the ceilings. Grocery stores have muzak interrupted by annoying ads and supposedly helpful announcements about how to pick out ripe pears, how to eat more healthily, and heaven knows what else. It shouldn't be necessary to buy a smart phone and an earpiece to block this out. It shouldn't exist in the first place.

When the Occupy Wall Street movement gets around to formulating a list of demands, one that should be on it is: End commercial noise in public places and business establishments. I for one am ******* tired of it.

P.s. Of course there are far more important issues but there are plenty of other people writing about them.

Book notes

2011-10-06T16:10:00.001-04:00

I heard Timothy Snyder give a talk on his book Bloodlands in New York this past weekend. The lecture was so good that I almost feel I don't have to read the book. That would be fine, in a way, because I've got a list of books I'd like to get to (or, in one case, finish).

What's on my list? Among others:

* Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. I'm about halfway through this elegantly written collection of short stories set in Pakistan.

* Geoffrey Dyer, Otherwise Known As The Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews. I've taken this out from the library but so far have only read bits of it. The pieces collected here are mostly short. Those at the end are autobiographical, including one in which Dyer remarks on his decision to avoid specialization and "the supreme pointlessness of a Ph.D." (Nice phrase, whether one agrees or not.)

* Francis Wheen, Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography. Brief (unlike its subject).

* Michael Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present.

* Geoffrey Parker, Success Is Never Final: Empire, War, and Faith in Early Modern Europe. Especially the piece "The Etiquette of Atrocity: The Laws of War in Early Modern Europe."

* Daniel Sherman, French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945-1975. To be published this month (Univ. of Chicago Press).

* Joshua Goldstein, Winning the War on War. Mentioned earlier; now bought (via Powells).

Will I get to all these? We'll see. What's on your list? (Feel free to say in comments. Note: Ads from publishers or self-publishers may be deleted at my discretion.)

P.s. The authors mentioned above are all male. That is a coincidence, not discrimination (just in case anyone was wondering).

The decline of war (Part II)

2011-10-05T11:17:00.006-04:00

In my previous post on this subject, I promised to follow up with some observations on the relation between global politics and global economics over the past couple of decades. For various reasons this has proved beyond me at the moment, so I'll confine this post to noting the case of one writer who acknowledged the decline of violent conflict but refused to accord it the significance it would seem to warrant. The case to be mentioned is probably not unique but rather is an indication of how hard it is for some analysts to discard assumptions about the permanence of conflict that have been central to discourse on international politics for centuries. Longevity does not equal validity, however, and the fact that these assumptions have been repeated endlessly does not make them correct.

Writing in 2007 about the shape of what he termed the post-American world, Fareed Zakaria observed that "war and organized violence have declined dramatically over the last two decades." [1] There has been, he wrote, "a broad trend away from wars among major countries, the kind of conflict that produces massive casualties." [2] However, in the very next breath Zakaria felt constrained to point out that "numbers [of casualties] are not the only measure of evil," [3] which is true but not particularly relevant. "I don't believe," he declared, "that war has become obsolete or any such foolishness. Human nature remains what it is and international politics what it is." [4]

"Human nature remains what it is and international politics what it is." This statement has basically no analytical content. It is an expression of faith, the same faith to which Robert Gilpin pledged allegiance when he wrote: "One must suspect that if somehow Thucydides were placed in our midst, he would (following an appropriate short course in geography, economics, and modern technology) have little trouble in understanding the power struggle of our age." [5] (Gilpin wrote this 30 years ago but plenty of people, including perhaps Gilpin himself, would write the same thing today.)

Would Thucydides, stepping out of a time machine, not bat an eye at a world in which there has been no great-power war for more than half a century (and in which no great-power war is looming on the horizon)? I'll let readers supply their own answers to that question.
--------
Notes
1. Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (W.W. Norton), p. 8. The book was published in 2008, meaning that it was written in 2007.
2. Ibid., p. 9.
3. Ibid., p. 10.
4. Ibid., pp. 9-10.
5. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge U.P., 1981), p. 211.

Hazaras in Baluchistan targeted again

2011-10-04T09:37:00.002-04:00

Unlike, for example, Iraq, where Shiites are in the majority and Saddam Hussein's Sunni regime represented the empowerment of a minority group, in Pakistan the vast majority of the population is Sunni. Nonetheless, certain militant Sunni groups remain bent on trying to rid Pakistan of all Shiites. Or so one might conclude from the recent attacks in Baluchistan on Shiites belonging to the Hazara tribe. See here.

Collective insanity, Republican version

2011-09-26T21:51:00.003-04:00

I have been spared the full experience of the recent debates among the Republican presidential candidates. Which is to say, I've heard merely snippets and excerpts, read commentaries rather than the transcripts. That's enough. The real star of these debates, as others have observed, is apparently not any one of the candidates; rather, it is the audiences. Whether cheering for capital punishment or booing a gay soldier, the crowd has upstaged the candidates. (Where is Canetti when we need him?)

Reflecting on the other candidates rounding on Rick Perry for his exceedingly few humane actions, Richard Cohen asks: "My God, what has happened to American conservatism?" Was it always this crazy? That depends on one's definitions. There has long been an uncompromising strain of American conservatism but it usually managed to clothe itself in at least a few shreds of rationality (McCarthyism and the John Birch Society excepted). That's rapidly vanishing, if it isn't already gone.

The recent passing from the scene of Mark Hatfield and Charles Percy is a reminder that there used to be Republican senators who could be called moderates -- even, on certain issues, liberals. That's definitely gone. The Republican party of 2011, at least as manifested in its primary contest, appears to be a version of collective insanity. John Holbo's theory that conservatives are really "operational" liberals in that they don't accept the implications of their slogans appears to be an analytical philosopher's attempt to convince himself that crazy is not crazy and, as such, is both less than persuasive and not very consoling. But holding to such a fiction may be required if one wants to get through this U.S. campaign season in one mental piece, or in something that at least approximates that condition. Good luck.

How can they know that?

2011-09-26T12:18:00.007-04:00

As I've had occasion to mention before, I'm on the e-mail list of the ONE campaign.

The following message from ONE arrived in my in-box today:

Dear ___,

Budget battles are never easy - except when there's a clear choice to save lives.

Right now, the House is proposing 18% cuts to global agriculture and economic development programs in next year’s budget. They’re proposing 9% cuts to global health programs.
And the Senate? No cuts at all - and in some cases even small increases.

It’s time to tell the House to think again.

…
It’s easy to just throw around numbers, but what would these House budget cuts really mean for the world’s poorest people? Nearly 50,000 children will not receive treatment for malaria. 900,000 children won’t receive nutrition interventions. 1.1 million children won’t be immunized. 1.9 million people won’t be able to escape extreme poverty.

We’ve got to let Congress know that the Senate bill is the only way to go. So today, we’re joining with our partners - Bread for the World, CARE, Oxfam, RESULTS, Save the Children - and making as many phone calls as we can to Capitol Hill.

I agree with ONE on the legislative issue here, but the sentence "1.9 million people won't be able to escape extreme poverty" is odd. You don't have to know a whole lot about development programs to know that it's extremely difficult to estimate, even to this kind of rounded figure, how many people will or won't escape extreme poverty as a result of a particular level of funding for certain programs. ONE's cause, which I support, is not well served by this.

The U.S., Iraq, and 'chronic misperception'

2011-09-25T14:34:00.000-04:00

A piece by Duelfer and Dyson in the summer issue of Int'l Security. I've only read the abstract, which is here.

Walzer, Mill, Libya, and the value of state boundaries

2011-09-24T12:10:00.005-04:00

In a blog post written last March (which I linked at the time but did not comment on at any length), Michael Walzer rehearsed J.S. Mill's argument about non-intervention, an argument Walzer had also summarized in his Just and Unjust Wars (Basic Books, 1977), pp. 87-91. With the debate about the Libyan intervention, sovereignty, and R2P continuing to simmer (in the IR blogosphere and elsewhere), and with Gaddafi still at large and one or two cities in Libya still resisting the rebels (or revolutionaries, or anti-Gaddafi forces, whichever label you like), it may be worth going back to Walzer's post. The question whether the U.S. and/or NATO should intervene in Libya is now of course moot, but the broader issues will likely recur (and have already recurred in a way in the case, e.g., of Syria).

Mill's position was basically that oppressed peoples had to struggle for their own freedom without outside help; if they failed to secure freedom that proved they didn't deserve it, weren't "fit" enough for it. In his blog post of last March, Walzer wrote that if the Libyan rebels were on the verge of defeat he would not be willing to go all the way with Mill, i.e. to declare the rebels "unfit" for liberty and leave them to their fate after a Gaddafi victory. But Walzer said that when intervention became necessary -- and he wasn't sure exactly when that point of "necessity" would occur -- it should be done by neighbors, by the Egyptian and Tunisian armies, rather than by the U.S. and NATO.

Even though he was not willing to go all the way with Mill in the Libyan case, Walzer clearly has a lot of sympathy for the view that oppressed peoples should do their own struggling, with outsiders intervening only in cases of real "necessity" (however defined). In Just and Unjust Wars [JUW] (pp. 90-91), he wrote: "We need to establish a kind of a priori respect for state boundaries; they are, as I have argued before, the only boundaries communities ever have. And that is why intervention is always justified as if it were an exception to a general rule, made necessary by the urgency or extremity of a particular case."

It is perhaps unfair to focus on something Walzer wrote 30-plus years ago, ignoring his more recent writing on these issues; still, the sentence just quoted shows a weakness, in my view, of his approach in JUW, namely the attachment of too much moral value to state boundaries. He recognized the (in some cases) "arbitrary and accidental character of state boundaries... [and] the ambiguous relation of the political community or communities within those boundaries to the government that defends them" (JUW, p. 89), but his basic position was that boundaries enclose communities which should be left to work out their political fates for themselves. There is definitely something to be said for this view but it is also necessary to acknowledge that the ways in which state boundaries are routinely penetrated or breached by outsiders, whether they be governments, corporations or NGOs, make the issue somewhat more complicated [note: some, e.g. Robert Jackson, would deny this]. Moreover, it is not the case that state boundaries are "the only boundaries communities ever have." Students of international relations have spilled much ink writing about all sorts of boundaries (ethnic, zonal, tribal, etc.). State boundaries retain a special place in international law and practice, but they are not the only boundaries communities have.

So where does this leave matters? Intervention should still be an exception to a general rule, and R2P, at least as I understand it, does not alter that. But in a world that some see as being full of cross-boundary 'networks' and transnational communities, the principle of non-intervention, assuming one wants to keep it, perhaps needs an updated justification, one that does not rely quite so heavily on a picture of self-enclosed national communities, each working out its own political destiny in isolation from the world outside. I'm not sure exactly what that updated justification of non-intervention might look like; perhaps political theorists and IR types have already produced one and with a little research I could find it. But laziness being the blogger's prerogative, I'm not going to bother searching, at least not now.

On incarceration, race, etc.

2011-09-21T20:45:00.001-04:00

Issues of incarceration, race, and the death penalty, including the Davis case, are being written about at length here. I frankly haven't had time to do more than glance at these posts but I figured I'd put up the link for those who may be interested.

U.S. 'ultimatum' to Pakistan over the Haqqani network

2011-09-20T23:44:00.001-04:00

Here.
The approaching transition in Afghanistan and recent attacks in Kabul appear to be driving this, probably including the assassination today of Rabbani but especially the recent attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul. Perhaps an 'ultimatum' on this issue is overdue.

Koch's role in the NY special election

2011-09-16T18:31:00.002-04:00

I hadn't read much about the recent election to fill Anthony Weiner's NY congressional seat, so it was not until glancing through this piece that I became aware of Ed Koch's apparently key role in supporting the Republican, Bob Turner, who won. I find it difficult, or I should say impossible, to come up with a polite word to describe my reaction to Koch's views on Israel/Palestine as described in the linked article. So in an act of restraint I will let people read it and arrive at their own judgments.

I'm out of here. Have a nice weekend.

The case for (another) UNSC res. on Israel-Palestine

2011-09-16T08:58:00.000-04:00

From Telhami & Goldstein's WaPo op-ed:

What would such a resolution include? Two states, based on the 1967 borders, with comparable mutually agreed swaps. Israel, as a state of the Jewish people and all its citizens, and Palestine as a state of the Palestinian people and all its citizens. The capital of Israel in West Jerusalem and the capital of Palestine in East Jerusalem. Mutual security arrangements to be negotiated, including possible deployment of international peacekeeping forces. And the Palestinian refugee problem to be resolved in a manner that respects the refugees’ legitimate rights, taking into account previous U.N. resolutions and the principle of the two-state solution outlined above.

I'm not entirely sure what the last sentence means, practically speaking. And hadn't the resolution better also say something about equitable arrangements re natural resources (e.g., water)?

No, no, no

2011-09-15T16:35:00.001-04:00

Not that this will do any good, but ... people persist in mischaracterizing the Peace of Westphalia.

I'm skimming through a piece by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, called "Once Upon a Time in Westphalia" (ungated) in the current issue of The National Interest -- lots of nice quotations, Rev. Sydney Smith, Cobden and Bright, yes, yes, etc. Then my eye falls on a sentence which says that the Peace of Westphalia "established the principle of national sovereignty" (uh-oh) and that it also established the principle of cuius regio eius religio (whose the region, his the religion). Both statements are wrong, though the second one is perhaps a bit more excusable inasmuch as it confuses the Peace of Westphalia with the Peace of Augsburg. The first statement, about Westphalia and "national sovereignty," doesn't confuse anything with anything else; it's just wrong. There are some people who argue that Westphalia helped lay the foundations for a sovereign state system, though even this claim is debatable, but to say it "established the principle of national sovereignty," in an article full of other historical references, is not good.

May I suggest that Mr. Wheatcroft read the text of the treaties of Munster and Osnabruck (or at least the former). They're online.

Palestine at the UN: overblown warnings

2011-09-15T13:30:00.001-04:00

Daniel Kurtzer, on the NewsHour last night:

The second, more serious concern has to do with the possibility that the Palestinians will use their new U.N. status to gain standing in international legal institutions such as the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice and to transform what has been a diplomatic process into a legal process of holding settlements illegal, settlers, Israeli soldiers and so forth coming under the jurisdiction of these international institutions.

And this could lead to some very dire consequences down the road.

I doubt it. Unless I'm much mistaken, the settlements have already been held illegal, for all the difference that's made. As for Israeli soldiers coming under the jurisdiction of the ICC, doesn't that depend on whether Israel signed the ICC statute? Which I'm reasonably sure it didn't.

I think this talk of dire consequences is much overblown. Moreover, as Jon Western pointed out in a recent Duck of Minerva post, to call the Palestinian move at the UN 'unilateral' is somewhat odd. In the official Israeli view, anything that takes place outside the framework of the currently non-existent peace process is 'unilateral,' hence to be opposed. This is a rather silly use of the term 'unilateral'.

As Robert Malley went on to note in the same NewsHour interview, Abbas is committed to this now and would face a great deal of criticism internally if he didn't pursue it. Far from foreclosing future negotiations, enhanced observer status for the PA at the UN could be just what is needed to get things moving again in the moribund 'peace process'.

"A...less subtle guy than George W. Bush"

2011-09-14T18:59:00.000-04:00

In this WaPo piece about Rick Perry's speech at Falwell's university, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention is quoted as saying that Perry is a "more overt, less subtle guy than George W. Bush" and therefore will be inclined to talk more openly about his religion.

To which one appropriate response would seem to be: my God, must we go through this? My current lack of a functioning television begins to seem more and more, um, providential.

The decline of war (Part I)

2011-09-13T17:02:00.008-04:00

Joshua Goldstein's piece in Foreign Policy, based on his new book Winning the War on War, will interest a lot of readers, not only IR types. In this post -- the first of a two-part discussion -- I will make some brief-ish comments on his Foreign Policy article. The second part of this discussion, which will appear in due course, will contain some broader ruminations about the relationship between global politics and global economics (no small, narrow subjects here, folks!).

Goldstein observes that the post-Cold War era, and especially the decade just passed, has been remarkably peaceful by historical standards. Citing research done by Lacina and Gleditsch at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, he notes that "the last decade has seen fewer war deaths" -- on average about 55,000 a year -- "than any decade in the past 100 years." Wars of all types, including civil wars, have decreased over the past 20 years.

What accounts for this decline of war? The article hints at a few possible explanations, but it's only at the end that Goldstein mentions what I'm inclined to believe is the most basic and consequential of the possible causes.

He writes that "armed conflict has declined in large part because armed conflict has fundamentally changed. Wars between big national armies all but disappeared along with the Cold War, taking with them the most horrific kinds of mass destruction." No doubt in the book Goldstein gives figures on how many "wars between big national armies" -- i.e., conventional interstate wars -- there were during the Cold War. The last war directly between great powers was either the Korean War or World War II (depending on whether you think China qualified as a great power at the time of the Korean War), and as Goldstein notes, the Korean War "effectively ended nearly 60 years ago." So there has not been a great-power war since either 1953 or 1945, depending on one's definitions. The end of the Cold War may have contributed to a change in the character of armed conflict, but the more basic change, I would suggest, is that great-power war as an 'institution' of international society seems effectively to have ceased to exist. [P.s. Of course some people thought the same thing in the period before 1914 and they turned out to be wrong, to put it mildly. But the situation is not analogous, for reasons I can go into in the comments or elsewhere, if anyone is interested.]

Why? Could shifts in the balance of power have something to do with it? Goldstein observes that "relative U.S. power and worldwide conflict have waned in tandem over the past decade," adding that the "best precedent for today's emerging world order may be the Concert of Europe...." The idea that a great-power concert, which today would include of course certain non-European powers, might be emerging (or might have already emerged) is not new. However, the heyday of the Concert of Europe (if I remember right) didn't last all that long (roughly, between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the Crimean War) and its operation was based in large part on shared reactionary values among the main European powers. This could be seen as either a pedantic irrelevancy or as casting some doubt on its suitability as an analogy, depending on one's inclination.

At the end of the piece Goldstein mentions that norms about war have changed, and this seems to be at the heart of the matter. Not only have norms about the protection of civilians changed; as J. Mueller, C. Fettweis, and others have argued, there is reason to think that great-power wars have become normatively unacceptable to great powers themselves. If correct, this is of course consonant with the main lines of Goldstein's argument, even if the emphases may differ somewhat. Btw, I'm sure his book (which I have not yet seen) goes into much greater detail, so readers interested in the subject should consult it rather than just the FP article.

Another p.s.: The decline of war also connects in a particular way with Foucault on biopower (oh no! I hear you crying), something which I learned a while back from a discussion on another blog. I'll get to this later (good, I hear you saying. In fact, why not make it never). Tsk, tsk, why can't the IR types all get along?

Krauthammer outdoes himself

2011-09-09T22:20:00.003-04:00

Every time I think Charles Krauthammer cannot possibly write anything worse than the column he has just written, he surprises me: he writes something worse.

His column denying that the War on Terror was an overreaction to 9/11 contains the classic elements of a baseless argument: straw men, irrelevant rhetorical flourishes, and bad historical analogies. The analogies to World War II are especially ludicrous. He implies that "we" defeated al-Qaeda in the present period just as "we" defeated the Axis powers in World War II.

Just a couple of little problems with this: World War II was a conflict against an enemy far more formidable than al-Qaeda, and it was one which demanded some kind of sacrifice from huge swaths of the population. WW2 was fought by an army -- or I should say armies -- of conscripts, of draftees; the WoT has been fought by armies of professional soldiers, in the case of the U.S. increasingly separated from the population, and whose sacrifices have not been shared by the population at large.

Krauthammer points out that the financial collapse and Great Recession were not caused by the War on Terror. I don't know of anyone who claims they were. Krauthammer is taking statements that the WoT "bankrupted" the country a bit too literally; there are different kinds of bankruptcy, as anyone as well acquainted with the English language as Krauthammer must realize.

Most damagingly for Krauthammer's argument, the invasion of Iraq toppled an ugly regime to be sure, but one which had nothing to do with 9/11. If that doesn't constitute an overreaction, then the word has no meaning.

Krauthammer is an intelligent person who writes stupid things. There must be a name for this phenomenon, but if there isn't, then maybe it's time to coin a new verb: to Krauthammer.

'Familial capitalism' in France

2011-09-06T21:29:00.002-04:00

Via the French Politics blog, a brief book notice in Le Monde. Of the 200 biggest French businesses in 2008, 76 were under "family control," up from 62 twenty years earlier. "Family control" could mean a couple of different things I suppose, but the gist is clear enough.

Not another one, please

2011-09-06T15:33:00.000-04:00

Bob Gates, according to the Checkpoint Washington blog at WaPo (here), is to become chancellor at Wm & Mary and is planning two books: a memoir and "a treatise on leadership."

Gates is widely respected but please, not another treatise on leadership. I don't read such things (not having any particular reason to) but the mere thought of another one's coming into existence is irksome.

Also there's a piece in the Style section comparing Princeton economists Alan Krueger and Paul Krugman. There are one or two substantive points in there but first you have to wade through stuff about which one plays tennis, which one looks "mildly" like a Hobbit (sic), and so on. (Sorry, no link on this one. I don't get paid enough.)

Does the 'sovereignty debate' matter?

2011-09-03T20:38:00.004-04:00

Update: I've now read Slaughter's latest entry in the debate, and at least on a theoretical level I tend to agree with the "walk and chew gum" formula: sovereignty as it's coming to be understood implies both a state's monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its borders (at least in the normal run of things) and a duty to act in non-exterminatory ways toward its citizens. As Slaughter herself appears to acknowledge, this hardly resolves all the practical problems, but as a general formula it seems unobjectionable.
-----
I would be lying if I'd said I have read with extremely close attention the recent blog posts by A.-M. Slaughter (here), J. Foust (here), D.P. Trombly (here), and others about the implications of the Libya intervention for the notion of state sovereignty. But the gist is that Slaughter wrote a post at The Atlantic saying that R2P and its application in Libya means that the "nature of sovereignty has fundamentally changed," Foust and Trombly took exception, and they were off.

Guess what? None of them is completely right. (You knew I was going to say that.) I think Slaughter is probably exaggerating when she implies that the notion of sovereignty as it is traditionally understood by international lawyers is dead -- to the extent she has implied that -- and Foust and Trombly are wrong to suggest that the 19th and 20th-century (note: their periodization) concept of sovereignty is as much about preventing civil war as it is about preventing external intervention in a state's 'internal affairs'. The modern idea of state sovereignty as enshrined for instance in Art. 2(7) of the UN Charter has more to do with the prerogatives of governments (states) than anything else. R2P has widened and formalized a traditional exception rather than completely upended the received notion of sovereignty, or so I would be inclined to argue.

Anyway, does the whole debate matter? I'm not sure it does. It gives IR types another subject to argue about, but whether it has any real importance beyond that is questionable. Governments will continue to make decisions about intervention for a variety of reasons, but whether any policy-makers will first sit down and reach a position on whether sovereignty has 'fundamentally changed' is, I think, doubtful. But this is, admittedly, pure speculation.

Added on 9/5: See also J. Ulfelder here.

Digging out an old proposal: a UN 'contact group' for Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan

2011-09-03T19:33:00.002-04:00

Back in December '08 I blogged about an article by B. Rubin and A. Rashid [link will be added later] that advocated setting up a UN contact group to facilitate dialogue between India and Pakistan on the issues of Kashmir and Afghanistan. They argued that steps toward resolving some of Pakistan's anxieties about its borders (presumably in both the legal and practical senses) could help reduce Pakistan's motives -- or more specifically, the motives of parts of its army and intelligence service -- to support the Afghan Taliban and other militant groups.

Some relevant aspects of the situation, of course, have changed since Dec. '08. For one thing, U.S.-Pakistan relations have deteriorated (in light of the drone campaign and the killing of bin Laden, among other things), and the U.S. has suspended some military aid to Pakistan. But the future of Afghanistan, especially after the last U.S. combat forces have left, remains as much an open question now as it was at the end of '08. Pakistan's connections with the Afghan Taliban, via elements of the army and ISI, have also not ceased, as far as I'm aware. The Kashmir problem remains, of course, unresolved (btw, the UN has had a small military observer, a/k/a peacekeeping, force along the Line of Control since 1949. The UN spent $16 million on it in 2010-11 according to its website). So if the proposal for a UN contact group made sense in Dec. '08, it would seem still to make sense. The UN has a lot on its plate, to be sure, but that in itself is not a good reason for not adding one more item (double negative, sorry).

Hollywood and the military (continued)

2011-09-01T11:31:00.003-04:00

I promised a bit more on the history of relations between Hollywood and the U.S. military. Some may be familiar with the series of films Why We Fight, produced during World War II under the auspices of the War Department (as it was then called) and directed by Frank Capra, but I knew little or nothing about it until I read part of Benjamin Alpers's Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture (Univ. of N. Carolina Press, 2003).

Alpers writes that the U.S. government "saw knowledge of the facts as essential to the morale of U.S. troops in a war against fanatical belief systems" (p.175), and the Why We Fight series was thus "built around the notion that factual knowledge about the war was the best basis for troop morale" (p.178). However, the films were "ultimately more factitious than factual" (p.179).

Much of the footage was...not what it claimed to be. Following a cinematic tradition established long before by newsreels, the Why We Fight series included footage from Hollywood features passed off as actual battle footage, staged scenes of life in the Axis countries, and captured footage taken entirely out of context.... Capra defended [this], maintaining that it was simply the most effective way to package fact. (p.179)

However, subsequent research on the films' impact on soldiers showed that "although the films did impart greater factual information about the war, this information had...no effect whatsoever on morale or combat motivation." (p.180)

As Alpers's discussion in the same chapter (called "This is the Army") suggests, the impact of Hollywood during WW2 was probably greater on civilians, as movies deployed the convention of the multi-ethnic combat unit as a symbol of American democracy and pluralism. Of course, this ran up against the awkward fact of racial segregation, both in the army and at home. Hollywood, not surprisingly, found it difficult to square this circle (see p. 170).

My own impressionistic sense -- not having researched this -- is that the relationship between Hollywood and the military began to turn a bit more adversarial during the first decades of the Cold War, with movies like Dr. Strangelove. By the Vietnam era, the splits in U.S. society were reflected in the movies, with John Wayne for instance continuing to make pro-war films while others made anti-war ones. (I think Apocalypse Now will probably be the most-viewed of these years from now, although there were a raft of them, including Platoon, The Deer Hunter, Born on the Fourth of July, and so on.)

As the Sirota piece linked in a previous post indicates, Top Gun represents a swing of the pendulum back toward celebration of militarism (not quite the right word, perhaps, but it will do). A trickle of dissent begins to return with the movies made after the first Gulf War (not that I saw any of them, I don't think), and this trickle becomes more of a stream with the movies of the current period that deal with the post-9/11 conflicts. Many of these (e.g., The Hurt Locker, In the Valley of Elah) I have not seen, but I did see Stop-Loss (2008) and Brothers (2009). I had to look up the titles of both of these on IMDB just now -- I remembered the actors but not the titles. (One of the joys of being middle-aged.) Stop-Loss was better than Brothers, as I recall, although the latter had its moments. I also saw (but on DVD not in a theater) a movie about Iraq with Matt Damon in it. Again, I don't remember the title and this time I'm not going to bother looking it up. Matt Damon fans will probably know the movie I'm talking about it and everyone else will probably not care too much. It was not great, but in terms of its politics definitely quite critical of the U.S. role, or at least of the military/occupation hierarchy.

P.s. There have also been, of course, documentaries on recent conflicts. E.g., on Afghanistan, 'Restrepo,' which I've mentioned before, and 'Armadillo,' which I haven't seen but which V. Yadav writes about here.

P.p.s. I've now seen The Hurt Locker. Worth watching.

NATO and "free markets"

2011-08-29T23:44:00.001-04:00

I just heard a broadcast (on C-Span radio) of part of a discussion held last week by the Atlantic Council on "Libya and the Future of the Atlantic Alliance" (that may not have been the exact title of the meeting, but it's close). Several aspects of this discussion I found somewhat jarring. One was the use by speakers of the phrase "free markets" when referring to the values shared by NATO members, as in "democracy and free markets."

I dislike the phrase 'free markets' for a number of reasons and I was a bit surprised, though I probably shouldn't have been, to find it being used, apparently as a piece of boilerplate, in this context. If it is meant as a synonym for "capitalism" (the similar phrase "free enterprise" is sometimes used in this way), why not just say "capitalism"? But especially given the different varieties of capitalist economic systems represented by the member states of NATO, one could argue that an alliance commitment to spreading and/or defending capitalism would be odd, an argument that would apply to "free markets" as well.

One of the speakers at the Atlantic Council session, responding to a question about how to answer criticisms that NATO had strayed quite far from its original purpose, said that the alliance is a "living, breathing entity" that has adapted itself to new challenges etc., and he referred to the Strategic Concept adopted at the NATO summit in Lisbon last November. I just downloaded this document, and glancing at the opening paragraphs I see a reference to the shared commitment of member states to "individual liberty, democracy, human rights and the rule of law." Nothing about "free markets."

Hollywood & the military: a bit of historical amnesia

2011-08-29T21:04:00.000-04:00

A few days ago David Sirota published a piece in which he claimed that the movie Top Gun started a Pentagon-Hollywood alliance, a 'military-entertainment complex'. In fact that alliance goes back at least to the 1940s, albeit with ups and downs over the years. More on this later.

"Realism is stuck in the 19th century"

2011-08-29T08:00:00.000-04:00

The quote is from remarks by Randall Schweller at a roundtable on Charles Glaser's Rational Theory of International Politics held at last year's APSA annual meeting. Video here.

Note to readers

2011-08-27T00:22:00.002-04:00

Posting will resume here in September [added later: or possibly a bit earlier] but probably at a slower pace than during the first part of the year (so expect longer intervals between posts). Incidentally, the few regular readers may find it more convenient to get the posts via RSS feed (see "subscribe" -- misleading word, since it doesn't cost anything -- on the right-hand-side column). I've never used feeds myself but I know that a lot of people do use them.
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P.s. Hurricane note: No one knows yet precisely how badly the area where I live (a bit north of D.C., west of I-95) will be affected; to judge from the media reports, however, those further north are supposed to bear the brunt as it moves up the coast. So to anyone in Pa., NY, NJ, etc. who may be reading -- be safe. (Ditto N. Carolina and Va.) Btw I remember Hurricane Isabel about 8 years ago -- power knocked out, trees swaying madly, etc. For some reason it doesn't seem to get mentioned much in the news coverage of Irene. In terms of scope -- i.e. geographic area covered -- I guess Irene dwarfs it.

Biden and China's one-child policy (brief interruption in the break)

2011-08-25T20:55:00.009-04:00

I just read this WaPo editorial about V.P. Biden in China. The Republicans apparently jumped all over Biden's remark that he "understood" China's one-child policy even though it was "unsustainable" from the standpoint of future worker-to-retiree ratios. Biden's office then issued a statement "clarifying" that the V.P. opposes not only the coercive aspects of the one-child policy but also the policy as a whole.

Although the coercive aspects of the policy are bad, if the policy were based on incentives alone would it warrant a denunciation? Probably not. The Chinese government did have rational reasons, when the policy was adopted, to want to moderate the pressures of population on resources, infrastructure etc., and those reasons probably remain somewhat valid. No one, of course, can approve of forced sterilizations or coerced abortions, but a non-coercive one-child policy would not be irrational, despite the concern about worker-to-retiree ratios. It's a bit annoying that Biden's office, in its clarification, apparently did not draw this distinction.

Break

2011-08-02T08:00:00.000-04:00

I'll be taking a break from posting in August.

Quote of the day

2011-07-31T15:34:00.001-04:00

Jacob Stein writes a regular column for the D.C. Bar's magazine. His pieces are anecdotal and reflective and often full of interesting quotations. In his column in the current issue Stein quotes a definition of "litigious paranoia" from the famous 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It says among other things that the "basic emotion [involved in the condition] is vanity...."

After quoting the paragraph-length definition, Stein adds:

This was written before Freudian psychoanalysis.... If the entry were rewritten today, the only change would be to reframe the diagnosis of vanity into narcissism, the narcissist being the person thinking of no one but oneself. Or, as George Eliot (not Freud or Jung) said, "What we see exclusively, we see out of proportion to reality."

I suppose it is arguable that an aspect of George Eliot's genius was her ability to make a tautology sound like a profundity. In any case, it's a pretty good line.

Government has been a job-creator (even if the GOP may not know it)

2011-07-30T12:55:00.000-04:00

"No taxes on job-creators" (meaning owners of small and large businesses and anyone making over a certain amount of money, say a quarter-million a year) has been a mantra of some Republican participants in the debt/deficit debate. In view of that, the following may be of interest inasmuch as it shows that government, supposedly the root of all evil, has been a major job-creator.

Between 1990 and 2008, the number of employed workers in the United States grew from about 122 million to about 149 million. Of the roughly 27 million jobs created during that period, 98 percent were in the so-called nontradable sector of the economy, the sector that produces goods and services that must be consumed domestically. The largest employers in the U.S. nontradable sector were the government (with 22 million jobs in 2008) and the health-care industry (with 16 million jobs in 2008). Together, the two industries created ten million new jobs between 1990 and 2008, or just under 40 percent of total additions.

-- Michael Spence, "The Impact of Globalization on Income and Employment," Foreign Affairs, July/August 2011, p.30 (emphasis added).

Goin' to the chapel

2011-07-29T10:20:00.002-04:00

Here (paragraphs 8 to 10).

[added later] A constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget is insanity. There are times when a balanced budget is desirable and other times when it isn't. One learns this on the second day (maybe the third) of any basic economics course.

Silliness on stilts: Friedman's "McDonald's theory"

2011-07-28T20:54:00.003-04:00

Maybe the heat has gotten to them: a prominent IR prof/blogger (Drezner) and a prominent writer/blogger (Mead) have a go-round about a so-called "theory" promulgated by a prominent ... well, whatever Friedman is (careful, no bad words allowed). Drezner is basically right, but I don't know why he's wasting his time on this in the first place. He suggests that a kernel can be salvaged from the Friedman "theory" because two countries with McDonald's, although they can go to war (see his examples), may be less likely to do so. He then proceeds to admit that this proposition, even if true, is not useful because the presence of McDonald's is an "intervening variable." He nonetheless urges some student to write a thesis testing the 'war-is-less-likely-between-countries-with-McDonald's' proposition.

However, 'traditional' interstate war (country A fighting country B, without the complicating presence of any internal armed conflict) is so rare these days that the proposed test is, IMO, of minimal interest. Friedman's "theory" is not a theory and Drezner's weaker version of it is a waste of time, virtually by his own admission. I blame John Sides for drawing my attention to Drezner's post: it's all the fault of someone who doesn't even study international relations. Figures.

The U.S. left and Obama

2011-07-27T11:31:00.004-04:00

It's no secret that large numbers of progressives or left-liberals (or whatever label one prefers) are unhappy with Pres. Obama's performance. Although there are some grounds for that unhappiness, I think part of its source may be the high expectations generated by the 2008 campaign. But presidents, especially in recent years (and with the possible exception of G.W. Bush), never behave in office exactly the way their campaigning suggests that they might; they move to the center, for lack of a better phrase, and when the center itself has shifted, or is perceived to have shifted, that will produce disappointments (e.g., in Obama's case, the insufficiently large stimulus package, compromise on Bush tax cut extensions, certain questionable foreign policy decisions, etc.). The disappointments, however, should not obscure the real, if measured, achievements of the Obama admin (e.g., health care reform, saving the domestic auto industry, fulfillment of pledge to end U.S. combat ops in Iraq, two pretty good Supreme Court appointments, etc.). Obama has not changed the underlying structure of the U.S.'s 'winner-take-all' politics (Hacker/Pierson's phrase), but changes to this kind of entrenched system are difficult, to say the least.

Disenchantment with Obama on the left can produce some unhinged judgments, as in this comment from a recent CT thread:

Obama should just do an LBJ. He won’t, of course, but that’s because he’s not as honorable as LBJ.
That is absurd. LBJ decided not to run for re-election in 1968 in the face of widespread discontent among Democrats and others, confirmed by Eugene McCarthy's strong showing in the New Hampshire primary, about his Vietnam policy. LBJ began an escalation of the Vietnam war under deceitful pretenses (the Tonkin Gulf resolution) and persisted in a policy that was misguided and morally dubious (to say the least). One can parcel out blame among his advisors and adduce all kinds of sophisticated and probably correct explanations about why LBJ's Vietnam policymaking took the course that it did, but ultimately it was a failed policy for which LBJ, as president, could not escape responsibility. Obama has made no mistakes of anything like a comparable magnitude. LBJ was in many respects a tragic figure; indeed, Eric Goldman wrote a book called The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson. No serious person will ever write a book called The Tragedy of Barack Obama. The comparison is groundless.

Historical footnote: On March 25, 1968, roughly a week before he announced he would not seek re-election, LBJ was advised by the so-called Wise Men (elders of the foreign policy establishment including Acheson, Lovett, McCloy) to change tack and start de-escalating (and negotiating). For ultra-hawk Walt Rostow, Johnson's national security advisor, this represented the 'death' of the U.S. foreign policy establishment (see D. Milne, America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War [2008], p.222). It was more like the establishment finally coming to its senses.