...I'm not sure why I listened to parts of the Republican convention. One thought that it prompts (viz. the chants of "USA, USA" that punctuated Romney's rather pedestrian speech) is that America is exceptional at least in the volume and insistence with which it proclaims its exceptional-ness. Attention to some of the literary roots or expressions of American exceptionalism might suggest something different: isn't one of the whole points of Owen Wister's Virginian precisely that he does not go around proclaiming how great he is?
P.s. I have a feeling I have made exactly this point before on this blog, but I'm too lazy to check. And if I can't exactly remember, I doubt anyone else will.
P.p.s. At least Clint Eastwood, whose reference to "mental masochism" inspired this post's title, did not do the exceptionalism thing, possibly because he was, to some extent, improvising. He did the "we own the country" thing and the "you are the best" thing, but not the "this country is superior to all others" thing.
P.p.p.s. (added later): I see Dan Balz at WaPo thought Eastwood was bizarre and a distraction. Maybe watching it on TV he was. Judging from just audio and no video, I found an unscripted 10 or 15 minutes kind of refreshing.
Friday, August 31, 2012
Thursday, August 30, 2012
What 'central planners'?
Paul Ryan's speech at the Republican convention last night conjured up the usual specter of government as stifler of individual initiative, etc. He threw in a reference to "central planners," implying, bizarrely even in this context, that Democrats favor a planned economy. Then, too, he attacked the stimulus legislation for cronyism but cited only one example, Solyndra. (Probably the main drawback of the stimulus was that it was too small, not cronyism.) There were a number of other objectionable things, including most of what he said about the Affordable Care Act. However, content aside, I thought that the speech was quite well delivered (based on listening to it on the radio, not watching). Not that that makes, or that it should make, any difference.
Dreadful (?) duo
History 89h. Henry Kissinger: Statecraft in Theory and Practice.
That's the title of an undergraduate seminar being taught by Niall Ferguson at Harvard this fall. A friend of mine described the combination of professor and subject as "unfathomably loathsome" (your mileage may vary, or it may not).
The course description in the catalog reads:
Although I can't abide Ferguson's politics (and cf. the recent justified outrage over his Newsweek piece), I have no idea what Ferguson is like as a teacher. If he welcomes a range of views and doesn't try to push his own line on students, the course might be, at least, non-terrible. (It might even be good.) If he does something else, well...
P.s. What if -- probably a very unlikely scenario -- Ferguson were co-teaching this with Stanley Hoffmann? Now that might have been really interesting.
That's the title of an undergraduate seminar being taught by Niall Ferguson at Harvard this fall. A friend of mine described the combination of professor and subject as "unfathomably loathsome" (your mileage may vary, or it may not).
The course description in the catalog reads:
As National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger was the architect of the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, of the "opening" to China, and of the effort to salvage "peace with honor" in Vietnam. Yet Kissinger should be understood as a scholar as well as a statesman. Using selections from his writings, this seminar will assess Kissinger in his own terms and in the context of modern international history.Who's going to take the course? Obviously some history students and maybe, I'd guess, some political science majors -- or, to use the school's official lingo, Government concentrators. Enrollment is limited to 15.
Although I can't abide Ferguson's politics (and cf. the recent justified outrage over his Newsweek piece), I have no idea what Ferguson is like as a teacher. If he welcomes a range of views and doesn't try to push his own line on students, the course might be, at least, non-terrible. (It might even be good.) If he does something else, well...
P.s. What if -- probably a very unlikely scenario -- Ferguson were co-teaching this with Stanley Hoffmann? Now that might have been really interesting.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Note to whoever (whomever, actually)
I have a post ready to go, so I'm going to put it up sometime tomorrow, even though I said there would be no posting here until Sept. 1.
(I'm sure no one will mind.)
(I'm sure no one will mind.)
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Andrew Marshall and 'Air-Sea Battle'
You don't have to be a Beltway think-tanker, defense policy wonk or avid consumer of varied news sources to know the name of Andrew Marshall -- all you have to do is glance at the acknowledgments in books by certain academics (Stephen Rosen, for example). Marshall, head of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, is a legend in Washington, D.C. by virtue of his longevity and influence. Still, it's not all that often that Marshall figures prominently in a story in the mainstream press. Thus this WaPo piece, about the kerfluffle over Pentagon contingency planning for a conflict with China, may be worth noting. I've only read the first page (it's rather late and I'm tired); I intend to read it more properly later.
P.s. The break resumes tomorrow.
P.s. The break resumes tomorrow.
For the record
In ten years of grad school I don't think I ever had dinner with a professor. A few quick lunches but no dinner. And if I had had dinner with a professor, I certainly would not have ordered the wine.
Dirda on Vidal
Michael Dirda's appreciation of Gore Vidal is worth interrupting the break to link to.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Friday, June 29, 2012
'Human nature' is back
Reader [hereafter R] : What do you mean, "human nature is back"? Has it been on vacation?
LFC: Yes and no. For a while, it was not cricket in parts of the social sciences to talk about human nature, and to some extent this is still true. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, two evolutionary psychologists (who happen also to be married, to each other, I mean) got so perturbed about this some years ago that they began referring to the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM), by which they meant, among other things, a model that neglected 'human nature'. E.O. Wilson picked up the cudgel, taking much of social science to task in his book Consilience and predicting that eventually social science would disappear, would be absorbed into the natural sciences, and we'd be left with only the natural sciences and the humanities.
R: I shudder to think how that would go down with all the political scientists who are tearing their hair out at The Monkey Cage about the possible cutoff in National Science Foundation support for political science.
LFC: Quite. But that doesn't mean Wilson was right. I think he went somewhat overboard in Consilience myself.
R: Back to the main topic, please, whatever it is.
LFC: Ah yes. Well, Cosmides & Tooby should take a peek at what's happening in some corners of International Relations (IR) theory. It's not for the most part evo psych, to be sure, but in recent years there's been a lot of work on emotions and IR. And the latest issue of Int'l Studies Review has an article by Ty Solomon, "Human Nature and the Limits of the Self: Hans Morgenthau on Love and Power," which harks back to a piece Morgenthau wrote for Commentary in the early '60s in which he argued that love and power are both efforts to escape "existential loneliness." Morgenthau's "underexplored thoughts on these issues," according to Solomon, "are crucial for more fully comprehending his seminal critique of the modern liberal, rational subject." (p.215)
R: But how does all that fit in with the Morgenthau of the later 1960s, the opponent of the Vietnam War, advocate of civil rights, and speaker of truth to power? Don't M's political writings from later in the decade presuppose that "the modern liberal, rational subject," despite its/his/her limits, is capable at least of responding to appeals to reason and acting to improve the world, in however partial a way?
LFC: Good questions. But I want to stay with the human nature point. Solomon mentions Robert Schuett's 2010 book on Freud and realism (Political Realism, Freud, and Human Nature in International Relations), which is also reviewed later in the same issue of the journal. The subtitle of Schuett's book is "The Resurrection of the Realist Man."
R: Hmm. This sounds somewhat reactionary, doesn't it? Realist Man [sic]? Have we just tossed several decades of IR feminist theory out the window?
LFC: I had to read some Freud many years ago, and I tend to the view that Freud's work is weakest when it's most speculative and when he's most openly doing social theory. I remember a casual conversation in which, fresh from writing an intemperate undergraduate paper on Civilization and Its Discontents, I denounced it as a terrible book. My interlocutor, a grad student, said cuttingly "you wish you could have written it." Well, I would not make such a sophomoric (and I was in fact a sophomore at the time) remark today. Still, Civilization and Its Discontents is not high on my list of subtle, nuanced works.
R: I don't care what you said in a college dining hall in 1977. You haven't answered the question about Morgenthau. You haven't answered the question about feminist theory.
LFC: What am I, an answer machine? This is a blog, not a PhD seminar. Go figure out your own answers.
R: ***!***#!!
LFC: Well, at least I gave you the last word. Sort of.
LFC: Yes and no. For a while, it was not cricket in parts of the social sciences to talk about human nature, and to some extent this is still true. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, two evolutionary psychologists (who happen also to be married, to each other, I mean) got so perturbed about this some years ago that they began referring to the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM), by which they meant, among other things, a model that neglected 'human nature'. E.O. Wilson picked up the cudgel, taking much of social science to task in his book Consilience and predicting that eventually social science would disappear, would be absorbed into the natural sciences, and we'd be left with only the natural sciences and the humanities.
R: I shudder to think how that would go down with all the political scientists who are tearing their hair out at The Monkey Cage about the possible cutoff in National Science Foundation support for political science.
LFC: Quite. But that doesn't mean Wilson was right. I think he went somewhat overboard in Consilience myself.
R: Back to the main topic, please, whatever it is.
LFC: Ah yes. Well, Cosmides & Tooby should take a peek at what's happening in some corners of International Relations (IR) theory. It's not for the most part evo psych, to be sure, but in recent years there's been a lot of work on emotions and IR. And the latest issue of Int'l Studies Review has an article by Ty Solomon, "Human Nature and the Limits of the Self: Hans Morgenthau on Love and Power," which harks back to a piece Morgenthau wrote for Commentary in the early '60s in which he argued that love and power are both efforts to escape "existential loneliness." Morgenthau's "underexplored thoughts on these issues," according to Solomon, "are crucial for more fully comprehending his seminal critique of the modern liberal, rational subject." (p.215)
R: But how does all that fit in with the Morgenthau of the later 1960s, the opponent of the Vietnam War, advocate of civil rights, and speaker of truth to power? Don't M's political writings from later in the decade presuppose that "the modern liberal, rational subject," despite its/his/her limits, is capable at least of responding to appeals to reason and acting to improve the world, in however partial a way?
LFC: Good questions. But I want to stay with the human nature point. Solomon mentions Robert Schuett's 2010 book on Freud and realism (Political Realism, Freud, and Human Nature in International Relations), which is also reviewed later in the same issue of the journal. The subtitle of Schuett's book is "The Resurrection of the Realist Man."
R: Hmm. This sounds somewhat reactionary, doesn't it? Realist Man [sic]? Have we just tossed several decades of IR feminist theory out the window?
LFC: I had to read some Freud many years ago, and I tend to the view that Freud's work is weakest when it's most speculative and when he's most openly doing social theory. I remember a casual conversation in which, fresh from writing an intemperate undergraduate paper on Civilization and Its Discontents, I denounced it as a terrible book. My interlocutor, a grad student, said cuttingly "you wish you could have written it." Well, I would not make such a sophomoric (and I was in fact a sophomore at the time) remark today. Still, Civilization and Its Discontents is not high on my list of subtle, nuanced works.
R: I don't care what you said in a college dining hall in 1977. You haven't answered the question about Morgenthau. You haven't answered the question about feminist theory.
LFC: What am I, an answer machine? This is a blog, not a PhD seminar. Go figure out your own answers.
R: ***!***#!!
LFC: Well, at least I gave you the last word. Sort of.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
E. Klein on Roberts's craftiness
"By voting with the liberals to uphold the Affordable Care Act, Roberts has put himself above partisan reproach. No one can accuse Roberts of ruling as a movement conservative. He’s made himself bulletproof against insinuations that he’s animated by party allegiances.
"But by voting with the conservatives on every major legal question before the court, he nevertheless furthered the major conservative projects before the court — namely, imposing limits on federal power. And by securing his own reputation for impartiality, he made his own advocacy in those areas much more effective. If, in the future, Roberts leads the court in cases that more radically constrain the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce, today’s decision will help insulate him from criticism. And he did it while rendering a decision that Democrats are applauding."
Full post is here.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Choice v. necessity, once more
Monday, June 25, 2012
Noted
1) WaPo is running excerpts from R. Chandresekaran's new book on Afghanistan.
2) The June issue of Perspectives on Politics is largely devoted to articles on civil war and terrorism, plus it has a thematic book review section on 'Violence and Politics'. The latter includes, e.g., a review by Samuel Moyn of a book on the history of the civilian-combatant distinction [Amazon link]. (One usually needs institutional/personal subscription or APSA-membership access for PoP.)
2) The June issue of Perspectives on Politics is largely devoted to articles on civil war and terrorism, plus it has a thematic book review section on 'Violence and Politics'. The latter includes, e.g., a review by Samuel Moyn of a book on the history of the civilian-combatant distinction [Amazon link]. (One usually needs institutional/personal subscription or APSA-membership access for PoP.)
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Everything you always wanted to know about the 'American empire debate' but were afraid to ask...
Update: A commenter at Reddit, to which this post was submitted (though not by me), calls it "terrible" and suggests a brief 2007 article by Michael Cox in Political Studies Review. I have no doubt that the Cox article (which I haven't read yet) is better than my post. For one thing, it's a 10-page article, not an 8-paragraph blogpost. I'm sorry the commenter considers this post terrible. (I myself used the term "half-baked," which is a tad more nuanced.) I'm planning -- no, really, seriously, truly I am -- a complete break from blogging in July and August, so the commenter in question can look forward to a long period of relief from my posts.
-----
I rarely have the time or patience to read through my old posts, and I certainly don't have the inclination to do that now. But a quick search reveals that, with a couple of exceptions, I haven't had a whole lot to say on this blog, except indirectly, about the 'American empire' debate. The subject keeps coming up, though, at least at Crooked Timber, where a post by H. Farrrell called "Imperialist Doublethink" has reignited the whole thing.
There are at least several available positions on the debate, which for purposes of this post I'll label (1) the "imperial dynamics" view, (2) the "empire of bases" view, (3) the "dollar rules" view, (4) the "Empire capital E" view and (5) the "it's all rubbish" view. No doubt, as this is going from my keyboard straight to the screen, it's going to be somewhat half-baked. But since some of my carefully drafted posts of the past don't seem to have lit a lot of people's fires, so to speak, maybe in this context careful drafting can be dispensed with.
(1) The 'imperial dynamics' view: This is the one I feel most confident about expounding, b/c I have actually read (well, more or less) the Nexon/Wright 2007 article "What's at Stake in the American Empire Debate" (APSR, May '07). Nexon/Wright's position is: "Is the US an empire?" is not a useful question. Rather, the US's foreign relations exhibit certain 'imperial dynamics,' i.e. 'indirect rule' through local elites (cf., for example, Iraq, 2003-2011, and perhaps beyond) and 'heterogeneous contracting', i.e. the US strikes different sorts of bargains and arrangements, rather than the same sort, with less powerful (or more 'peripheral') actors, which it thereby contrives to keep from collaborating against it (though with mixed success: cf. Walt's Taming American Power). Nexon/Wright think that according to their criteria the US is less 'imperial' now than it was during the Cold War, though as of 2007 they were somewhat uncertain about how 'imperial' it would be in the future. (Note: Reading this article, or even parts of it, is not fun. But it was published in APSR, which I guess means you should read it whether it's fun or not.)
(2) The "empire of bases" view holds, as the label suggests, that the US is an empire b/c it has military bases all over the world from which it can project military power into whatever region it wants.
(3) The "dollar rules" view emphasizes the way the dollar's role as reserve currency reinforces, and/or is reinforced by, US military power. Sometimes it's expressed more crudely, as in the contention that the US uses the threat of military force to keep countries buying dollar-denominated debt. In this strong form, the position seems quite implausible. (CT readers will not need to have this all rehashed for them.)
(4) The "Empire capital E view": This has something to do with Hardt and Negri's famous book Empire, which I haven't read, though in good blogger fashion I did take five seconds to glance at the rather brief -- surprisingly brief -- Wikipedia entry on it. (I've also glanced in the past at one or two learned symposia on the book, which apparently left few lasting impressions on me.) In short, this view holds that Empire = the current 'liberal' world order, against which resistance of various kinds is steadily growing, despite the best efforts of the order's defenders to defuse it. Well, go read the book (plus its sequels) and come back and tell me what it says, 'cause it appears that I'm not likely to anytime soon.
(5) 'It's all rubbish': This view holds that empire means formal empire, which means formal colonies, which mostly no longer exist. Other uses of "empire" are just smoke being blown by jargon-wielding political scientists or radicals of one sort or another who are out to make trouble and bamboozle. Or so this view maintains.
Who's right? Good question. I'd love to stick around and answer that but I have to do some other things now. Sorry.
-----
I rarely have the time or patience to read through my old posts, and I certainly don't have the inclination to do that now. But a quick search reveals that, with a couple of exceptions, I haven't had a whole lot to say on this blog, except indirectly, about the 'American empire' debate. The subject keeps coming up, though, at least at Crooked Timber, where a post by H. Farrrell called "Imperialist Doublethink" has reignited the whole thing.
There are at least several available positions on the debate, which for purposes of this post I'll label (1) the "imperial dynamics" view, (2) the "empire of bases" view, (3) the "dollar rules" view, (4) the "Empire capital E" view and (5) the "it's all rubbish" view. No doubt, as this is going from my keyboard straight to the screen, it's going to be somewhat half-baked. But since some of my carefully drafted posts of the past don't seem to have lit a lot of people's fires, so to speak, maybe in this context careful drafting can be dispensed with.
(1) The 'imperial dynamics' view: This is the one I feel most confident about expounding, b/c I have actually read (well, more or less) the Nexon/Wright 2007 article "What's at Stake in the American Empire Debate" (APSR, May '07). Nexon/Wright's position is: "Is the US an empire?" is not a useful question. Rather, the US's foreign relations exhibit certain 'imperial dynamics,' i.e. 'indirect rule' through local elites (cf., for example, Iraq, 2003-2011, and perhaps beyond) and 'heterogeneous contracting', i.e. the US strikes different sorts of bargains and arrangements, rather than the same sort, with less powerful (or more 'peripheral') actors, which it thereby contrives to keep from collaborating against it (though with mixed success: cf. Walt's Taming American Power). Nexon/Wright think that according to their criteria the US is less 'imperial' now than it was during the Cold War, though as of 2007 they were somewhat uncertain about how 'imperial' it would be in the future. (Note: Reading this article, or even parts of it, is not fun. But it was published in APSR, which I guess means you should read it whether it's fun or not.)
(2) The "empire of bases" view holds, as the label suggests, that the US is an empire b/c it has military bases all over the world from which it can project military power into whatever region it wants.
(3) The "dollar rules" view emphasizes the way the dollar's role as reserve currency reinforces, and/or is reinforced by, US military power. Sometimes it's expressed more crudely, as in the contention that the US uses the threat of military force to keep countries buying dollar-denominated debt. In this strong form, the position seems quite implausible. (CT readers will not need to have this all rehashed for them.)
(4) The "Empire capital E view": This has something to do with Hardt and Negri's famous book Empire, which I haven't read, though in good blogger fashion I did take five seconds to glance at the rather brief -- surprisingly brief -- Wikipedia entry on it. (I've also glanced in the past at one or two learned symposia on the book, which apparently left few lasting impressions on me.) In short, this view holds that Empire = the current 'liberal' world order, against which resistance of various kinds is steadily growing, despite the best efforts of the order's defenders to defuse it. Well, go read the book (plus its sequels) and come back and tell me what it says, 'cause it appears that I'm not likely to anytime soon.
(5) 'It's all rubbish': This view holds that empire means formal empire, which means formal colonies, which mostly no longer exist. Other uses of "empire" are just smoke being blown by jargon-wielding political scientists or radicals of one sort or another who are out to make trouble and bamboozle. Or so this view maintains.
Who's right? Good question. I'd love to stick around and answer that but I have to do some other things now. Sorry.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Thought for the day
In the syntactical (if not the substantive) spirit of Trotsky, who said that on becoming the Soviet Union's foreign minister he would pass a few resolutions and close up shop, perhaps we should hang a for-sale sign on U.S. elections and all go home.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Remove the UN observers from Syria
Update: for more on the helicopters, here.
The situation in Syria continues to move toward a full-scale civil war, with the Assad regime, as part of its ongoing brutality, deploying helicopter gunships (now allegedly being sent by Russia) and apparently using children as human shields, while the opposition fights back with arms probably supplied by Saudi Arabia and/or other Gulf states. The pointlessness of having unarmed UN observers in this situation is becoming glaringly obvious. There is currently no ceasefire to observe, and whatever slim benefit may derive from the presence of observers is outweighed by the real possibility that the observers themselves will become targets and will be injured or killed. Moreover, keeping observers on the ground in this situation, it seems to me, not only endangers the observers themselves but plays into the hands of those who have an ideological or political interest in portraying the UN as feckless and weak. It's one thing to be unable to solve a problem; it's another to publicize and emphasize your inability to solve a problem by, in effect, standing on a rooftop and shrieking: "I am unable to solve this problem!!" That is the only message the presence of UN observers in Syria seems to be conveying right now.
The situation in Syria continues to move toward a full-scale civil war, with the Assad regime, as part of its ongoing brutality, deploying helicopter gunships (now allegedly being sent by Russia) and apparently using children as human shields, while the opposition fights back with arms probably supplied by Saudi Arabia and/or other Gulf states. The pointlessness of having unarmed UN observers in this situation is becoming glaringly obvious. There is currently no ceasefire to observe, and whatever slim benefit may derive from the presence of observers is outweighed by the real possibility that the observers themselves will become targets and will be injured or killed. Moreover, keeping observers on the ground in this situation, it seems to me, not only endangers the observers themselves but plays into the hands of those who have an ideological or political interest in portraying the UN as feckless and weak. It's one thing to be unable to solve a problem; it's another to publicize and emphasize your inability to solve a problem by, in effect, standing on a rooftop and shrieking: "I am unable to solve this problem!!" That is the only message the presence of UN observers in Syria seems to be conveying right now.
Monday, June 11, 2012
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Diamonds are aglitter but policy's stuck in the mud
Writing from London at the start of the Diamond Jubilee, Steven Pearlstein argues that the Cameron government has both economic and political reasons for easing up on its refusal to engage in "targeted investments" (i.e., spending on certain projects like a new London airport and new housing), but the memory of Thatcher is acting as an unhelpful brake on what remains of the Conservative imagination. Too bad they don't reach a bit further back and look to the tradition of Tory Democracy.
Friday, June 1, 2012
Two views on Obama's use of drones
Monday, May 28, 2012
Cheney in the twilight zone
Via PM, quoting Steve Coll, comes the nugget that Cheney thought the last chapter of Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics was a bit too "softhearted." This is fairly mind-boggling. Mearsheimer's basic line in that chapter was that the U.S. had to take deliberate measures to slow down China's economic growth, because otherwise security competition would increase, leading to a higher likelihood of military conflict, presumably on terms increasingly unfavorable to the U.S. Short of advocating a preventive war, which no one in his/her right mind would, I'm not sure how much more hardheaded (or whatever the opposite of softhearted is) one could get. (Of course, Mearsheimer was not right, I think.)
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Romney in Philly
So Romney, according to WaPo, went to a charter school in West Philadelphia, did some listening, but also delivered a little sermony remark about two-parent families and cited a McKinsey study purporting to show that class size is not correlated with student achievement. Wow. I guess, on balance, it's better than not going to West Philadelphia, though he can't possibly expect to get many votes there, I wouldn't think.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
The mantra of growth; or, Bhagwati vs. Pogge
Given the nature of the news cycle, the debate sparked by Pres. Obama's (successful) nomination of Jim Yong Kim to head the World Bank has long since been eclipsed by a spate of fresher stories. But I wanted to write this post before the Kim story faded into complete oblivion, because the debate over Kim raised again some fundamental questions about economic growth, inequality, and poverty.
In a column published last month criticizing the choice of Kim, Jagdish Bhagwati asserted that the Obama administration has the wrong view of development. He wrote:
A 2008 article by Thomas Pogge suggests that the answer is yes.* Pogge used China to illustrate his case. He argued that although poverty in China has gone down substantially, "it is likely that more equitable growth," i.e., growth accompanied by less income inequality, "would have been much better for the Chinese poor." Pogge pointed out that although China's gross national income (GNI) increased dramatically from 1990 to 2004, the relative income share of the bottom ten percent (decile) of China's population decreased from 30.8% in 1990 to 16.0% in 2004. This decrease in its relative share meant that the absolute income of the poorest decile increased "by only 75 percent" at a time when China's GNI was going up by a whopping 236 percent (see section 5.3 of the article as reprinted in Pogge's Politics as Usual, pp.100ff.).
What if China had preserved the income distribution as it existed in 1990, even if that meant sacrificing some growth? Pogge assumed, for the sake of argument, that preserving the existing income shares would have cost China 2.3 percentage points in per capita GNI growth from 1990 to 2004. Under this assumption, the poorest decile "would have done much better..., ending the period [in 2004] at an average income of $715, rather than $500, thus with a gain of 150 rather than 75 percent." (p.101) Slower, more equitable growth also would have caused less environmental degradation, a consideration that, coupled with equity, suggests that "all countries should conceive growth much more from the standpoint of their poorer population segments" (p.102, italics in original). He also pointed out that economic inequality is much easier to create (or generate) than to reverse, because the better-off are able to change the relevant rules in their favor (ibid.). There are, in other words, lock-in effects (though Pogge does not use that phrase).
Pogge also highlighted the growth in global income inequality from 1988 to 2002, with the relative share of "the poorest 30 percent of humanity" down by about 20 percent during that period, "from 1.52 to 1.22 percent of global household income" (p.106). Again, inequality translates into differential influence over the rules that shape the distribution of global income and wealth (p.107).
These are the sorts of considerations one should keep in mind when reading the celebratory assertions of Bhagwati and others about rapid economic growth in 'the emerging countries' and its effect on poverty. Of course such growth has reduced poverty, in some cases substantially, but poverty would have been reduced even more if that growth had been more equitable, even if less rapid. Neoliberal globalization, heralded by its supporters for reducing poverty, has likely not reduced poverty as much as a more equitable form of globalization would have, and it has perpetuated the unequal structure of influence in global institutions. The appointment of Kim to the Bank will obviously not drastically change this, since no single appointment could have such an effect and the institution will no doubt exert its organizational pull over any leader. But Kim's critical stance toward neoliberal globalization -- or what was his critical stance some years ago, at any rate -- perhaps offers a bit of hope. In any event, Bhagwati's critique was completely off the mark.
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*T. Pogge, "Growth and Inequality: Understanding Recent Trends and Political Choices," Dissent (Winter 2008), reprinted (in slightly different form) in his Politics as Usual: What Lies Behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric (Polity Press, 2010), pp.93-109.
In a column published last month criticizing the choice of Kim, Jagdish Bhagwati asserted that the Obama administration has the wrong view of development. He wrote:
...perhaps the most compelling factor in Obama’s choice [of Kim] seems to have been a fundamental misunderstanding of what "development" requires. Micro-level policies such as health care, which the Obama administration seems to believe is what "development" policy ought to be, can only go so far. But macro-level policies, such as liberalization of trade and investment, privatization, and so forth, are powerful engines of poverty reduction; indeed, they are among the key components of the reforms that countries like India and China embraced in the mid-1980’s and early 1990’s....Now, there's no question that economic growth in India and especially in China has enabled millions of people to improve their living standards and leave the ranks of the extremely poor. And it's also true that economic growth generates revenues that governments, if they have wise priorities and some administrative resources, can use for public-health, education, and similar purposes. But Bhagwati failed to ask an important question: Could 'emerging countries' have reduced poverty even more by following a different, more equitable growth path?
[I]t is the rapid acceleration of economic growth in the major emerging countries that has reduced poverty, not only directly, through jobs and higher incomes, but also by generating the revenues governments need to undertake the public-health, education, and other programs that sustain poverty reduction – and growth – in the long term.
A 2008 article by Thomas Pogge suggests that the answer is yes.* Pogge used China to illustrate his case. He argued that although poverty in China has gone down substantially, "it is likely that more equitable growth," i.e., growth accompanied by less income inequality, "would have been much better for the Chinese poor." Pogge pointed out that although China's gross national income (GNI) increased dramatically from 1990 to 2004, the relative income share of the bottom ten percent (decile) of China's population decreased from 30.8% in 1990 to 16.0% in 2004. This decrease in its relative share meant that the absolute income of the poorest decile increased "by only 75 percent" at a time when China's GNI was going up by a whopping 236 percent (see section 5.3 of the article as reprinted in Pogge's Politics as Usual, pp.100ff.).
What if China had preserved the income distribution as it existed in 1990, even if that meant sacrificing some growth? Pogge assumed, for the sake of argument, that preserving the existing income shares would have cost China 2.3 percentage points in per capita GNI growth from 1990 to 2004. Under this assumption, the poorest decile "would have done much better..., ending the period [in 2004] at an average income of $715, rather than $500, thus with a gain of 150 rather than 75 percent." (p.101) Slower, more equitable growth also would have caused less environmental degradation, a consideration that, coupled with equity, suggests that "all countries should conceive growth much more from the standpoint of their poorer population segments" (p.102, italics in original). He also pointed out that economic inequality is much easier to create (or generate) than to reverse, because the better-off are able to change the relevant rules in their favor (ibid.). There are, in other words, lock-in effects (though Pogge does not use that phrase).
Pogge also highlighted the growth in global income inequality from 1988 to 2002, with the relative share of "the poorest 30 percent of humanity" down by about 20 percent during that period, "from 1.52 to 1.22 percent of global household income" (p.106). Again, inequality translates into differential influence over the rules that shape the distribution of global income and wealth (p.107).
These are the sorts of considerations one should keep in mind when reading the celebratory assertions of Bhagwati and others about rapid economic growth in 'the emerging countries' and its effect on poverty. Of course such growth has reduced poverty, in some cases substantially, but poverty would have been reduced even more if that growth had been more equitable, even if less rapid. Neoliberal globalization, heralded by its supporters for reducing poverty, has likely not reduced poverty as much as a more equitable form of globalization would have, and it has perpetuated the unequal structure of influence in global institutions. The appointment of Kim to the Bank will obviously not drastically change this, since no single appointment could have such an effect and the institution will no doubt exert its organizational pull over any leader. But Kim's critical stance toward neoliberal globalization -- or what was his critical stance some years ago, at any rate -- perhaps offers a bit of hope. In any event, Bhagwati's critique was completely off the mark.
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*T. Pogge, "Growth and Inequality: Understanding Recent Trends and Political Choices," Dissent (Winter 2008), reprinted (in slightly different form) in his Politics as Usual: What Lies Behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric (Polity Press, 2010), pp.93-109.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Regional integration and the state, Mideast version
An interesting statement by Harriet Feinberg reproduced in this post suggests that "new governance structures" may be the eventual solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Israel, she writes, will need to become part of two "regional consortia," one consisting of Mideast countries, the other of those that border the Mediterranean. She cites the EU as a work-in-progress and also (implicitly) a model, as well as regional integration efforts in Africa and South America.
One of the notable features of existing regional arrangements, however, is that they have not replaced nation-states but rather built on top of them. Nor is there any strong evidence that the EU, for instance, is going to replace states in the foreseeable future. Thus while Feinberg's thoughts are to be welcomed, her vision of separate nation-states in the Mideast becoming as obsolete as Royal typewriters in 50 or 100 years is one that I would hesitate to place bets on as a prediction. Which is not to say that regional consortia are not a good idea; they almost certainly are. Whether they can solve the underlying problems in that region, however, is less clear.
One of the notable features of existing regional arrangements, however, is that they have not replaced nation-states but rather built on top of them. Nor is there any strong evidence that the EU, for instance, is going to replace states in the foreseeable future. Thus while Feinberg's thoughts are to be welcomed, her vision of separate nation-states in the Mideast becoming as obsolete as Royal typewriters in 50 or 100 years is one that I would hesitate to place bets on as a prediction. Which is not to say that regional consortia are not a good idea; they almost certainly are. Whether they can solve the underlying problems in that region, however, is less clear.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
An omission
CORRECTION (added 6/5/12): Awlaki and his son were killed in two different strikes, not the same one. See here. That no one corrected my mistake is an indication, if any were needed, of how few people read this blog.
Reports (WaPo, NewsHour) about the latest story involving AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) mention the U.S. drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki last fall but don't mention that [a later strike, I should have said] killed Awlaki's 16-year-old son.
Reports (WaPo, NewsHour) about the latest story involving AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) mention the U.S. drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki last fall but don't mention that [a later strike, I should have said] killed Awlaki's 16-year-old son.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Coming late to a right-wing "theorist"
Following a link on another blog, I just read a column by Spengler, which is the name David Goldman uses for his columns in the Asia Times online. This particular Spengler piece conjures up the ghost of Richelieu, who "advises" that Iran should be attacked. According to a puff for one of Goldman's books at Amazon, his Spengler column has a million readers a month. If true, this is depressing. The book in question, by the way, appears to argue that "population decline" is "the issue of the 21st century" and that declining fertility in the Muslim world fuels Islamic radicalism. Or something like that. I never cease to wonder at the amount of rubbish that manages to get published. Declining fertility in the Muslim world actually is a positive trend, certainly from the standpoint of long-term economic development, and one has to ponder the sanity of someone who tries to construe it as a major "threat."
Update: Wikipedia's entry on the real Spengler mentions that Goldman has been writing his column since the beginning of 2000. I had been happily unaware of the column until now.
Update: Wikipedia's entry on the real Spengler mentions that Goldman has been writing his column since the beginning of 2000. I had been happily unaware of the column until now.
Friday, May 4, 2012
Only bad options
Added 5/6: A review of a recent book about the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in the late 80s. Parallels? Decide for yourself.
There is no good exit strategy available for the U.S./ISAF/NATO from Afghanistan, which should not be very surprising: there rarely are good options for withdrawal and extrication from this kind of conflict. The best outcome might be a negotiated peace settlement that brings elements of the Taliban into a kind of national unity government, but that prospect does not seem at all likely right now.
Pres. Obama has said that after 2014, the U.S. will remain only to help the Afghans with 'counterterrorism' and training. Eugene Robinson asks why the U.S. doesn't make that switch now instead of at the end of 2014. The official answer is that the extra time is needed for the Afghan security forces to gain more strength, though that is not exactly a comforting or perhaps even a convincing rationale or justification for continuing loss of life.
Two former State Dept. employees who worked in Afghanistan, writing in the March/April 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs, argue for leaving a sizeable number of U.S. civilian and military advisers in Afghanistan after 2014, adding that the advisers should 'rough it' and share the risks to which those they are advising will be exposed. Obama did not mention this approach explicitly in his speech from Bagram the other evening, but I wouldn't be surprised if an 'advisory strategy' is basically what ends up being adopted, regardless of who wins the November election here. "Advisers" would be a loose term covering both civilians and a military force, which David Ignatius thinks could number up to 20,000, though Obama mentioned no numbers in the speech. Ignatius believes this strategy makes sense, but here's a problem: what happens if, by the time 2024 rolls around, Afghanistan is still in turmoil and the 'counterterrorism' strategy or 'advisory' strategy (I think the differences between these are not all that significant) hasn't succeeded? Commit the force for another ten years? I don't think anyone would be happy with that.
There is no good exit strategy available for the U.S./ISAF/NATO from Afghanistan, which should not be very surprising: there rarely are good options for withdrawal and extrication from this kind of conflict. The best outcome might be a negotiated peace settlement that brings elements of the Taliban into a kind of national unity government, but that prospect does not seem at all likely right now.
Pres. Obama has said that after 2014, the U.S. will remain only to help the Afghans with 'counterterrorism' and training. Eugene Robinson asks why the U.S. doesn't make that switch now instead of at the end of 2014. The official answer is that the extra time is needed for the Afghan security forces to gain more strength, though that is not exactly a comforting or perhaps even a convincing rationale or justification for continuing loss of life.
Two former State Dept. employees who worked in Afghanistan, writing in the March/April 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs, argue for leaving a sizeable number of U.S. civilian and military advisers in Afghanistan after 2014, adding that the advisers should 'rough it' and share the risks to which those they are advising will be exposed. Obama did not mention this approach explicitly in his speech from Bagram the other evening, but I wouldn't be surprised if an 'advisory strategy' is basically what ends up being adopted, regardless of who wins the November election here. "Advisers" would be a loose term covering both civilians and a military force, which David Ignatius thinks could number up to 20,000, though Obama mentioned no numbers in the speech. Ignatius believes this strategy makes sense, but here's a problem: what happens if, by the time 2024 rolls around, Afghanistan is still in turmoil and the 'counterterrorism' strategy or 'advisory' strategy (I think the differences between these are not all that significant) hasn't succeeded? Commit the force for another ten years? I don't think anyone would be happy with that.
The Scream and Angelus Novus
It occurred to me that there is arguably some similarity between Munch's 'The Scream,' which just sold at auction for close to $120 million, and Klee's 'Angelus Novus,' the subject of a well-known passage by Walter Benjamin describing it as picturing "the angel of history." The arguable similarity lies in the vibes the works give off rather than in a literal visual similarity. (The Benjamin passage is quoted by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities at the end of ch. 9; see also Anthony Marx, Faith in Nation, pp. 204-5.) I'm pretty sure this thought isn't original so I'm not even bothering to google around and find out how many people have had it before me.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Were the "trusters" right?
In an article published a year ago, Brian Rathbun looked at the views held by U.S. liberals and conservatives just after World War II about the institutional design of the UN and NATO.* Rathbun argued -- I'm simplifying for the sake of brevity -- that liberals (mostly though not exclusively Democrats) wanted a more co-operative, multilateral approach and strategy because they were more "trusting" of allies and less fearful that allies would take advantage of the U.S., whereas conservatives (mostly though not exclusively Republicans) were less "trusting." Thus on NATO, for example, the Truman administration, Rathbun writes, "was willing to provide a guarantee of European security before the Europeans could effectively contribute to the alliance because it expected future reciprocity." By contrast, conservative Republicans wanted a "unilateral declaration of American intent," a sort of Monroe Doctrine for western Europe, rather than NATO, "but even moderate Republicans wanted the Europeans to first demonstrate their commitment to continental defense before the conclusion of any pact...." The less "trusting" Republicans feared 'free-riding' (in the non-technical sense of that phrase), i.e. they feared that the European states in NATO would not contribute adequately to their own defense.
Rathbun is interested in making a theoretical argument about social psychology, trust, and dispositions to co-operate, so he doesn't, at least from what I gather based on a perusal of the article, ask which side turned out to be right. Were Republicans correct to fear that allies would take advantage of a U.S. commitment to their security and not contribute to their own defense? It depends, I suppose, on how strong a version of the argument one takes. NATO members certainly have maintained their own defense budgets and militaries, but the question of relative contributions has been a sore point in recent years and probably throughout much of the alliance's history. And when it comes to U.S. security commitments to allies in Asia, the situation is probably etched in sharper relief. Robert Kelly (who, like Rathbun, blogs at Duck of Minerva) has pointed out that the level of defense spending by South Korea is "irresponsibly low," i.e., South Korea is taking advantage of the U.S. security umbrella to avoid spending very much on its own defense. Trust is all well and good, but in these contexts it does seem to have led to what IR scholars loosely (because it's not really the technical definition) call free-riding. I never, ever thought I'd quote Reagan with approval about anything, but here one can't help recall the slogan -- admittedly taken out of context -- "trust but verify."
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*B. Rathbun, "The 'Magnificent Fraud': Trust, International Cooperation, and the Hidden Domestic Politics of American Multilateralism after World War II," Int'l Studies Quarterly v.55 (2011):1-21.
Rathbun is interested in making a theoretical argument about social psychology, trust, and dispositions to co-operate, so he doesn't, at least from what I gather based on a perusal of the article, ask which side turned out to be right. Were Republicans correct to fear that allies would take advantage of a U.S. commitment to their security and not contribute to their own defense? It depends, I suppose, on how strong a version of the argument one takes. NATO members certainly have maintained their own defense budgets and militaries, but the question of relative contributions has been a sore point in recent years and probably throughout much of the alliance's history. And when it comes to U.S. security commitments to allies in Asia, the situation is probably etched in sharper relief. Robert Kelly (who, like Rathbun, blogs at Duck of Minerva) has pointed out that the level of defense spending by South Korea is "irresponsibly low," i.e., South Korea is taking advantage of the U.S. security umbrella to avoid spending very much on its own defense. Trust is all well and good, but in these contexts it does seem to have led to what IR scholars loosely (because it's not really the technical definition) call free-riding. I never, ever thought I'd quote Reagan with approval about anything, but here one can't help recall the slogan -- admittedly taken out of context -- "trust but verify."
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*B. Rathbun, "The 'Magnificent Fraud': Trust, International Cooperation, and the Hidden Domestic Politics of American Multilateralism after World War II," Int'l Studies Quarterly v.55 (2011):1-21.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Mann & Ornstein: 'extremist' GOP to blame for polarization and gridlock
An important piece by two veteran Congress-watchers, not known usually for being excitable but clearly distressed right now, and with reason.
Friday, April 27, 2012
More on inequality
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Just call it history?
Robert Kelly writes:
Also, a small comment on path dependence. I have a feeling some people think it means "things go along on a fairly steady course until some big event comes along and shakes things up, whereupon a new course emerges and things go along steadily in that vein until ... etc." That's not what path dependence means. Pierson in his 2000 APSR article and subsequent book (Politics in Time [here]) is very clear that small events can be as important as big ones; what matters is where an event comes in a sequence (the earlier the more influential), not how "big" the event is.
Is the ‘institutional turn’ in the social sciences just a fancy way of saying we look at patterns over time, and is that just a fancy way of saying ‘history’? I don’t mean to be trite; I know I’m not a good methodologist as my reviewers always tell me. But I don’t really see why we don’t just call ‘historical institutionalism’ ‘history.’ Path dependence, temporality, sequencing – that’s all stuff historians have been doing for awhile, no?Well, I'd say yes, but many historians don't like to be very explicit about what they're doing, unlike IR types, who can't get an article accepted unless it has at least 5 pages of theoretical throat-clearing (10 pages would be better).
Also, a small comment on path dependence. I have a feeling some people think it means "things go along on a fairly steady course until some big event comes along and shakes things up, whereupon a new course emerges and things go along steadily in that vein until ... etc." That's not what path dependence means. Pierson in his 2000 APSR article and subsequent book (Politics in Time [here]) is very clear that small events can be as important as big ones; what matters is where an event comes in a sequence (the earlier the more influential), not how "big" the event is.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Zakaria on envy and aspiration
Fareed Zakaria says the Obama re-election campaign has the wrong message: instead of emphasizing 'the Buffett rule' and reducing inequality, the President, according to Zakaria, should stress his proposals to increase spending on infrastructure, R&D, and education, and Obama should contrast those proposals with the Republican focus on budget-cutting.
Zakaria believes, apparently, that the Obama campaign can't walk and chew gum at the same time: either it must focus on reducing inequality or focus on investment in infrastructure, etc. But why not emphasize both? Here's where, if I may switch from one bad metaphor to another, the rubber hits the road: Zakaria doesn't like all this talk about inequality. Why not? Because it runs counter to his shopworn view of Americans' moral psychology: Americans, he writes, are "aspirational" not "envious," therefore focusing on inequality is bad politics in the long run.
This is, to be blunt, a load of crap. The U.S. now has a more unequal distribution of income than Kenya (and several other developing countries). The notion that you must be "envious" if you want a multi-millionaire or billionaire to shoulder a slightly larger share of the tax burden is nonsense.
Americans aren't envious, they are "aspirational": how many thousands of times have you heard this bromide repeated by one pundit or another? Americans don't envy the rich, God forbid; they want to become rich themselves. What if the real situation is that Americans want a less unequal distribution of wealth and income because huge inequalities are offensive to a basic sense of justice?
Zakaria, who earned a Harvard Ph.D. with a political science dissertation on the U.S.'s growth and emergence as a world power at the turn of the twentieth century, is slated to be the main speaker at Harvard's commencement this spring. If he trundles out this platitudinous b.s. about envy and aspiration in his speech on that occasion, I hope he gets booed off the podium.
Zakaria believes, apparently, that the Obama campaign can't walk and chew gum at the same time: either it must focus on reducing inequality or focus on investment in infrastructure, etc. But why not emphasize both? Here's where, if I may switch from one bad metaphor to another, the rubber hits the road: Zakaria doesn't like all this talk about inequality. Why not? Because it runs counter to his shopworn view of Americans' moral psychology: Americans, he writes, are "aspirational" not "envious," therefore focusing on inequality is bad politics in the long run.
This is, to be blunt, a load of crap. The U.S. now has a more unequal distribution of income than Kenya (and several other developing countries). The notion that you must be "envious" if you want a multi-millionaire or billionaire to shoulder a slightly larger share of the tax burden is nonsense.
Americans aren't envious, they are "aspirational": how many thousands of times have you heard this bromide repeated by one pundit or another? Americans don't envy the rich, God forbid; they want to become rich themselves. What if the real situation is that Americans want a less unequal distribution of wealth and income because huge inequalities are offensive to a basic sense of justice?
Zakaria, who earned a Harvard Ph.D. with a political science dissertation on the U.S.'s growth and emergence as a world power at the turn of the twentieth century, is slated to be the main speaker at Harvard's commencement this spring. If he trundles out this platitudinous b.s. about envy and aspiration in his speech on that occasion, I hope he gets booed off the podium.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Book notes
In case you missed it, Gaddis's biography of Kennan, mentioned here previously, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography, while the late Manning Marable's book on Malcolm X won the history prize (via); I also happened to read another review of Gaddis, by Frank Costigliola in the New York Review of Books, that I found quite interesting. (He criticizes Gaddis for giving Kennan's later views -- on Vietnam, nuclear weapons, etc. -- too little emphasis.)
Recently published: Rachel Maddow's Drift (on U.S. foreign/military policy) and Timothy Noah's The Great Divergence (on income inequality in the U.S.) are aimed at a broad audience and I imagine will be getting a fair amount of discussion, especially Noah. (Drift is mentioned in this post.)
Lastly, some who are stopping by here may be interested in this (not yet published).
Recently published: Rachel Maddow's Drift (on U.S. foreign/military policy) and Timothy Noah's The Great Divergence (on income inequality in the U.S.) are aimed at a broad audience and I imagine will be getting a fair amount of discussion, especially Noah. (Drift is mentioned in this post.)
Lastly, some who are stopping by here may be interested in this (not yet published).
Saturday, April 21, 2012
The Pentagon's response to China's 'threat'
I ran across this piece in Commentary (not on my usual circuit) by Bill Gertz last night. I haven't read it all and don't agree with the tone and general perspective, but it appears to be informative about internal U.S. policy debates on China and the Chinese military, so I'm passing it on here fwiw.
Friday, April 20, 2012
Footsteps on the Moon
Krathaummer is exercised today about China's overtaking the U.S. in space, what with the retirement of the last shuttle and the cancellation of the Constellation program. China's footsteps are going to overlay ours on the Moon. Horrors. Didn't Neal Armstrong refer to one giant step for mankind, not simply for the U.S.?
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
CIA seeks expanded drone authority in Yemen
Drezner's only three-quarters right about the UN
D. Drezner answers W.R. Mead's bizarre assertion that the UN is "less prestigious and influential than it was in the 1940s and 1950s," but in doing so Drezner, IMO, stumbles once or twice. First, he says, in effect, that the General Assembly was never important. I don't think that's quite right. The 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (referred to by me in this post) had a large symbolic importance and almost certainly some real-world effects, and the NIEO (New Intl. Ec. Order) declarations of the '70s also had some significance, contrary to Drezner's dismissal of them. I'm also not sure I would paint the UN's effectiveness as "entirely a function of the current state of great power politics" (emphasis added). That's a very major factor but probably not the only one. What are the other factors? Well, perceptions of the UN among electorates and in the world as a whole probably matter, too. And no doubt some other things, such as the quality of the organization's leadership and staff...
Monday, April 16, 2012
How to f*** up grad school (among other things), in a few easy lessons
Some encouragement from Kindred Winecoff over at IPE@UNC has persuaded me to take a shot at a post outlining the mistakes I made during my career (such as it was) as a graduate student. This will not be a now-I-reveal-everything sort of post -- I've chosen to blog under my initials, after all -- but I think I can manage to convey some points without going into too many specifics and details. (Well, having written it, it turns out I have gone into some details. I also realize that I probably don't come off as a paragon of wisdom and scholarly wonderful-ness in this post. So be it.)
***
My situation was unusual from the start, because I was considerably older than most Ph.D. students when I began grad school. I had gone to law school (also a mistake, btw, but never mind that now) almost right after college (I took one year in between them), and then after law school worked for a number of years -- not, for the most part, practicing law, though I did do that briefly, but rather working in fairly conventional go-to-an-office-sit-at-a-computer-edit-and-write-stuff type of employment (it wasn't journalism as usually understood but somewhat more specialized). I eventually got bored with that, decided I didn't want to spend the rest of my working life doing it, and decided to go back to school.
I applied to a couple of M.A. programs (not simultaneously but in succession). The first one was a rather prestigious one that I didn't get into. The second institution not only admitted me to its M.A. program but ended up -- for reasons that largely had to do with some idiosyncratic factors not worth going into -- offering me a place in its Ph.D. program.
Mistake #1: I should never have accepted that offer without (i) thinking longer and harder than I did about whether I really wanted to get a Ph.D. and (ii) if so, whether I wanted to get it at that institution.
The institution in question was not a traditional political science department (my Ph.D. says International Relations, not Political Science), but the majority of faculty members were political scientists. The program was closer to a "big thinking and deep theorizing" (Kindred's words) type of program than to what Dan N. calls an "overprofessionalized" program. I had to take exactly one quant methods course, which was fairly worthless, and that was it. (At the time that was fine with me: I stopped high school math after 11th-grade trigonometry and analytic geometry, or whatever the course was called, and never took calculus, anywhere, though I certainly could have.)
I actually enjoyed aspects of my first couple of years as a PhD student, despite the heavy reading/writing load. Perhaps partly because, as I've already said, this was not a traditional pol sci department, the required first-year seminars were along the lines of Big Books and Big Theory (not exclusively but to a fair extent). So in my first year (this was the mid-'90s, btw, just to give the time frame) I read, for instance, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (much of) Polanyi's The Great Transformation, re-read some of the Marx and Weber that I'd read in college, plus a bit of Kant and Plato and Hobbes and Grotius, plus, of course, standard IR theory stuff: Waltz, Theory of International Politics; Carr, Twenty Years' Crisis; Oye et al., Cooperation Under Anarchy; Snyder, Myths of Empire, etc. (Wendt's Social Theory of International Politics hadn't been published yet. I read that later, on my own, when I was writing my diss.) Plus I took a course with a respected historian on U.S. diplomacy in WW2 and the Cold War and wrote a paper on Kennan. That was fun. Wrote another paper for which I read some of the lit. on civil society and social movements. Also did an independent reading course (this was the second year, I think) for which, among other things, I plowed through all of Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in the space of a few days -- don't recommend doing that unless you have to. One gap in the first year, though, even on its own Big Theory terms, was the modern literature on comparative politics. (Note: The program's curriculum has been modified in various ways in the intervening years.)
Now this was all fine but I really had no idea what I was going to write my dissertation about. At the time that seemed not to matter much, even though the then-Dean of the school had asked all of us entering PhD students for our tentative dissertation topics in the second week we were there. (I told him, in politer language, that I hadn't the slightest f***ing idea what my topic was going to be.) Anyway...
Mistake #2: I did not really think about my training in relation to the job market. I figured if I was finding grad school reasonably interesting and learning something, that was enough.
Mistake #3: When it came time to choose a dissertation topic, I chose one that was not going to help me on the job market. If I had been attending a marquee institution -- a Columbia, Berkeley, Princeton, perhaps (even) Chapel Hill [still with me, Kindred? :-)] -- I could have gotten away with the topic I chose, but the combination of topic and institution was not good. (It was a historically-oriented topic, though of course I had to connect it to the present, since it was an IR diss.) Plus, frankly, my execution of it was ok but not stellar. It passed muster as a dissertation but that's about it. (I'm sure the administration's attitude was: Are you still here? Defend your ******* dissertation and leave, already.) Afterward I thought about trying to get some journal articles out of it, began to write one, but then decided I was really too sick of the whole subject to be able to do that.
Mistake #4: Sticking it out and finishing was probably, under the circumstances, Mistake #4. Obviously I did finish, even though, for reasons not entirely (though mostly) my fault, it took me a long time. I went on the academic job market after doing a bit of adjunct teaching (because I hadn't done a lot of teaching as a grad student; just one semester's worth), but I didn't have to send out a huge number of applications in order to discover that no university or college was much interested in hiring me -- and, all in all, I can't really blame them too much. I'm not sure I would have hired me, given the presumed competition.
***
I'm not wealthy, certainly not in the sense in which most Americans use that word, but, without going into detail, my circumstances are such that I don't need a job to survive, at least for the time being. Which is good, because no one is exactly beating down the doors to hire me. I don't have a narrow, focused policy specialty (e.g., environmental issues, nonproliferation, etc.), truly deep regional knowledge, or tech (statistics etc.) skills. In other words, I'm a generalist, and in a field where the demand for them is not very high. I could probably be a decent teacher but I'm not so desperate to teach that I'm enthusiastic about adjuncting; I don't need to do it to eat and I don't really like teaching the intro course, which is all I've ever taught. So if/when I do need a job I'm probably going to have to pound the proverbial pavement (even if I have to take some stuff off my résumé so I'm not rejected as overqualified for whatever I'm applying for).
I will conclude with an anecdote: last month I gave a guest talk in a friend's intro IR class. I enjoyed doing it, there was a lively discussion, the students asked good questions, etc. At one point I had occasion to remark: "Most of you are not going to become IR theorists," and then I added "I hope." My friend, the class's prof, looked surprised, but grinned. I pretty much meant it: Parents, don't let your children grow up to be IR theorists.
Well, this post has probably not contributed all that much to the sum total of wisdom in the blogosphere but writing it has been more enjoyable, believe it or not, than the post on growth, poverty, and inequality that I'm supposed to be writing. That will appear when I get around to finishing it.
Clarifying addendum (tacked on later): My point in this post is not to argue that all pol sci grad students should load up on quant methods, nor am I defending "over-professionalization" in graduate training. In my own case, going the quant route would have been rather absurd. I'm just saying as a practical matter that grad students have to be conscious of how their choices will affect their future chances of employment etc. In comments at DofM, PTJ has repeatedly made the point that one doesn't need a lot of quant/stats background to get an IR academic job in the U.S., provided one is willing to go outside the urban centers, major research institutions etc., and he cites some of his own students who have gotten jobs as examples. I think PTJ is right on this, but I would point out that many (or some) of his students may have written on interesting or 'hot'-ish topics, which helps; moreover, being acquainted with PTJ, as I am, I would imagine -- I don't know but I'm guessing -- that he really 'goes to bat' for his students (in a way that not all advisors necessarily do), and that's also got to help.
***
My situation was unusual from the start, because I was considerably older than most Ph.D. students when I began grad school. I had gone to law school (also a mistake, btw, but never mind that now) almost right after college (I took one year in between them), and then after law school worked for a number of years -- not, for the most part, practicing law, though I did do that briefly, but rather working in fairly conventional go-to-an-office-sit-at-a-computer-edit-and-write-stuff type of employment (it wasn't journalism as usually understood but somewhat more specialized). I eventually got bored with that, decided I didn't want to spend the rest of my working life doing it, and decided to go back to school.
I applied to a couple of M.A. programs (not simultaneously but in succession). The first one was a rather prestigious one that I didn't get into. The second institution not only admitted me to its M.A. program but ended up -- for reasons that largely had to do with some idiosyncratic factors not worth going into -- offering me a place in its Ph.D. program.
Mistake #1: I should never have accepted that offer without (i) thinking longer and harder than I did about whether I really wanted to get a Ph.D. and (ii) if so, whether I wanted to get it at that institution.
The institution in question was not a traditional political science department (my Ph.D. says International Relations, not Political Science), but the majority of faculty members were political scientists. The program was closer to a "big thinking and deep theorizing" (Kindred's words) type of program than to what Dan N. calls an "overprofessionalized" program. I had to take exactly one quant methods course, which was fairly worthless, and that was it. (At the time that was fine with me: I stopped high school math after 11th-grade trigonometry and analytic geometry, or whatever the course was called, and never took calculus, anywhere, though I certainly could have.)
I actually enjoyed aspects of my first couple of years as a PhD student, despite the heavy reading/writing load. Perhaps partly because, as I've already said, this was not a traditional pol sci department, the required first-year seminars were along the lines of Big Books and Big Theory (not exclusively but to a fair extent). So in my first year (this was the mid-'90s, btw, just to give the time frame) I read, for instance, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (much of) Polanyi's The Great Transformation, re-read some of the Marx and Weber that I'd read in college, plus a bit of Kant and Plato and Hobbes and Grotius, plus, of course, standard IR theory stuff: Waltz, Theory of International Politics; Carr, Twenty Years' Crisis; Oye et al., Cooperation Under Anarchy; Snyder, Myths of Empire, etc. (Wendt's Social Theory of International Politics hadn't been published yet. I read that later, on my own, when I was writing my diss.) Plus I took a course with a respected historian on U.S. diplomacy in WW2 and the Cold War and wrote a paper on Kennan. That was fun. Wrote another paper for which I read some of the lit. on civil society and social movements. Also did an independent reading course (this was the second year, I think) for which, among other things, I plowed through all of Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in the space of a few days -- don't recommend doing that unless you have to. One gap in the first year, though, even on its own Big Theory terms, was the modern literature on comparative politics. (Note: The program's curriculum has been modified in various ways in the intervening years.)
Now this was all fine but I really had no idea what I was going to write my dissertation about. At the time that seemed not to matter much, even though the then-Dean of the school had asked all of us entering PhD students for our tentative dissertation topics in the second week we were there. (I told him, in politer language, that I hadn't the slightest f***ing idea what my topic was going to be.) Anyway...
Mistake #2: I did not really think about my training in relation to the job market. I figured if I was finding grad school reasonably interesting and learning something, that was enough.
Mistake #3: When it came time to choose a dissertation topic, I chose one that was not going to help me on the job market. If I had been attending a marquee institution -- a Columbia, Berkeley, Princeton, perhaps (even) Chapel Hill [still with me, Kindred? :-)] -- I could have gotten away with the topic I chose, but the combination of topic and institution was not good. (It was a historically-oriented topic, though of course I had to connect it to the present, since it was an IR diss.) Plus, frankly, my execution of it was ok but not stellar. It passed muster as a dissertation but that's about it. (I'm sure the administration's attitude was: Are you still here? Defend your ******* dissertation and leave, already.) Afterward I thought about trying to get some journal articles out of it, began to write one, but then decided I was really too sick of the whole subject to be able to do that.
Mistake #4: Sticking it out and finishing was probably, under the circumstances, Mistake #4. Obviously I did finish, even though, for reasons not entirely (though mostly) my fault, it took me a long time. I went on the academic job market after doing a bit of adjunct teaching (because I hadn't done a lot of teaching as a grad student; just one semester's worth), but I didn't have to send out a huge number of applications in order to discover that no university or college was much interested in hiring me -- and, all in all, I can't really blame them too much. I'm not sure I would have hired me, given the presumed competition.
***
I'm not wealthy, certainly not in the sense in which most Americans use that word, but, without going into detail, my circumstances are such that I don't need a job to survive, at least for the time being. Which is good, because no one is exactly beating down the doors to hire me. I don't have a narrow, focused policy specialty (e.g., environmental issues, nonproliferation, etc.), truly deep regional knowledge, or tech (statistics etc.) skills. In other words, I'm a generalist, and in a field where the demand for them is not very high. I could probably be a decent teacher but I'm not so desperate to teach that I'm enthusiastic about adjuncting; I don't need to do it to eat and I don't really like teaching the intro course, which is all I've ever taught. So if/when I do need a job I'm probably going to have to pound the proverbial pavement (even if I have to take some stuff off my résumé so I'm not rejected as overqualified for whatever I'm applying for).
I will conclude with an anecdote: last month I gave a guest talk in a friend's intro IR class. I enjoyed doing it, there was a lively discussion, the students asked good questions, etc. At one point I had occasion to remark: "Most of you are not going to become IR theorists," and then I added "I hope." My friend, the class's prof, looked surprised, but grinned. I pretty much meant it: Parents, don't let your children grow up to be IR theorists.
Well, this post has probably not contributed all that much to the sum total of wisdom in the blogosphere but writing it has been more enjoyable, believe it or not, than the post on growth, poverty, and inequality that I'm supposed to be writing. That will appear when I get around to finishing it.
Clarifying addendum (tacked on later): My point in this post is not to argue that all pol sci grad students should load up on quant methods, nor am I defending "over-professionalization" in graduate training. In my own case, going the quant route would have been rather absurd. I'm just saying as a practical matter that grad students have to be conscious of how their choices will affect their future chances of employment etc. In comments at DofM, PTJ has repeatedly made the point that one doesn't need a lot of quant/stats background to get an IR academic job in the U.S., provided one is willing to go outside the urban centers, major research institutions etc., and he cites some of his own students who have gotten jobs as examples. I think PTJ is right on this, but I would point out that many (or some) of his students may have written on interesting or 'hot'-ish topics, which helps; moreover, being acquainted with PTJ, as I am, I would imagine -- I don't know but I'm guessing -- that he really 'goes to bat' for his students (in a way that not all advisors necessarily do), and that's also got to help.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Centenaries
This a.m. I received an e-mail signed "Happy Titanic Centenary." Whereupon I replied that 2012 is also the centenary of the 1912 Basle congress of the Second International that declared "war on war." Whereupon someone else chimed in "don't forget the birth of cubist collage." Then it also occurred to me that 2012 is the centenary of the Japanese gift of cherry trees to the U.S. government. (See here for an exhibit connected with that anniversary.) Plus the Balkan war of 1912.
The dubious pleasures of pedantry...
The dubious pleasures of pedantry...
Friday, April 13, 2012
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
H. Clinton's Forrestal Lecture
I caught the last 20 minutes or so [on second thought, maybe more like 15 minutes] of the C-span radio broadcast of Hillary Clinton's speech at the Naval Academy, which focused on the U.S. role in Asia. I was not impressed with the there-is-no-alternative-to-American-leadership-we-are-great emphasis. However, I've not had a chance to read the text.
(P.s. The post promised in the previous post (how's that for awkward?) will be coming eventually. I'm busy with some other things this week.)
(P.s. The post promised in the previous post (how's that for awkward?) will be coming eventually. I'm busy with some other things this week.)
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Shouldn't they be, um, studying, or at least asleep?
From a long post by Timothy Burke, Swarthmore professor and eloquent blogger:
P.s. If American English is your native language and you don't know the expression "same diff," you're too young to be reading this blog.
At Swarthmore this semester..., some students were deeply annoyed that the administration attempted to enforce a rule against parties between midnight and 2am on Thursday nights (or Friday mornings, to be more precise).I'm feeling old, kill-joyish, and stick-in-the-mudish. Students should not be partying on Thursday nights, or on any weekday nights. More to say here, but it will conjure up the image of a middle-aged person harrumphing, so I'll refrain. What really makes me feel old is the fact that one of my contemporaries (actually one of my brother's contemporaries, but same diff) has a daughter now at Swarthmore. (I'd guess she's not partying on Thursday nights. But I don't know.)
P.s. If American English is your native language and you don't know the expression "same diff," you're too young to be reading this blog.
Quote of the weekend
From John Le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, ch. 16:
With a sigh, [Smiley] drew towards him the first of the Witchcraft files, and, having vouchsafed a gingerly lick to his right finger and thumb, set to work matching the official memory with his own.I love "vouchsafed." Much better than "giving his right finger and thumb a gingerly lick," which is what a lot of writers would have said.
Friday, April 6, 2012
Heady days for the Front de Gauche
Here and here.
And (via A. Goldhammer) a video of Mélenchon speaking in Toulouse. Crikey, my French aural comprehension is not what it should be. I got some of it, understood he was attacking the EU, but if anyone would like to provide a proper translation in the comments that would be nice. Actually the Reuters piece linked above gives one line: "When there's no more liberty, civil insurrection becomes a sacred duty of the Republic." Ok, that's clear enough on the video; but then the last bit... ?
Then the young man being interviewed: "C'est le cri de guerre du peuple." Yup, got that. This is the level of my French these days: pathetic.
And (via A. Goldhammer) a video of Mélenchon speaking in Toulouse. Crikey, my French aural comprehension is not what it should be. I got some of it, understood he was attacking the EU, but if anyone would like to provide a proper translation in the comments that would be nice. Actually the Reuters piece linked above gives one line: "When there's no more liberty, civil insurrection becomes a sacred duty of the Republic." Ok, that's clear enough on the video; but then the last bit... ?
Then the young man being interviewed: "C'est le cri de guerre du peuple." Yup, got that. This is the level of my French these days: pathetic.
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Shocked
From a story in Al Jazeera about a suicide bombing in Mogadishu:
The piece goes on to note that the bomber was female. I don't mean in any way to make light of this horrible event, but "shocked" is not the first word that would occur to me in connection with this.Al-Shabab rebels have claimed responsibility for an explosion at Somalia's newly reopened national theatre in Mogadishu that killed at least four people, including two of the country's top sports officials.
Abdirahman Omar Osman, a senior adviser to the Somali prime minister, told Al Jazeera that at least four people were killed and dozens wounded in the blast on Wednesday.
"It was a surprise and shock to us that a suicide bomber could come near Abdiweli Mohamed Ali [the Somali prime minister] who was giving a speech for the relaunch of the national theatre," Osman said.
He added: "I am shocked and saddened by the attack, but luckily the prime minister was not harmed in the incident."
Monday, April 2, 2012
A puzzle (maybe)
This is a 'thinking aloud' type of post, but that's one of the things blogs are for, isn't it?
Here's the question: What explains the apparent disjunction disconnect between global downward trends in armed conflict, on the one hand, and U.S. military and foreign policy, on the other?
It's fairly clear that the amount of armed conflict in the world, while not negligible, has been declining for a few decades (though the decline may have leveled off in the last several years). Joshua Goldstein judges that "[d]espite...complexities and some ups and downs, the year 2010 was probably the most peaceful, in terms of battle deaths relative to population, in the history of the world." (Winning the War on War, p.247) John Mueller and Christopher Fettweis, among others, argue that great-power war is either obsolete or on the verge of becoming so, an argument that has to be taken quite seriously in my opinion.
Yet the U.S. continues to act, in many respects, as if the world has not really become much more peaceful than it was in, say, 1950. Yes, the numbers of U.S. soldiers in Europe and Asia have been reduced somewhat in recent years, but the U.S. continues to have alliances or other security agreements with numerous countries, military bases all over the world, thousands of troops still in Europe and Asia (primarily Japan and Korea), and aircraft carrier groups able to be dispatched to anywhere in the world. Plus the U.S. still has some tactical nuclear weapons in Europe (I actually wasn't aware of this until seeing a journal article about it the other day) and also has invested in regional missile defense systems (or, in the case of the Persian Gulf states, sold Patriot missiles to them) ostensibly as protection from an Iranian missile threat which seems to have been overestimated. Moreover, the U.S. is executing what appears to be either an encirclement or a balancing (depending on one's view) maneuver against China, via the creation of a new or refurbished 'strategic partnership' with Australia, the selling of jets to Indonesia, etc. It is true that the Pentagon, faced with budget constraints, is planning to shrink the size of the Army and Marines somewhat and also, for example, is having to reconsider its plans for a major build-up on Guam, but this does not basically change the U.S.'s global military position.
So, given -- at least for the sake of argument -- that the world is more peaceful and less dangerous than it has been in a long time, why don't U.S. actions in the military/security arena seem to reflect this reality?
Some possible answers:
(1) U.S. policy is simply irrational.
(2) U.S. policy-makers don't think great-power war is obsolete and are generally stuck in an outmoded mindset.
(3) The U.S. global military posture is driven by domestic institutional forces, i.e., the power of the Pentagon and large arms manufacturers to influence Congress and the importance (or at least perceived importance) of the 'military-industrial complex' to the health of the U.S. economy.
(4) U.S. policy is a holdover from the Cold War. Elaboration: With the dissolution of the USSR and the resulting absence of a true peer competitor, the U.S. should have substantially cut back on its global military presence and commitments, according to both one strand of realist logic and 'ordinary' logic. This is what John Mearsheimer, to cite one prominent example, predicted. It didn't happen: there was some retrenchment but nothing like what might have been expected. (And NATO, far from declaring its mission accomplished and disbanding, expanded.) The reason was perhaps a combination of vested institutional interests, path dependence, and plain old inertia.
(5) Al-Qaeda done it. According to this view, had it not been for the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent decade-long reaction or overreaction (Afghanistan, Iraq, drones, etc.), the U.S. global military presence would be much smaller today than it is.
(6) U.S. global military dominance is supporting the U.S. global economic position (or what remains of it).
With the exception of #1 (which basically evades the question), I'm inclined to think there may be something to all of these answers, though I'm also a bit skeptical of #6. I would put the most weight on #3 and #4. But, as we say in the blogosphere, your mileage may vary.
Update: Another explanation for the puzzle might be that Americans are "an unusually warlike people," as Stephen Rosen argued in a 2009 article. I never got around to reading (as opposed to skimming) this, but the link will take you there if you're interested.
Here's the question: What explains the apparent disjunction disconnect between global downward trends in armed conflict, on the one hand, and U.S. military and foreign policy, on the other?
It's fairly clear that the amount of armed conflict in the world, while not negligible, has been declining for a few decades (though the decline may have leveled off in the last several years). Joshua Goldstein judges that "[d]espite...complexities and some ups and downs, the year 2010 was probably the most peaceful, in terms of battle deaths relative to population, in the history of the world." (Winning the War on War, p.247) John Mueller and Christopher Fettweis, among others, argue that great-power war is either obsolete or on the verge of becoming so, an argument that has to be taken quite seriously in my opinion.
Yet the U.S. continues to act, in many respects, as if the world has not really become much more peaceful than it was in, say, 1950. Yes, the numbers of U.S. soldiers in Europe and Asia have been reduced somewhat in recent years, but the U.S. continues to have alliances or other security agreements with numerous countries, military bases all over the world, thousands of troops still in Europe and Asia (primarily Japan and Korea), and aircraft carrier groups able to be dispatched to anywhere in the world. Plus the U.S. still has some tactical nuclear weapons in Europe (I actually wasn't aware of this until seeing a journal article about it the other day) and also has invested in regional missile defense systems (or, in the case of the Persian Gulf states, sold Patriot missiles to them) ostensibly as protection from an Iranian missile threat which seems to have been overestimated. Moreover, the U.S. is executing what appears to be either an encirclement or a balancing (depending on one's view) maneuver against China, via the creation of a new or refurbished 'strategic partnership' with Australia, the selling of jets to Indonesia, etc. It is true that the Pentagon, faced with budget constraints, is planning to shrink the size of the Army and Marines somewhat and also, for example, is having to reconsider its plans for a major build-up on Guam, but this does not basically change the U.S.'s global military position.
So, given -- at least for the sake of argument -- that the world is more peaceful and less dangerous than it has been in a long time, why don't U.S. actions in the military/security arena seem to reflect this reality?
Some possible answers:
(1) U.S. policy is simply irrational.
(2) U.S. policy-makers don't think great-power war is obsolete and are generally stuck in an outmoded mindset.
(3) The U.S. global military posture is driven by domestic institutional forces, i.e., the power of the Pentagon and large arms manufacturers to influence Congress and the importance (or at least perceived importance) of the 'military-industrial complex' to the health of the U.S. economy.
(4) U.S. policy is a holdover from the Cold War. Elaboration: With the dissolution of the USSR and the resulting absence of a true peer competitor, the U.S. should have substantially cut back on its global military presence and commitments, according to both one strand of realist logic and 'ordinary' logic. This is what John Mearsheimer, to cite one prominent example, predicted. It didn't happen: there was some retrenchment but nothing like what might have been expected. (And NATO, far from declaring its mission accomplished and disbanding, expanded.) The reason was perhaps a combination of vested institutional interests, path dependence, and plain old inertia.
(5) Al-Qaeda done it. According to this view, had it not been for the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent decade-long reaction or overreaction (Afghanistan, Iraq, drones, etc.), the U.S. global military presence would be much smaller today than it is.
(6) U.S. global military dominance is supporting the U.S. global economic position (or what remains of it).
With the exception of #1 (which basically evades the question), I'm inclined to think there may be something to all of these answers, though I'm also a bit skeptical of #6. I would put the most weight on #3 and #4. But, as we say in the blogosphere, your mileage may vary.
Update: Another explanation for the puzzle might be that Americans are "an unusually warlike people," as Stephen Rosen argued in a 2009 article. I never got around to reading (as opposed to skimming) this, but the link will take you there if you're interested.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Missiles in the Gulf
Karen DeYoung reports in WaPo this morning about the first "strategic cooperation forum" meeting between the U.S. and the six countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman, and Saudi Arabia).
The UAE, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia already have U.S. Patriot missiles and the U.S. is planning to help tie these systems together into a regionally integrated system, according to DeYoung's article. (The Patriot, for those rusty on this, is a surface-to-air missile designed to hit planes and ballistic missiles; the Wikipedia article on it appears to be fairly thorough.) Presumably these Patriot missiles are supposed to deter an Iranian missile attack on Saudi Arabia or the other GCC countries. Thus it may be worth noting that a recent article in International Security [abstract] which simulated an Iranian conventional missile attack on Saudi oil installations found "no evidence of a significant Iranian missile threat to Saudi infrastructure."
The UAE, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia already have U.S. Patriot missiles and the U.S. is planning to help tie these systems together into a regionally integrated system, according to DeYoung's article. (The Patriot, for those rusty on this, is a surface-to-air missile designed to hit planes and ballistic missiles; the Wikipedia article on it appears to be fairly thorough.) Presumably these Patriot missiles are supposed to deter an Iranian missile attack on Saudi Arabia or the other GCC countries. Thus it may be worth noting that a recent article in International Security [abstract] which simulated an Iranian conventional missile attack on Saudi oil installations found "no evidence of a significant Iranian missile threat to Saudi infrastructure."
Thursday, March 29, 2012
"The freedom to live like it's 1804"
From a piece by Dahlia Lithwick on the health-care arguments: "...now we know the [Supreme Court] is worried about freedom: the freedom to live like it's 1804." See also E.J. Dionne here.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Brief note on the decline of interstate war
From S. Walt's post of yesterday:
I agree with [Steven] Pinker's claim that the overall level of human violence has declined significantly over the past several centuries ..., but I remain agnostic about the larger claims for a long-term reduction in inter-state violence. That trend is driven almost entirely by the absence of great-power war since 1945, and the absence of great-power war may have multiple and overlapping causes ... whose persistence is hard to forecast.There are no interstate wars going on in the world at the moment, as far as I'm aware. (The war in Afghanistan, for example, is not an interstate war; it's an internationalized civil war. The war in Syria is a civil war, period.) Since there are roughly 200 sovereign states in the world and since there could be numerous interstate wars not involving the great powers, and yet in fact there are no interstate wars at all, it seems bizarre -- actually, it seems flat-out wrong -- to say, as Walt does, that the decline in interstate war "is driven almost entirely by the absence of great-power war...." We're dealing with a phenomenon -- the absence of interstate war -- of which the absence of great-power war is a (very important) manifestation, or sub-phenomenon if you prefer. Even if no great powers were fighting each other, a lot of other states could be fighting each other. But they're not. Walt evidently sees this as insignificant or at least as not worthy of separate mention. Why? Good question. Better go ask him directly.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Note to readers
I said that posting here would be light in March and it has been. I have one post in the works but it's not time-sensitive and probably will not go up until April. So I don't anticipate much activity here for the remainder of March.
Added 3/23: Quick note on Obama's nomination of J.Y. Kim to head the World Bank: Someone who, among many other things, has edited a book called Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor [here] is a very good choice.
Added 3/23: Quick note on Obama's nomination of J.Y. Kim to head the World Bank: Someone who, among many other things, has edited a book called Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor [here] is a very good choice.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Afghanistan: more bad news
Update: A quite revealing column about Karzai by Joshua Partlow.
I haven't said anything about recent events in Afghanistan (including Koran burnings and the reaction; the killing of 16 Afghan civilians by an as-yet-unnamed U.S. soldier who has now apparently been flown out of the country by the military [update note: he has now been named]; and the Taliban's suspension of the barely-begun peace talks). None of this bodes very well, though there is disagreement about how damaging these events are to the NATO/ISAF position, and Obama and Cameron have been trying to put the best face on things.
Those, such as S. Walt, who argued from the beginning that the Afghanistan 'surge' was a mistake feel that their judgment has been vindicated, and I was hard put to do anything but agree with Walt's recent post to that effect. Commenting on a post of mine in August 2010, Hank suggested that patience was required. About a year-and-a-half later, I'm not sure that a great deal has been accomplished; we won't know for sure, I suppose, until the ISAF forces leave and the Afghan army and police are more or less on their own. But I suspect that the Afghanistan surge will go down as one of Obama's biggest foreign policy mistakes (or even, per Walt, the biggest).
P.s. See also this interview on 'The World' (PRI) about, among other things, how the soldier accused in the shootings might have been able to walk off the base unnoticed.
I haven't said anything about recent events in Afghanistan (including Koran burnings and the reaction; the killing of 16 Afghan civilians by an as-yet-unnamed U.S. soldier who has now apparently been flown out of the country by the military [update note: he has now been named]; and the Taliban's suspension of the barely-begun peace talks). None of this bodes very well, though there is disagreement about how damaging these events are to the NATO/ISAF position, and Obama and Cameron have been trying to put the best face on things.
Those, such as S. Walt, who argued from the beginning that the Afghanistan 'surge' was a mistake feel that their judgment has been vindicated, and I was hard put to do anything but agree with Walt's recent post to that effect. Commenting on a post of mine in August 2010, Hank suggested that patience was required. About a year-and-a-half later, I'm not sure that a great deal has been accomplished; we won't know for sure, I suppose, until the ISAF forces leave and the Afghan army and police are more or less on their own. But I suspect that the Afghanistan surge will go down as one of Obama's biggest foreign policy mistakes (or even, per Walt, the biggest).
P.s. See also this interview on 'The World' (PRI) about, among other things, how the soldier accused in the shootings might have been able to walk off the base unnoticed.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
New book on climate change and conflict
Will climate change generate armed conflict? The present state of research on this question would seem to be somewhat inconclusive, at least to judge from this Monkey Cage post and the accompanying comments. Just now I was over at the Polity Press site for another reason and happened to see the announcement for Climate Wars (by Harald Welzer), so I'm passing it on fwiw.
Monday, March 12, 2012
The our-grandchildren-will-have-to-pay-off-the-deficit myth
A quick post, as I'm pressed for time. I just caught the tail end of Marketplace on NPR. A commentator, a community banker from Pa. named Liz Herman (if I recall correctly), was saying, among other things, that the deficit worried her because she didn't want to stick her children and grandchildren with the bill (I'm paraphrasing).
One hears this all the time. It's nonsense. Yes, there are good reasons to reduce the deficit, especially over the long term and after what appears to be the start of a slow recovery gathers steam, but "oh noes! our grandchildren will be stuck with the bill" is not one of those reasons. As I remarked on a recent Crooked Timber thread, a government not facing a Greece-like crisis can continue to incur debt indefinitely, and as others added, this is particularly so if the economy grows faster than the government debt does. In any event, no one is going to knock on the door of Ms. Herman's grandson or granddaughter and say "pay up". This children-and-grandchildren-will-be-stuck-with-the-bill line is a myth devised by conservatives in search of catchy, understandable rationales for reducing government spending on programs they don't like. It's catchy, all right. It's also complete BS.
One hears this all the time. It's nonsense. Yes, there are good reasons to reduce the deficit, especially over the long term and after what appears to be the start of a slow recovery gathers steam, but "oh noes! our grandchildren will be stuck with the bill" is not one of those reasons. As I remarked on a recent Crooked Timber thread, a government not facing a Greece-like crisis can continue to incur debt indefinitely, and as others added, this is particularly so if the economy grows faster than the government debt does. In any event, no one is going to knock on the door of Ms. Herman's grandson or granddaughter and say "pay up". This children-and-grandchildren-will-be-stuck-with-the-bill line is a myth devised by conservatives in search of catchy, understandable rationales for reducing government spending on programs they don't like. It's catchy, all right. It's also complete BS.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
One aspect of the human cost of the Afghanistan 'surge'
I just stumbled across this WaPo article from a year ago. It's about (among other things) the increase from 2009 to 2010 in wounds to U.S. soldiers that required amputation of one or more limbs. Drawing on data from "a team of surgeons at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where virtually every evacuated soldier stops en route to the United States," the article notes:
In 2009, 75 soldiers underwent amputation and 21 lost more than one limb. In 2010, 171 soldiers had amputations and 65 lost more than one limb. GU [genito-urinary] injuries increased from 52 to 142 over the same period.
I stumbled across the article because this article linked it.
Friday, March 2, 2012
A note and a few links
Posting will be light here in March and probably in April as well. Before going silent for a while, however, I might as well link to a few things:
*This article by Kalyvas and Balcells (from 2010) is something I'll be reading in the next week or two.
*A review (h/t HC) of James Hershberg's 900-page tome about a missed chance to end the Vietnam war in 1966.
*The continuing toll of chronic childhood malnutrition: here.
Also: Cynthia Ozick & Henry James.
*This article by Kalyvas and Balcells (from 2010) is something I'll be reading in the next week or two.
*A review (h/t HC) of James Hershberg's 900-page tome about a missed chance to end the Vietnam war in 1966.
*The continuing toll of chronic childhood malnutrition: here.
Also: Cynthia Ozick & Henry James.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
A debate on Syria
The PBS NewsHour has its ups and downs but this discussion from last Friday with Slaughter, Haass, and Malinowski is an example of the program at its best.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
On the cost of aircraft carriers, perceived threats, democracy, etc.
Phil Arena, never losing a chance to take a dig at Reiter and Stam (two scholars with whom he disagrees), mentions Jay Ulfelder's post on threat inflation and comments: "Clearly, Jay hasn't read Reiter and Stam on how democracy promotes a healthy marketplace of ideas."
Yes, the incentives of the press in a less-than-healthy marketplace of ideas can lead to distortion and exaggeration of threats, but I'm inclined to think that bureaucratic and economic interests, also mentioned by J. Ulfelder, play a larger role. Example: I learned from a recent Walter Pincus article in WaPo (here) that the U.S. navy has two aircraft carriers under construction (one about half finished) at a cost of roughly $12 billion [sic] apiece. The U.S. already has 11 aircraft carriers, in my view probably more than it needs, and to justify adding two more someone, somewhere -- and not only the press -- is going to have to do some pretty serious threat inflation. Maybe Phil could consider taking an occasional break from criticizing Reiter and Stam's enthusiasm about democracy and focus on the particular forces that drive bad, suboptimal policy in the particular democracy known as the United States. There are, after all, varieties of democracy, just as there varieties of capitalism. The problem isn't so much democracy per se as the particular form it is taking in the U.S. today.
Addendum: See here and here (and the comments attached to those posts).
Yes, the incentives of the press in a less-than-healthy marketplace of ideas can lead to distortion and exaggeration of threats, but I'm inclined to think that bureaucratic and economic interests, also mentioned by J. Ulfelder, play a larger role. Example: I learned from a recent Walter Pincus article in WaPo (here) that the U.S. navy has two aircraft carriers under construction (one about half finished) at a cost of roughly $12 billion [sic] apiece. The U.S. already has 11 aircraft carriers, in my view probably more than it needs, and to justify adding two more someone, somewhere -- and not only the press -- is going to have to do some pretty serious threat inflation. Maybe Phil could consider taking an occasional break from criticizing Reiter and Stam's enthusiasm about democracy and focus on the particular forces that drive bad, suboptimal policy in the particular democracy known as the United States. There are, after all, varieties of democracy, just as there varieties of capitalism. The problem isn't so much democracy per se as the particular form it is taking in the U.S. today.
Addendum: See here and here (and the comments attached to those posts).
Friday, February 24, 2012
Are Pakistan's generals right to fear 'encirclement'?
In Steve Coll's article "Looking for Mullah Omar" in the Jan. 23 New Yorker, there is a passage (at p.52 of the hard copy) which contains a statement that I've been reading for a long time now, in one place or another and in one form of words or another:
The news today that the Pakistani prime minister is urging the Afghan Taliban to enter peace talks with the Afghan government (which have been in the 'feeler' stages for a while) may indicate that the proxy-against-perceived-encirclement strategy is becoming less attractive and that Pakistan is beginning to realize that its interests will be served if the Afghanistan war comes to some kind of a settlement.
On Baluchistan, btw, I have bookmarked this piece by Akbar Ahmed (h/t The Yorkshire Ranter), but haven't yet read it.
...Taliban influence in Pashtun areas of Afghanistan has...served Pakistan's cause against India. The [Pakistani] generals fear that India will use economic aid and political support for Afghanistan to encircle Pakistan, establishing consulates and business outposts, and use these to funnel aid to separatist groups such as those fighting to achieve independence for the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. The [Afghan] Taliban offer a counterforce in this proxy struggle.What evidence is there that India has actually tried to "encircle" Pakistan via aid to the Karzai government, setting up "business outposts," etc.? I know that India funded an elaborate road-building project or two in Afghanistan but I don't follow developments closely enough to know the answer to the question. Fears of 'encirclement,' however, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The news today that the Pakistani prime minister is urging the Afghan Taliban to enter peace talks with the Afghan government (which have been in the 'feeler' stages for a while) may indicate that the proxy-against-perceived-encirclement strategy is becoming less attractive and that Pakistan is beginning to realize that its interests will be served if the Afghanistan war comes to some kind of a settlement.
On Baluchistan, btw, I have bookmarked this piece by Akbar Ahmed (h/t The Yorkshire Ranter), but haven't yet read it.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Kathy Ferguson on 'understanding Santorum'
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Frightening
I find Rick Santorum genuinely frightening. This Dana Milbank column properly takes Santorum to task for comparing his political opponents to Nazis. I parted company with Milbank only at the very end:
In his unsuccessful 2006 [Senate re-election] campaign, he [i.e. Santorum] often invoked Churchill’s “gathering storm” phrase and compared Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler. He also called for more active use of the term “Islamic fascism.” Last year, Santorum warned that if the Muslim Brotherhood prevails in Egyptian elections, it would be like the Nazis winning in 1933: “That was the last democratic election.”
When used on Ahmadinejad or the Muslim Brotherhood, the Nazi talk is provocative, but defensible. When used on an American president and a rival political party, it shows an alarming lack of perspective.
Milbank is too generous to Santorum here: his "Nazi talk" is not defensible, period. Comparing the Egyptian party that won the most votes in the recent parliamentary elections to the Nazis is ridiculous.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Trita Parsi on the U.S. and Iran
Yesterday evening I heard Trita Parsi talk about his book A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran (Yale U.P.). Rather than summarizing the whole hour-long (including Q&A) talk, I will report what seemed to me to be the nub of his argument. This is thus a distillation and paraphrase (except where I use quotation marks):
Obama came into office in January '09 promising a new diplomatic approach to Iran. By the end of November '09 the approach had been abandoned, unwisely, for a "pressure track," i.e., escalating sanctions, which, unless changed, now puts the situation on a trajectory toward a war. Although there were various reasons for the change in policy (and the tale of course involves several key players other than Iran and the U.S.), Obama's main mistake was that he never tried to "create political space," in terms of U.S. domestic politics, for the diplomatic approach that the administration tried for less than a year. G.W. Bush gave 16 major speeches between Jan. '02 and March '03 making the (flawed) case for war with Iraq. By contrast Obama, although he spoke "passionately" as a candidate about the need for a diplomatic approach with Iran, as president publicly made the case for that approach only once (in a May '09 press conference with Netanyahu). The administration's unwillingness to spend political capital to defend its initial policy more or less guaranteed that the policy would have a short life and would not be given enough time to see whether it might have worked.
There was more in Parsi's talk (and obviously there is more in the book), but the above seemed to me to be the take-away message. He also has a recent short piece in The Nation along the same lines.
Obama came into office in January '09 promising a new diplomatic approach to Iran. By the end of November '09 the approach had been abandoned, unwisely, for a "pressure track," i.e., escalating sanctions, which, unless changed, now puts the situation on a trajectory toward a war. Although there were various reasons for the change in policy (and the tale of course involves several key players other than Iran and the U.S.), Obama's main mistake was that he never tried to "create political space," in terms of U.S. domestic politics, for the diplomatic approach that the administration tried for less than a year. G.W. Bush gave 16 major speeches between Jan. '02 and March '03 making the (flawed) case for war with Iraq. By contrast Obama, although he spoke "passionately" as a candidate about the need for a diplomatic approach with Iran, as president publicly made the case for that approach only once (in a May '09 press conference with Netanyahu). The administration's unwillingness to spend political capital to defend its initial policy more or less guaranteed that the policy would have a short life and would not be given enough time to see whether it might have worked.
There was more in Parsi's talk (and obviously there is more in the book), but the above seemed to me to be the take-away message. He also has a recent short piece in The Nation along the same lines.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Quote of the day
I rarely read Danger Room, but I happened to see this piece by David Axe about a U.S./Romanian Special Forces team training an Afghan police unit in a province east of Kabul. This passage in particular struck me:
Tom says he quickly began to appreciate the extent to which Afghanistan is a “man-culture,” big on pride, physical bravado and reputation. Offending that sense of masculinity can be counter-productive — even deadly. Since the war began, no fewer than 70 American troops have died at the hands of their Afghan trainees. Almost all of the killings can be traced to “personal issues,” according to David Sedney, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Did containment pull the world "back from the brink of nuclear destruction"?
Added 2/19: Two other relevant items: here and here.
Readers of this blog -- all one-and-a-half of them -- may recall that I earlier made some reference to Gaddis's biography of Kennan (and reported briefly on a talk that I heard Gaddis give about the book). Since then I have had a chance to half-read half-skim Kissinger's very long review of the book in the NYT Bk Rev (which contained some sonorous generalizations and, while saying admiring things about Kennan, argued that his effectiveness as policymaker/diplomat was undercut by his "innate perfectionism" [something no one would ever accuse Kissinger of, I think]).
I also printed out but never properly read Louis Menand's review of the book in The New Yorker (to which a commenter here had earlier taken exception).
Just now I ran across another, shorter review of the book at the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) blog (this review in turn references Kissinger's and Menand's reviews and also a review by Fred Kaplan in the NYT, which I haven't read). All this throat clearing is a preface to saying that the NBCC review, by Mary Ann Gwinn, opens this way:
Readers of this blog -- all one-and-a-half of them -- may recall that I earlier made some reference to Gaddis's biography of Kennan (and reported briefly on a talk that I heard Gaddis give about the book). Since then I have had a chance to half-read half-skim Kissinger's very long review of the book in the NYT Bk Rev (which contained some sonorous generalizations and, while saying admiring things about Kennan, argued that his effectiveness as policymaker/diplomat was undercut by his "innate perfectionism" [something no one would ever accuse Kissinger of, I think]).
I also printed out but never properly read Louis Menand's review of the book in The New Yorker (to which a commenter here had earlier taken exception).
Just now I ran across another, shorter review of the book at the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) blog (this review in turn references Kissinger's and Menand's reviews and also a review by Fred Kaplan in the NYT, which I haven't read). All this throat clearing is a preface to saying that the NBCC review, by Mary Ann Gwinn, opens this way:
The best biographies teach signal lessons about the mysteries of human nature. Here’s one of my favorites: even great men and women are to some degree, as we all are, at war with themselves.
George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis is the story of just such a conflicted man, an American diplomat who by turns inspired, exasperated and appalled his superiors, never held high office and hated the necessary insincerities of the diplomatic trade. And his brilliant strategizing arguably kept the Soviet Union and the United States from going to war with one another in the chaotic years after World War II, pulling the world back from the brink of nuclear destruction.
Did the containment doctrine really pull "the world back from the brink of nuclear destruction"? This seems to me dubious (to put it mildly). Gwinn apparently got this from Kaplan, who writes that Kennan's strategy, which (don't forget) was implemented in ways of which Kennan disapproved, "arguably prevented World War III." Well, "arguably" is a nice word. I use it myself quite a lot. But it may be cracking under the strain in this context.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Life paths
If there is such a thing as an American creed and if you had to pick one statement that comes closest to encapsulating it, the most likely candidate would be Jefferson's assertion that all persons ("men" in the original) are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...."
Although the pursuit of happiness is an old notion, its translation into the idea of personal fulfillment is arguably more recent. The material precondition for this is the existence of a group of people whose (relative) affluence allows them enough leisure to worry about being 'fulfilled'. Needless to say, this observation is far from original. It was made, to take only one example, by Andrew Hacker some forty years ago in a book called (rather presciently) The End of the American Era.
In a chapter titled "The Illusion of Individuality," Hacker cast a skeptical eye on the notion that most people have hidden capacities and potentials waiting to be unleashed, if only given the right setting and opportunity. On the contrary, he wrote, "most people are ordinary...regardless of the time or society or setting in which they live." Most people, he continued, lack "any special qualities of talent or creativity" and "prefer the paths of security." They are "not terribly clever or creative or venturesome."
That may sound harsh, but what Hacker went on to say about education is, I think, still apt, more than forty years after it was written. "Middle-class Americans," he observed,
P.s. (anecdotal): Back in December the NYT ran a piece about a 30-year-old American with an MBA who had decided to make a career in the slums of Rio singing hard-edged Brazilian funk. No 'path of least resistance' there.
Although the pursuit of happiness is an old notion, its translation into the idea of personal fulfillment is arguably more recent. The material precondition for this is the existence of a group of people whose (relative) affluence allows them enough leisure to worry about being 'fulfilled'. Needless to say, this observation is far from original. It was made, to take only one example, by Andrew Hacker some forty years ago in a book called (rather presciently) The End of the American Era.
In a chapter titled "The Illusion of Individuality," Hacker cast a skeptical eye on the notion that most people have hidden capacities and potentials waiting to be unleashed, if only given the right setting and opportunity. On the contrary, he wrote, "most people are ordinary...regardless of the time or society or setting in which they live." Most people, he continued, lack "any special qualities of talent or creativity" and "prefer the paths of security." They are "not terribly clever or creative or venturesome."
That may sound harsh, but what Hacker went on to say about education is, I think, still apt, more than forty years after it was written. "Middle-class Americans," he observed,
remain persuaded that with just a little more effort and some added insight they may discover their true selves. Thus the growing commitment to education, and the conviction that with schooling can come not only worldly success but also an awareness of one's own potentialities.... Yet, on the whole, the educational process has surprisingly little effect in determining how people will finally shape their lives.... [T]he overwhelming majority of college graduates...despite their exposure to higher education and their heightened awareness of life's options...nevertheless take paths of least resistance when faced with critical decisions throughout their lives.While this was and remains a considerable overgeneralization (like virtually all such social criticism), it does bring to mind the large numbers of graduates of elite colleges and universities who have gone into investment banking, fancy consulting firms, hedge funds, private equity firms, etc., in recent years. Lately the numbers have started to decline, but for many it is still the preferred option. Of course today the majority of young people, including no doubt the majority of college graduates, face economic uncertainty, high levels of student debt, and a job market in which getting any kind of reasonably remunerative employment is a challenge. In that respect the picture is different from what it was when Hacker wrote the above-quoted passage. But it is interesting that in the late 60s and early 70s, a period one thinks of as full of experimentation and rebellion by the young (especially the 'privileged' young), at least one observer found more evidence of conformity and rationalization. Also interesting is that Hacker's The End of the American Era was published in the same year, 1970, as Charles Reich's The Greening of America, which took a quite different view of the rising generation.
P.s. (anecdotal): Back in December the NYT ran a piece about a 30-year-old American with an MBA who had decided to make a career in the slums of Rio singing hard-edged Brazilian funk. No 'path of least resistance' there.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
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