The U.S. in the Middle East (Part 2)

Note: This is the second part of a guest post by Peter T.  For the first part, see here.

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The IR literature is not very good on how to recognise and deal with country-size pools of irrationality.  This is not one deluded leader and associated sycophants being irrational, which is very common indeed and extensively explored, but a whole establishment going around with eyes wide shut.  A good historical example is Wilhelmine Germany, whose diplomatic and military calculations were routinely made on the strategic equivalent of assuming, when convenient, that gravity does not exist.  In our time, we have a large number of influential people having difficulty with a straightforward piece of high-school science (admitting that checking the conclusions involves some not-so-high school statistics. But, come on, these people read the Financial Times), while other influential people argue that, yes, the science is right, but can we afford to do anything?  Meanwhile the plants have moved 100 kilometers or so poleward.  At the collective level, these people are literally dumber than carrots.

Why is this so hard?  One factor is that policy arguments more or less assume ab initio that things are, in fact, explainable in rational terms.  “Everyone is mad” is not a helpful starting point.  Another is that the policy mind exists to solve problems; it hiccups when it comes up against “This cannot be done”.  These situations are labelled “wicked problems,” but it's mostly not the problem itself that's wicked, it's that the solutions lie outside the accepted boundaries, and that changing the boundaries is not on the policy menu.  Very Serious People (VSPs) often wear quite narrow blinkers.

Really bad ideas get put off limits, after repeated experiences.  The lessons become standard phrases: Do Not March on Moscow; Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia. Do Not Put Boots on the Ground in the Middle East is not quite there yet.  We Have Only One Planet will be up there in a few decades.

So what lessons might one draw from a long series of rational decisions that still ended up in a total mess?  The first is about the limits of realpolitik.  The presumption that everyone acts in their own interest, and that therefore all promises or commitments come with fingers crossed, is both old and very common.  While it does not preclude playing for very high stakes indeed (Saddam Hussein knew that his lieutenants' professions of loyalty were not to be relied on, just as they knew that his professions of friendship and protection were similarly hollow. So they plotted his overthrow, and he executed one from time to time), it does rely on a general acceptance that this is actually the rule of the game.  The Austrian Foreign Minister who remarked of Russian help in a critical moment that “we will amaze the world with the depths of our ingratitude” could be sure of  getting an appreciative chuckle from his fellows, even in St. Petersburg.  People lower down the social scale are less likely to be amused.  Repeated bad experiences with a foreign power’s policy choices will get a lot of people thinking very hard about how to get out of the game: to lessen or annul their dependence on the foreigners (usually this involves a messy change of leadership. In which case the realpolitik practitioners lose all leverage.  If they are indifferent to your viewpoint, why talk to them at all?  See China 1949, Iran 1979, possibly Greece 2015?). When a state takes this route, it will come back into the game with a much stronger sense of its own interests and a good few red lines that are simply not negotiable.

Again, this comes back to the blinkers worn with pride by all the VSPs. A true realpolitik would think carefully about where other people were coming from; their national pride, their obsessions, their emotional commitments.  It would try to gauge local and mass feelings as well as the preferences of the elites.  It would ask “can we do this?” before it asked “how do we do this?”. What passes for realpolitik all too often counts tanks but not the will to drive them, money but not on what it is spent.

A related point is that pursuing a primary goal at the expense of other, secondary, goals is often counterproductive. This is more than finding the balance between the long and the short term.  Number One on the little lists of the Rules of War found in the business section of the bookshop (“Leadership Secrets of [insert psycho war-monger of your choice]”) is usually “Keep your eyes firmly on the main game”. Unfortunately, Number Two is “Keep checking that what you think is the Main Game is, in fact, the Main Game”.  For your adversaries and partners may not be playing your game.  Rule Two is often sadly neglected.

The U.S. thought the point of the Vietnam War was to defeat the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese militarily.  The VC and North Vietnamese thought the point was retaining enough allegiance among the Southern population to prevent the construction of a broad-based South Vietnamese state.  In Afghanistan, the U.S. thought the main game was to bleed the Soviet Union (tellingly, one policy-maker wrote of the “ennui” of the international community towards Afghanistan in the ‘90s, as if Afghanistan were a toy one had become bored with).  It gave no thought to the maintenance of an Afghan state, or the spread of radical Islam.  If the First Gulf War was about oil, then the U.S. gave little thought to what the debilitation of Saddam's regime might offer to the various ethnic and religious groups of Iraq, or to Iran, or to wider Arab opinion. Whatever the Second Gulf War was about, there is little evidence that U.S. policy-makers gave much thought to anything other than the Vice-Presidential desire to get Saddam.

What is evident is that it cannot be presumed that policy-makers will pay attention to basic facts about the world unless really compelled to (and maybe not even then).  It is often not so much that they are ignorant or ill-informed as often simply indifferent.  Facts are there to support the policy, not to form it.  When the facts involve foreigners, who can be presumed to be mysterious and irrational, they are of even less account.  People who understand every nuance of domestic political culture blithely dismiss history when it comes to the Middle East.

The facts ignored are not esoteric: many of them are available in plain view on the helpful one-page overviews in the CIA World Factbook. Iraq: Kurdish 15-20%, Shi'ite Islam 60-65%.  Hmm.  If the CIA tells me this, maybe it's important.  Perhaps I can type “Shia” into the search engine?  Oh, look, Wikipedia tells me that Iran is Shia, that these guys take this really seriously, that the Saudis massacred lots of Shia back then, that the Iranian and Iraqi clerical leadership are very close and so on.  And a further five minutes tells me that the Kurds are not happy with rule from Baghdad.  So the Shia will help conditional on getting to govern, the Kurds will help conditional on autonomy, and the Sunni will fight.  Maybe I had better think about what that word “conditional” implies, eh? A quick look at the page for Afghanistan tells me it's a melange of different groups held together by bribes and occasional shows of brute force. In others words, about as resistant to an influx of arms and foreign fanatics as a kid's cubby-house to a bomb.  Current headline: $400 million of U.S. arms falls into Yemeni Shia rebel hands.  Who could have known?

Alfred North Whitehead remarked that “it takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.”  It is the obvious -- that Moscow is a long way east, that China is too large and populous to subdue permanently, that religion is at the centre of political identity to most Middle Easterners -- that eludes the usual minds.

-- Peter T.

Pearl Harbor, once more

Since I occasionally make cryptic, sniping remarks about Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, I should make clear that there are at least a few things in the book that I find  illuminating. One of them is his discussion of the situation that Japan faced in 1941. (Btw, the prompt for this post is a discussion about Pearl Harbor on an LGM thread that started off being about the Russo-Japanese war.)

He notes that in mid-1941 the U.S. applied a "full-scale embargo" against Japan, "emphasizing...that it could avoid economic strangulation only by abandoning China, Indochina, and maybe Manchuria." (p.223) The U.S. was determined that Japan should not dominate Asia or be in a position to strike the USSR, then on the ropes against Hitler's invasion. This left Japan with two bad, from its perspective, choices: "cave in to American pressure and accept a significant diminution of its power, or go to war against the United States, even though an American victory was widely agreed to be the likely outcome." (ibid.) The Japanese chose the latter course, he goes on to say, as the less bad of two very bad alternatives. That does not mean the decision was irrational, though it was an extremely "risky gamble" (ibid., 224).

Where I would part company (or so I assume) with Mearsheimer is in seeing the entire Japanese militarist-imperialist enterprise as irrational -- and also immoral and criminal -- from the outset. However, given that Japan's leaders at the time were committed to that enterprise and given the particular circumstances that they faced, their decision to go to war with the U.S. was not 'irrational'. Whether the specific decision to attack Pearl Harbor was a mistake is really a secondary question; the more basic question has to do with the decision to launch war against the U.S.

ETA: And it's the more basic questions that tend to get shunted aside or overlooked when discussions focus narrowly on specific strategic decisions.

2nd update: Googling "sagan origins of the pacific war" brings up results, including Scott Sagan's 1988 article that M. cites (although my browser didn't like the pdf) and a 2010 paper at academia.edu by a UCLA grad student ("Revisiting the Origins of the Pacific War") that appears, on a quick glance, to take M.'s view, more or less. (But I've already conceded in the comments that TBA could be right.)

3rd update: For a somewhat different take on this, see John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday (1989), pp.229-30.

Moral action in the real world

An ongoing exchange at Duck of Minerva between PTJ (here) and Phil Arena (here) raises some interesting questions about rational choice theory and moral action (among other things).

PTJ argues that "moral action strictly speaking" does not take any account of an individual's preferences or desires and that choice-theoretic models therefore rule out moral action by definition.

I don't want to get deeply into the argument about rational choice theory for several reasons (one of them being that I don't care that much about it one way or another), but I do want to raise another issue -- albeit not that systematically or even coherently, given the hour.

The issue is this: does anyone engage in "moral action strictly speaking" in the real world? That is, does anyone act without taking into account his or her own desires, at some level? To some extent this is a semantic question: one can always say that because X did Y, X wanted to do Y. Mother Theresa must have wanted to minister to the poor of Calcutta (Kolkata), otherwise she wouldn't have done it. But the use of "want" in this way begs the question. More pointedly, one can suggest that of course Mother Theresa acted out of moral and religious conviction but presumably it must also have given her satisfaction, in some sense that can be separated from acting purely out of a sense of moral duty. At least, it's not absurd to think that might have been the case. (And if you don't like the Mother Theresa example, substitute one of your own choosing.)

There are at least a few philosophers who think, as Iris Murdoch remarked, that "every second has a moral tinge," that we are constantly faced with moral decisions. This, I think, is an overstatement: there are large swaths of mundane daily life that do not have a moral tinge. But even if only ten percent of one's existence involves moral questions, that's still a lot. And I think ten percent might be on the low side.

The point I'm trying to get to, though, is that real-world decisions usually involve a mix of considerations, in which one balances what one thinks or knows is the right thing to do, abstractly speaking, against the inconvenience or cost to oneself which doing that thing might entail. After all, if Christians followed Christ's example literally, they would live in poverty and give all their wealth and possessions to the less fortunate. Ditto for Jews and Muslims who followed the relevant scriptural injunctions for them. Of course monks and saints might do that, and the WaPo recently ran an article about some young people in well-paying jobs who give most of their income to charity (having been influenced by, inter alia, the writings of Peter Singer), but most people balance the imperatives of their moral and/or religious beliefs against the practical costs of operationalizing those beliefs. I give a small amount of money each month to an organization that works against global poverty. Could I give more? Yes. Why don't I? Because there are other, mostly less selfless (or more selfish, if you prefer to put it that way) calls on a finite amount of resources.

So, to come back to rational choice theory, even if it does rule out "moral action strictly speaking" by definition, if few people engage in such action in the real world, I don't know that the exclusion-by-definition greatly matters -- especially if you assume that ultimately the point of even highly stylized models is to advance understanding of the real world.

Mitzen on Pinker

Although I've probably mentioned Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature here before, I haven't previously discussed it at any length, for the excellent reason that I haven't read it. However, Jennifer Mitzen's review of the book in the current Perspectives on Politics is worth a post [the link is to a gated version; I haven't searched for an ungated version but there probably isn't one].

As many will know (including those who haven't read the 800-page book), Pinker argues that all forms of violence have declined since the Middle Ages and have declined especially sharply in contemporary times, with 'the West' being the center of this trend. Mitzen basically grants this, but argues that Pinker's approach induces a sense of complacency about the violence that remains, even though that is not his intent. In her words, while "absolv[ing] modernity and moderns" of responsibility for the violence of the past, Pinker "dull[s] our sense that it is important to care about, much less feel a sense of responsibility toward, the distant others still mired in violence."

It is tricky, of course, to argue about a book's (or any text's) effect on readers' sensibilities and feelings since, in these respects, no two readers will be affected in exactly the same way. Shaw's Heartbreak House, to take one example that comes to mind, might have caused some readers (or viewers) of the play to crusade against the pre-1914 arms race in Europe while at the same time inducing others to consider the prospect of starting their own munitions company. Good art is ambiguous (even when it appears to be preachy, as Shaw often does), and scholarship is also often ambiguous, at least in terms of its effects on the sensibilities of its consumers.

With that said: how, in Mitzen's view, does Pinker's approach induce complacency and a dulling of the sense that "it is important to care about...distant others...."?

Pinker's account of liberalism and modernity is, she writes, "airbrushed and uncomplicated." Thus, according to him, the French Revolution took a wrong turn not because of any tensions or contradictions in the Enlightenment but because, in Pinker's words, "many of the French philosophes from whom the revolutionaries drew their inspiration were intellectual lightweights" (hmm).

Mitzen criticizes Pinker's accounts of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, which he depicts as having nothing to do with modernity, reason or science. I'm not sure exactly where I come down on that particular question. I do tend to think, however, that the legacy of the Enlightenment, although mostly positive, is, to use Mitzen's word, "mixed."

Her key point is that "[t]he mechanisms of Pinker's causal argument suggest that there is not a whole lot we as individual agents can or ought to do about the violence that remains, especially violence outside of the liberal West." Societies, in Pinker's view, will adopt 'reason' and reduce violence when they "are ready" (Mitzen's words) and until then we basically just have to wait. 

This makes Mitzen uncomfortable, and I understand why. On the other hand, I don't think she would be more comfortable with an approach that attempts to spread 'reason' by force. What we are left with is a sort of middle ground, in which societies are mostly left to chart their own paths but with 'the West' offering financial and/or other support to 'liberal,' 'modern' voices within them, while at the same time trying to temper global economic forces that may hinder political liberalization. As a general matter, I suspect that Pinker and Mitzen would both endorse that approach.

Adam Elkus vs. John Mueller: Is war on the way out?

This is a propitious time, one might think, to be pushing back against the argument that war is obsolescent. A bloody, prolonged civil war is raging in Syria and major powers and international organizations seem unable or unwilling to stop it. In Yemen, tribal militias have been fighting al-Qaeda. In Pakistan and elsewhere, U.S. drone strikes continue. Then, of course, there is the war in Afghanistan. It doesn't seem as if war is on the way out -- until one looks a bit deeper and at long-term trends. Then the question becomes at least an open one.

Adam Elkus, in a piece at Infinity Journal, joins the ranks of those criticizing the war-is-obsolescent view. He is right, I think, to sound a cautionary note about John Mueller's thesis, in The Remnants of War, that war these days is becoming a matter of thugs and criminal gangs (assuming that's what Mueller said in The Remnants of War -- I've read some of Mueller's work but not that particular book).
 
Unfortunately, however, Elkus doesn't give some of Mueller's other arguments, as stated in his Retreat from Doomsday and in his 2009 article "War Has Almost Ceased to Exist" [pdf], their due. For example, why was World War I such an important turning point in this context? To read Elkus's piece, you'd think it was because the war was extraordinarily costly for certain countries, wiping out almost an entire generation of young men in several of the main belligerents. That's true, of course, but as Mueller points out in his 2009 article, a key fact is that an anti-war movement existed in the belligerent countries (certainly in Britain and to a lesser extent in some of the others) before the war. Thus an anti-war discourse was in the air, available for appropriation by broader groups of people (including writers and opinion-molders) after the war ended. That's important because the driver in Mueller's argument is ideational change. It's not just that World War I was extremely bloody. It's that a set of ideas existed and was in circulation before the war which, while largely ignored by most people in 1914, became increasingly plausible as the war dragged on and especially once it had ended and the enormous costs were fully visible and undeniable.

Elkus writes: "Indeed, the enduring popularity of overly tragic World War I histories like those of Barbara Tuchman suggest[s] an urgent need to portray major war as an irrational – even accidental – act rather than the result of determined political choices to engage in violence." This is, I think, largely beside the point. It doesn't matter, from the standpoint of Mueller's argument, whether WW1 was accidental or non-accidental, whether it was the result of "determined political choices to engage in violence" or not. What matters is that, whatever one's view of the war's genesis, it had certain effects on the prevailing ideas about war in the West. Before WW1, serious, respectable people wrote about war as glorious, as necessary for the health of the species, and so forth. World War I marked, in effect, the end of the widespread glorification of war in the public discourse of the West. Elkus's piece, titled "Only the West Has Seen the End of War," suggests that he might implicitly understand this. But it is not made explicit in the piece. Rather, Elkus's unnecessarily dismissive reference to Tuchman's The Guns of August -- a book, don't forget, that apparently exercised a salutary influence on John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, if certain accounts are correct -- is coupled with the message that there is an "urgent need" to portray major war as "irrational." But there is no such "urgent need." Obsolescence and irrationality are two different things. Mueller says major war in the 'developed' world has become unthinkable ("subrationally unthinkable" is his phrase), not "irrational." The two notions are not quite the same. 

Elkus is right about some things in this piece, for instance that the official military doctrines of China and Russia reveal "a strong appreciation for the role of force." But so, to some extent and indeed tautologically, do the official military doctrines of all major powers. The Pentagon is not going to issue a white paper declaring major war obsolescent. That doesn't mean major war is not obsolescent, it just means you're not going to read that in an official Pentagon document.

One might think Mueller, as an established scholar, needs no defenders. But there seems to be a growing tendency to dismiss or ignore or minimize his arguments. Thus Elkus's piece continues a  pattern. Maybe it's time for Mueller to do some pushing back of his own.

P.s. (added later): I recognize, of course, that fascism often glorified war. But the post-WW1 change in discourse and attitudes is nonetheless striking. 

P.p.s. In the opening of this post I also could have mentioned the recent fighting in Mali.

Robert Kagan & Norman Angell

Yesterday I heard snatches of a call-in radio show in which Robert Kagan was talking about his new book The World America Made. One caller apparently (I say "apparently" because I missed the question itself) made a point about economic interdependence and its connection to the unlikelihood of war.

In response Kagan trotted out the old, inaccurate Norman Angell story. It goes like this: About five years before WW1 Norman Angell published The Great Illusion (which was a huge best-seller) making the very same case about economic interdependence and war that the caller made. Then WW1 happened. Therefore economic interdependence (actually Kagan said economic "rationality," if I recall correctly) cannot be relied on to prevent war. People are motivated by many things, Kagan went on: hatreds, passions, questions of honor, not just economics.

Well, there are still hatreds and passions around, no doubt about that. But there are two problems with Kagan's reply: (1) Norman Angell did not say that economic interdependence made war impossible; he said it made war futile (a lose-lose proposition); (2) certain things have changed since WW1, and one reason they have changed is precisely the impact of WW1 itself.

In the opening pages of his book Dangerous Times? The International Politics of Great Power Peace [Amazon; Powell's], Christopher Fettweis makes the point about Angell very clearly:

It is hard to believe that anyone who has actually read Angell's work would come away with the impression that he believed the age of major war had come to an end. Angell was hardly a naive, utopian pacifist.... War with Germany was not only possible, he wrote, "but extremely likely." He argued that "as long as there is danger, as I believe there is, from German aggression, we must arm," and that he "would not urge the reduction of our war budget by a single sovereign." In order for war to become obsolete, Angell realized, a revolution in ideas had to occur. His book [The Great Illusion] was an attempt to spark that revolution. It was "not a plea for the impossibility of war...but for its futility."

Kagan is a popular author and a think-tanker but also a historian -- his book Dangerous Nation was his Ph.D. dissertation at American University. Everyone makes mistakes, including credentialed historians, but this one, made on national radio, was unfortunate.
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On Angell, a good starting point is:
J.D.B. Miller, "Norman Angell and Rationality in International Relations," in D. Long and P. Wilson, eds., Thinkers of the Twenty Years' Crisis (Oxford U.P., 1995), pp.100-121. There is also now a full-length biography: Martin Ceadel, Living the Great Illusion: Sir Norman Angell, 1872-1967 (Oxford U.P., 2009; here). See also Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (Yale U.P., 1993), pp.150-51, for several interesting quotes from Angell's 1915 pamphlet The Prussian in our Midst.
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P.s. I recently ran across a conference paper which argued that because there is a statistical correlation between growing interdependence (or globalization, to use the paper's word) and growing international tension in the years before WW1, we can infer that the former caused the latter (!). Well, perhaps it was a bit more nuanced than that but not much. I'm not giving the link because I may blog about the paper properly later on.
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P.p.s. I just looked at the brief Wikipedia entry on The Great Illusion. The entry claims the 'futility' argument was added in the 1933 edition. I believe this is incorrect and that the argument was in the original edition.
P.p.p.s. I have changed the Wikipedia entry.

Bentham to the rescue; or, Why voting is rational

Andrew Gelman makes an argument for the rationality of voting (against some resistance). Here's my personal take on this. If I did not vote I'd feel guilty about failing to discharge a basic obligation of citizenship; hence voting, in my case at least, avoids psychic pain. It also gives some, albeit small, psychic pleasure as a form of self-expression. Avoiding pain, gaining pleasure: what could be more rational? Cue Jeremy Bentham.

Wherein the break is briefly interrupted

The local PBS station just aired Daniel Goldhagen's film about genocide, Worse than War (made to accompany his book of the same name). It has some powerful and emotional moments.

It also has an argument and a set of policy recommendations, none of which I have the time or inclination to go into, at least not now. But one or two reactions may be worth noting. Most of Goldhagen's scholarship (including his prize-winning undergraduate thesis and his Ph.D. dissertation, which became the famous and controversial book Hitler's Willing Executioners) deals with the Nazi genocide of the Jews. This film however deals with genocide in general, focusing on various instances of it, especially fairly recent ones (e.g., Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s; Guatemala in the '80s; Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge; and Darfur).

Goldhagen argues in the film that genocidal political leaders are not "crazy" but are "rational calculators" (his phrase) who weigh costs and benefits; if they are made to realize that genocide will not 'pay' because they will be punished swiftly, then they will not order it. This description may very well apply to Slobodan Milosevic or Omar al-Bashir. Goldhagen does not say explicitly, however, that this description applies to Hitler. And whether the "rational calculator" label applies to perpetrators, as opposed to leaders, is less clear still. (As Goldhagen mentions at one point, surviving concentration camp inmates were sent on forced death marches in the very last days of Nazi Germany, even after officials in the Nazi hierarchy had ordered killings to stop; the organizers of the death marches ignored those orders.) Goldhagen also observes that genocidal leaders mobilize and play on prejudices that people already have; of course, since such prejudices are usually irrational, "rational calculators" have to know how to mobilize and harness irrationality. In the process, however, isn't it possible that these "rational calculators" may come to believe the myths that they start out by exploiting? If so, does that make them less rational? These questions were not really addressed in the film; perhaps they are addressed in the book.

[The break from posting will now resume.]