'Brutal realpolitik' and the Katyn massacre

Jacob Heilbrunn writes:

Winston Churchill had said he would "sup with the devil" if it would help bring about victory [in WW2]. So he—and Franklin Roosevelt—did. They allied themselves with Stalin, even pretended, at least publicly, that he was a fine man and the Soviet Union an even finer place. Now, with the release of numerous documents from the National Archives about Stalin's murder of over twenty thousand Polish officers and intellectuals in the Katyn forest in 1940, we know in even more detail just how far they were prepared to go to extol and defend the Soviet Union.

Heilbrunn goes on to observe that the newly released documents indicate that Churchill and FDR pretty much knew the Soviets were responsible for the massacre and worked to ensure that an investigation, which the Polish government-in-exile in London called for, would not occur. FDR and Churchill engaged in "a brutal act of realpolitik," Heilbrunn writes, adding that this shows they had given up on Poland's freedom before Yalta.

I agree with Heilbrunn's characterization of FDR's and Churchill's actions, but the puzzling thing about Heilbrunn's post is that he criticizes FDR and Churchill while also seeming to recognize that their alternatives were very limited: "they had a weak hand to play," he notes. In the spring of 1943, Heilbrunn observes, the Nazis discovered the Katyn massacre and, blaming the Soviets for it, hoped to use it to create a rift between Stalin on on hand and Roosevelt and Churchill on the other. "But Roosevelt and Churchill were having none of it," he writes.

Of course Roosevelt and Churchill were having none of it. In the spring of '43 Hitler's armies were still in the USSR. They were reeling from Stalingrad but not yet totally defeated. The battle of Kursk had not yet started. The overriding aim of Roosevelt and Churchill was to defeat Nazi Germany and there were few lengths to which they would not go in pursuit of that goal. They had to feel some considerable gratitude to the USSR (and, by extension, to Stalin) for repulsing Hitler's invasion at enormous human cost.

You really don't have to know much about World War II to know that, while it was being fought, ideals took a back seat to the perceived requirements of victory in the policy decisions of the main leaders, at least of the Allies. Churchill and FDR allied themselves with a murderous dictator and helped to cover up the Katyn massacre and no doubt would have covered up other crimes of Stalin that came to their attention in the course of the war (perhaps in fact they did). Churchill said that if Hitler invaded Hell, he (Churchill) would make a favorable remark about the Devil in the House of Commons. He was serious. In 1943 victory was still not certain and it is a bit bizarre to think that FDR and Churchill would have created a breach with Stalin over anything. Should they have done so? Not even Heilbrunn says that directly.

There were many individual acts of heroism and idealism on the battlefields (construing that word broadly) of World War II. But in the councils where policy was made and memorandums of state were written, I think it's probably safe to say that World War II was almost entirely 'brutal realpolitik'. It was, if anyone, Hitler who was the least guided by realpolitik, as he insisted on spending bureaucratic and financial and manpower resources on the machinery of the Holocaust long after it became clear that all of Germany's resources should have been going directly into its military effort if the Third Reich were going to have a chance of survival. It was Hitler who put his ideological aims above the dictates of military necessity. FDR and Churchill issued high-minded declarations like the Atlantic Charter, but basically they were focused on one thing: prosecuting the war to a successful conclusion. All other considerations got pushed aside. They were facing what they saw, with some considerable justification, as 'a supreme emergency', in Churchill's phrase, and they were going to do what they thought they had to do.

P.s. Stalin of course did a great deal of ideologically motivated killing too, but more before and after the war than during it (the Katyn massacre notwithstanding).

One corner of Aleppo

I just ran across this series of photos at the NewsHour site, taken by a photographer with Globalpost, showing the mismatch in firepower, at least in this instance, between the regime and the insurgents. The latter face a tank with what appears to be a machine gun and a small antitank weapon (or RPG?), and the results are predictable. These photographs are not for the squeamish.

Islands in the storm

One of the more significant quotes in this WaPo piece about the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute is buried at the end: the Japanese professor saying there's no possibility of a major war between China and Japan.

A small amendment to Walt's 'America the brittle?'

I agree with most of this post by S. Walt, on a quick reading. He's right about threat inflation, for one thing. One passage I'd amend is the one in which Walt says that if U.S. forces are showing signs of fatigue and being stretched thin, it's because of bad strategic choices by policymakers. That's surely part of it, but how about multiple deployments (for the same soldier) and the length of tours? That's got to be a factor, and that's not necessarily solely a matter of bad strategic choices. It's also because the burden of carrying out missions, whether well-conceived or ill-conceived, falls on a very small percentage of the population. This is one consequence of having a professional army, an "all-volunteer" (as opposed to a conscripted) force. Without getting into the pros and cons of that, Walt might have at least acknowledged the issue.

Quote of the day

In The Abolitionist Imagination, Andrew Delbanco mentions an 1862 article by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Chiefly About War Matters," which Hawthorne published under a pseudonym in The Atlantic. After quoting a passage from the article in which Hawthorne, referring to a group of fugitive slaves, wrote that "For the sake of the manhood which is latent in them, I would not have turned them back; but I should have felt almost as reluctant, on their own account, to hasten them forward to the stranger's land...," Delbanco observes (pp.28-9) that:

...this was an example of Hawthorne doing what he always did: arguing with himself. As F.O. Matthiessen put the matter, "the characteristic Hawthorne twist" was his habit, after making any decisive assertion..."to perceive the validity of its opposite." And so, in the Atlantic article, he not only acceded to the editors' insistence that the essay could be published only if accompanied by dissenting footnotes, but he supplied the annotations himself. "The author seems to imagine," he wrote in one note, that he has "compressed a great deal of meaning into" his "little, hard, dry pellets of aphoristic wisdom. We disagree with him."

Unmentioned issues

Two issues that went unmentioned at both conventions: (1) the absurdly high number of people in U.S. prisons; (2) the extent of poverty in the U.S.

Unemployment and financial hardship were mentioned a lot, but there was little or no mention of poverty beyond a vague reference now and then, except in the biographical parts of speeches, which are always tales of a rise out of poverty or straitened circumstances. See this review of C. Hedges and J. Sacco's book on poverty in the U.S. (Btw, this year is the 50th anniversary of M. Harrington's The Other America.)

Reflections on the Democratic convention and the election

Can one learn something from convention speeches? The answer is yes. At least, I learned something -- or was reminded of something -- from the passages on the energy issue in both Clinton's speech and Obama's. In those sections, they both highlighted the same set of facts about the last couple of years: the increased use of renewable energy sources and the rise in domestic oil and natural gas production and corresponding decline in oil imports. As Clinton put it, oil imports are at "a near 20 year low and natural gas production [is at] an all time high. Renewable energy production has also doubled." Both speeches also mentioned the increase in fuel-efficiency standards that will double the minimum required miles-per-gallon "by the middle of the next decade" (quote from Obama). I had been vaguely aware of all this but it hadn't been at the front of my mind. Whether it sank in with all that many people is of course an open question. Perhaps doubtful, given all the hoopla, distractions, etc. that tend to dominate these events.

Some points I thought were perhaps too heavily emphasized by the Dems. E.g. the auto industry rescue deserved emphasis but probably it was overdone. Apart from Kerry's speech, foreign policy got fairly short shrift, and Obama, for the most part, raced through the foreign policy sections of his speech, which were anyway rather unsurprising and, e.g. in the case of the Middle East, extremely vague (one sentence, in fact). However, the line about Romney being caught in "a Cold War time warp" was good, as was the line about it being time for some "nation-building at home."

Last thought: Martin Gilens's research, which he wrote about in a series of Monkey Cage posts, e.g. here, shows that the most affluent in the U.S. have far more success in translating their positions and political preferences into policy than everyone else. This casts doubt on the rhetoric of both parties about democracy, responsiveness to the popular will, self-government, and so on. So the question in the election might be less one of a grand philosophical choice between visions -- though there are of course real and significant philosophical differences between Obama and Romney -- and more a question of which outcome will intensify even further the situation Gilens documents, i.e. make the connection between affluence and influence (to use the title of his book) even tighter. I don't think readers of this blog will be in too much doubt about my answer to that question.

More on models, methods, etc.

This is a response to Phil Arena's comment on my immediately preceding post and also to one of Kindred Winecoff's comments. (I decided to put my response up here rather than burying it in the comment thread.)

Phil wrote, in part:

...I think you're being a bit unfair here, LFC. I can't speak for Sullivan, but myself, I would never give policy advice based on analogies. Nor would I ever assume that my simplifying model (be it statistical or theoretical) has captured all the relevant details, thus obviating the need for any appreciation of the specifics of any given case when deciding how to handle that case....I think you're turning statistical modelers into a caricature.

My post speculated about whether a scholar's epistemological and/or methodological orientation (or 'standpoint of inquiry'[1]) might affect how he or she would give advice to a policymaker. I wrote: "...if you are a scholar with a more nomothetic mindset (e.g. Sullivan), if a policymaker called you and asked you what to do, you might start thinking in terms of historical analogies, because you are used to homogenizing historical cases.... (emphasis added)."

Phil says he would never give advice based on analogies. OK. But I never said anyone would give such advice. I said might, not would. Maybe the modeler would just say to the policymaker: "Here's what my model suggests are the relevant considerations. How you weigh these considerations is up to you and to others who may know more about the specifics of this particular case or issue than I do." Maybe the modeler would say: "Sorry, I don't give policy advice. Goodbye." I don't know. I was speculating. Nonetheless, despite my explicitly tentative language, it was probably a mistake to bring Sullivan's name into this aspect of the post. I'll concede that much. As to whether I caricatured modelers, readers can make up their own minds on that.

Kindred wrote in his first comment (and Phil agreed with this):

We always approach new cases with reference to old ones. I don't think there's any way around it, and if there were I'm not sure the "on its own" approach would outperform the "look for similarities with past events and act accordingly". I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that we use mental models (i.e. heuristics) all the time anyway, so trying to create better models is better than relying on worse ones.

I don't think there is much real disagreement among us here, though there is probably some difference in emphasis. Do we always approach new cases with reference to old ones? Yes, probably at some level, but "approaching new cases with reference to old ones" can mean different things in operation, depending on one's particular bent. In any event I am not disparaging models if they are used as one tool or method. They are suited for answering or exploring some questions more than others. It's useful to know that the nature of the stronger state's objective in an asymmetric conflict affects, or may affect, the likelihood of its success (per Sullivan). But if you all had was the general proposition that the more coercive (i.e. less 'brute-force') the objective the lower the likelihood of success, that, standing alone, would not equip you either to analyze adequately a particular case or to give policy advice about any given situation. I think we probably agree on that. Which in turn raises the question whether this (i.e., our discussion) has all been a waste of time. Again, I'll let readers judge that.
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1. This phrase comes from a just-published article by Christopher Meckstroth in the August 2012 issue of APSR. More on that later.

Big countries, small wars, different mindsets

Political scientists and other scholars have spilled a lot of ink on the question of why big states lose small wars, i.e., wars against weaker adversaries. Phil Arena recently pointed me to
Patricia Sullivan's 2007 JCR article, which I have looked at (meaning looked at, not read every single word of). Her main argument, put in simplified form, is that big states are more likely to lose small wars when their objective is coercive, i.e., when it requires the adversary to change its behavior, as opposed to when the objective can be accomplished simply with brute force (i.e., overthrowing a regime or conquering territory). The main reason, she argues, is that big states are more likely to underestimate the costs of achieving coercive objectives. Sullivan has a typology of objectives on a continuum with brute-force objectives at one end and coercive objectives at the other. [Cf. Schelling, Arms and Influence (1966).]

Interestingly, the objective "maintain regime authority" falls in the middle of Sullivan's continuum. This is interesting because if you had to choose a three-word label for the U.S. objective in Afghanistan, it would be "maintain regime authority" (against those who seek to overthrow it). That was also basically the U.S. objective in Vietnam, as Sullivan suggests (i.e., the stated aim was to maintain an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam).

The main point I want to make is that looking at this article highlighted (once again) for me the distinction between those who emphasize the idiographic in their methods versus the nomothetic, or to put it in simpler terms (this would probably drive PTJ up the wall, never mind), the difference between those who do historical case studies and those who do formal modeling or quantitative work (yes, some people do both in the same book or article, but we'll put that aside for now).

Sullivan's approach would suggest that the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam are basically similar because the objective (maintain regime authority) was the same. Of course she would acknowledge there are local differences, but she is not concerned with exploring them; she is interested in a model that explains, at some kind of quasi-'law-like' level, when big states lose small wars, and she gets there via a 'homogenizing' approach, so to speak. So if you took her approach, even though her concern is not explicitly with policy debates or decision-making, you might be quite receptive to analogies between Afghanistan and Vietnam.

A case-study approach might suggest something quite different. As opposed to a receptivity to the Vietnam-Afghanistan analogy, it might suggest a wariness about such an analogy and indeed about analogies in general. Yuen Foong Khong's Analogies at War (1992) showed quite convincingly that analogies to Munich and to the Korean War exercised a harmful influence on the Johnson administration's Vietnam policymaking. The takeaway lesson of that book, one could argue, is that because even smart people find it difficult to use analogies properly (i.e., in a sufficiently discriminating way), one should be wary of the mobilization and use of historical analogies, especially in a broad-brush way (e.g. "Afghanistan is like Vietnam"), in policy debates. Each case should be looked at primarily on its own, in other words.

One might say there is no contradiction here. Sullivan is interested in explaining outcomes, not prescribing a method for policymakers to use in decision-making. Khong is interested in showing why and how policymakers tend to misuse historical analogies. They are doing different things but not contradictory things. OK. Nonetheless, if you are a scholar with a more nomothetic mindset (e.g. Sullivan), if a policymaker called you and asked you what to do, you might start thinking in terms of historical analogies, because you are used to homogenizing historical cases and treating them as data points to be coded. Whereas if you have a more idiographic mindset, you might be less prone to think in terms of analogies, i.e., in terms of similarities between cases, and more prone to emphasize that each situation is unique. And I think that might be true even if, for purposes of getting your dissertation or article or book past the relevant authorities, you made a general argument that mobilized case studies in its support. Close contact with the historical specifics of cases, even when mobilized to support a general thesis or argument, is bound to sensitize one to differences and unique elements. In other words, even if (as is very often the case) you are doing case studies to develop or back up an overarching theory, you are bound, almost despite yourself as it were, to acquire some wariness about the merits of generalization.

Of course, our two hypothetical scholars might end up, policy-wise, in the same place: for example, both might have decided to oppose the Obama administration's "surge" in Afghanistan (or to favor it, as the case may be). But they would have reached their conclusion, whatever it was, by rather different routes.

P.s. Just to be clear (and repetitive), that the U.S. lost in Vietnam doesn't necessarily mean it's going to 'lose' in Afghanistan. This partly depends on how one defines 'victory'. (See this post and the attached comments.)

Do U.S. troop deployments abroad cause development?

Yes, argues Tim Kane in an article in the July 2012 issue of Foreign Policy Analysis, "Development and US Troop Deployments." [abstract]

The article, unsurprisingly, is full of regression tables. I skimmed though it. Here are a couple of key paragraphs from the conclusion:

I showed a positive relationship between US troops and three social indicators across 148 countries during two two-decade periods, 1970–1990 and 1990–present. On the simplest level, countries with a heavy US troop presence had faster increases in life expectancy, faster reductions in rates of child mortality, and faster development of telephone lines per capita. Comparing the countries with a heavy US troop presence (250 or more troops per year) to those with essentially no US presence (five or fewer troops per year), the heavy presence countries experienced an additional decrease in children’s mortality rates of 21% points during 1970–1990 and 13% points 1990–present. Among low-income countries, gains in life expectancy during the first period averaged almost 10% (5.6 years) higher in heavy presence countries than in nil presence countries and 3.6% higher in the post-Cold War period. Increases in telephone lines per capita were four times larger in the heavy presence countries compared to nil presence countries during the Cold War and two times larger during the latter period.

Regression tests showed these relationships to be statistically significant, even when controlling for initial levels and growth rates of GDP per capita, conflict, economic aid, and other factors. A tenfold increase in US troops during a 20-year period in a typical host country is estimated in this paper to improve the reduction in children’s mortality by 2.2% points, improve life expectancy gains by 1% point, and increase the number of telephone lines by two per 100 people.

And here's the final paragraph:

The positive effect of US troop presence across over 148 countries is a new finding. However, much remains to be done. First, the mechanism of the developmental effect of hosted US forces is not known and also problematic since it was almost certainly unintentional at a tactical and strategic level. Although Mancur Olson [in his The Rise and Decline of Nations] theorized such a positive effect in his writings, the concept has not been carefully assessed with modern data and techniques until now. And yet, these results should be interpreted with some caution because the troops–growth relationship represents historical alliances, which is a far cry from normative justification for regime change [what? what does regime change have to do with anything here? --LFC]. In addition, the data are aggregated at the highest level possible. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into causal explanations at the microlevel, growth theory suggests troops enhanced technology diffusion in some fashion, and indeed it may be that troop presence is simply an easily quantifiable proxy for overall US engagement. Nevertheless, whether directly or indirectly, the impact of US troops on global social development—during and since the Cold War—has been clearly positive, a fact that alone merits widespread recognition.

OK. Let's say this is right. Does this mean the U.S. should put more soldiers into more countries, in addition to the hundreds of thousands it already has? No, for two reasons. (1) This is objectionable on political grounds, in that, among other things, it may very well increase resentment and even hatred of the United States. American soldiers in Saudi Arabia might have indirectly given that kingdom some additional phone lines and life expectancy, but they also gave the U.S. the 9-11 attacks (or, to be more precise, contributed to causing the organization/movement which planned and executed those attacks). Troop deployments should have a compelling strategic rationale, which, as I've argued here before, many U.S. troop deployments lack. (2) Putting U.S. soldiers in a country is probably not an efficient development strategy in that there must be more cost-effective, direct ways to achieve development goals, not to mention ways that encourage more local participation and 'empowerment'.

So this research is interesting but I doubt it's going to change any minds about the merits of U.S. troop deployments abroad. If you favored the current U.S. footprint before this article, you are still going to favor it, with maybe an additional small arrow in your argumentative quiver. If you favored reducing that footprint, as I do, your position will likely be unchanged.

P.s. Besides correlation/causation, which can always be raised, there may of course be technical issues with the analysis. But I would have to read the article more closely, and in any case the question is largely beyond my competence.

The Dems as the party of austerity

Corey Robin argues at some length that the Democrats have become the party of austerity and deficit reduction. I only skimmed through it, but I was struck by a quote Robin has from Jonathan Chait in 2010, pointing out that the Republicans did not pay for their expansion of Medicare prescription drug coverage under G.W. Bush because they had lifted the 'pay-go' rule after taking control of Congress in '01. The Democrats reimposed the pay-go rule when they regained control of Congress, which is one reason why money had to be shifted from Medicare to help fund the Affordable Care Act. So when you hear the Republicans wailing about "raiding" Medicare to pay for Obamacare, recall their own expansion of Medicare prescription drug coverage, which they didn't "raid" anything to pay for because they didn't care about paying for it and indeed had gotten rid of the rule requiring them to do so. So much for the Republicans as the party of fiscal responsibility!

What is "victory" in a counterinsurgency war?

David Silbey at Edge of the American West presents a graph of coalition fatalities in Afghanistan, 2010-2012, and writes that the downward trend suggests that the coalition is "winning militarily." He adds that whether this constitutes "victory" in a larger sense would require more discussion.

I'm not an expert on counterinsurgency. You want Dan Trombly, Abu Muqawama, Adam Elkus, and that whole crowd. As readers of this blog know (all one or two of them), I'm not really an expert on anything. (If I were, presumably I'd have a job, right? But then I probably wouldn't have time to blog and what a loss that would be to the world of discourse. Criminy, I'm starting to sound like J. Otto Pohl, who spent months online repeatedly bemoaning the unfairness of his having to teach in Ghana, while simultaneously proclaiming how great Ghana is.)

Anyway, to the point. I am skeptical of Silbey's suggestion. Surely what matters in measuring success in a counterinsurgency is the eventual outcome, not the casualty trends. I hope someone who knows something in real detail about, say, France's war in Algeria (to take one prominent historical example) will tell me whether I'm right about this.

P.s. (added later): Note, btw, Laleh Khalili's new book Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford U.P.). I might buy this. On the other hand, inspired by the rhetoric at the Republican convention, I could take the money I would spend on this book and use it to start a small business instead. If only there weren't so many burdensome taxes and regulations. Tsk, tsk.

Speaking of masochism...

...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.

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:

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.

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.)

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.

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.

July/August break

I'll be taking a break from posting for a couple of months.

The burdened planet

WaPo ran this piece early last month, before the Rio + 20 meeting.

'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.

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.

Choice v. necessity, once more

I am on record as saying that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a 'war of necessity' and that the choice-necessity dichotomy is thus not helpful. Patrick Porter has an article (link at this post) arguing much the same thing. I've only read the abstract.

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.)

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.
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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.

Funny...

...and right on the mark.

Ruminations

See my comment here.

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.

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.

Supreme Court to DC Circuit: keep right on ignoring us

Here.

A correction

Here.

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.

Two views on Obama's use of drones

Cliff Bob (here) and Charles Krauthammer (here). Both take off from the NYT piece on the picking of drone targets. Krauthammer's column is revoltingly hypocritical and regretful that suspects are no longer being tortured in CIA 'black sites'.

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.)

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.

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:

...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....

[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.

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?

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.

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.

Taylor's crimes in Liberia

Here (h/t HC).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

More on inequality

Nicholas Lemann reviews (h/t) a number of books on inequality and related issues, written from different points on the ideological spectrum. (Haven't read the whole piece, just the opening and the last part, but thought I'd pass it on.)

Just call it history?

Robert Kelly writes:

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.?

CIA seeks expanded drone authority in Yemen

A detailed, well-reported WaPo piece on this here. Not a good idea, ISTM.
Update (4/26): The CIA's request has been approved.

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...

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.

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 dog was in a kennel

Here. (h/t)

Rep. Allen who?

I'd not heard of Rep. Allen West but he is clearly off his rocker.

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.)

Shouldn't they be, um, studying, or at least asleep?

From a long post by Timothy Burke, Swarthmore professor and eloquent blogger:

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.

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.

Shocked

From a story in Al Jazeera about a suicide bombing in Mogadishu:

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."

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.

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.