The immorality of the U.S. drone war

I'm going to vote for Obama. I live in a safely blue state but, perhaps a bit irrationally, I don't feel like taking any chances. Romney in the White House would be horrible. There are important issues where the chasm between the two is wide and the Romney approach would be very bad. There is the issue of prospective Supreme Court appointments. And so on.

All that said, am I going to vote for Obama enthusiastically? No, I don't think I can say that. Conor Friedersdorf's description of the drone war (via CT) captures the major part of the reason:

The drone war [Obama] is waging in North Waziristan isn't "precise" or "surgical" as he would have Americans believe. It kills hundreds of innocents, including children. And for thousands of more innocents who live in the targeted communities, the drone war makes their lives into a nightmare worthy of dystopian novels. People are always afraid. Women cower in their homes. Children are kept out of school. The stress they endure gives them psychiatric disorders. Men are driven crazy by an inability to sleep as drones buzz overhead 24 hours a day, a deadly strike possible at any moment. At worst, this policy creates more terrorists than it kills; at best, America is ruining the lives of thousands of innocent people and killing hundreds of innocents for a small increase in safety from terrorists. It is a cowardly, immoral, and illegal policy, deliberately cloaked in opportunistic secrecy. And Democrats who believe that it is the most moral of all responsible policy alternatives are as misinformed and blinded by partisanship as any conservative ideologue.

I'm hard pressed to do anything except agree with this. I don't share Friedersdorf's conclusion (he's voting for the libertarian candidate), but on this issue I think he's pretty much right. That is, he's right that it's an immoral policy. (He's not right in the conclusion that it requires a vote for someone other than Obama. Sometimes one has to vote for a candidate who is pursuing an immoral policy, if the other candidate with a chance to win would pursue more immoral policies.) 

Also, see a new study of the drone campaign described here (h/t).

P.s. (added later): As things I've written here before suggest, I recognize that the issue is not an easy one, given Pakistan's refusal to deal with the Haqqani network and other groups which have been carrying out cross-border attacks into Afghanistan from the border region. Still, the 'collateral' cost of drones, in terms of civilian casualties and hardship, makes the campaign in its current form hard to justify.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fort Sumter and the Tonkin Gulf

I recently read Andrew Delbanco's essay The Abolitionist Imagination [Amazon link].  He traces the abolitionist impulse through U.S. history and into the present, detecting, for instance, "structural" (if not "substantive") similarities between the movement to abolish slavery and the anti-abortion (or 'pro-life') movement of today (pp.48-49), and  the movement for Prohibition in the early twentieth century (pp.46-47).

Delbanco's attitude toward the original abolitionists is ambivalent. Moreover, he views with some sympathy those who, despite being opposed to slavery, declined to join the abolitionists' ranks. He closes with a quotation from John Jay Chapman, who spoke of "the losing heroism of conservatism" with reference to "New England judge[s] enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law" (e.g., Lemuel Shaw) despite their personal opposition to it (pp.54-55).
 
My attitude to the abolitionists is more positive than Delbanco's, but I think he makes some interesting points even if I'm not persuaded by them. Toward the end of the essay he provocatively compares the Civil War to recent (and not-so-recent) American wars abroad (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq). I don't think these comparisons work. A quote or two will indicate the tenor of his argument.

He writes (p.43):

...[I]f we imagine ourselves living in the America of the 1850s, how sure can we be of our judgment on the question of intervention in what people of advanced views today might call "the indigenous culture" of the South?

Would we have regarded the firing on Fort Sumter as the abolitionists did -- as a welcome provocation to take up arms against an expansionist power? Or would we have regarded it as a pretext for waging war, akin to that notorious event in every baby boomer's memory, the Gulf of Tonkin incident? If we could have known in advance the scale of the ensuing carnage, would we have sided with those who considered any price worth paying to bring an end to slavery? Or would we have voted for patience, persuasion, diplomacy, perhaps economic sanctions -- the alternatives to war that most liberal-minded people prefer today in the face of manifest evil in faraway lands?

He pushes the point a little further (p.44):

Most of us live quite comfortably today with our knowledge of cruelty and oppression in nation-states whose exports are as essential to our daily lives as slave-grown cotton once was to the "free" North--yet few of us take any action beyond lamenting the dark side of "globalization." Are we sure we would have sided with those who insisted that all Americans--even if they had never seen, much less owned,a slave--had a duty forcibly to terminate the labor system of a region that many regarded, to all intents and purposes, as a foreign country? None of these questions yields an easy answer--but they should at least restrain us from passing easy judgment on those who withheld themselves from the crusade, not out of indifference but because of conscientious doubt.

An obvious problem with this line of thought is that although the South might have been seen in the North as a foreign country, the South was in fact part of the same country. As Delbanco himself observes earlier in the essay, Lincoln's original war aim was to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery. It was only in the summer of 1862 that Lincoln's "mind was opening to new possibilities" (p.13), leading him to free the slaves in the Confederate states but not in border states that had remained in the Union.

Another point is that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was, at least on some accounts, completely manufactured: "North Vietnamese gunboats were probably operating in the area [of the U.S. destroyers Maddox and Turner], but no evidence has ever been produced to demonstrate that they committed hostile acts" (G. Herring, America's Longest War, 2d. ed., p.120). By contrast, there is no doubt that Fort Sumter was fired upon.

Then, too, it is far from clear that going to war to preserve an independent South Vietnam (i.e., independent of absorption into the Communist North) constituted in practice an especially noble goal, given that South Vietnam's rulers, from Diem to Thieu (and pre-Diem as well), were not exactly paragons of democratic legitimacy. By contrast, going to war to preserve the Union seems considerably more justified -- though not, I concede, an open-and-shut case. And to be sure, the Civil War proved very costly in terms of lives and I agree that has to be weighed (cf. Delbanco, p.54).


All this doesn't answer Delbanco's question of how sure we can be of our judgments had we been living in the 1850s. But it does suggest that some of the comparisons he draws are more than a bit strained.
-----
Note: Delbanco's essay, originally a lecture, was published with several responses. I've looked at the responses but not properly read them.

Suu Kyi, Pussy Riot, and the corridors of power

Two WaPo reporters recount an event at the Newseum in which Aung San Suu Kyi, fresh from receiving her delayed Congressional Gold Medal, rubbed shoulders with supporters and relatives of Pussy Riot, the Russian punk rocker feminists three of whom are now serving time in a Moscow prison for, in effect, insulting Vladimir Putin.

The WaPo reporters are taken with the notion of strange-seeming allies and with how, sooner or later, "everyone" (their word) comes to Washington, D.C. to make his or her "case."

I admire Suu Kyi (who doesn't?). I'm fine with Pussy Riot. But as someone who was born in Washington, D.C. and has lived much of his life in the city or its environs, I find the smug, self-congratulatory tone of the reporters' article, with its comfy assumption that "everyone" comes to Washington, D.C., to be false and somewhat repellent.

It reminds me of a D.C.-based bank (perhaps no longer in existence) which used to run advertisements, some years ago, referring to itself as "the most important bank in the most important city in the world." Pardon me while I reach for the barf bag.

Washington, D.C. is not the center of the universe. New York City is not the center of the universe. These are delusions held by people who have spent too much time in or around what the WaPo article calls, without really even a hint of irony, the "corridors of power."

The WaPo article quotes a Univ. of California professor who blogs about social movements on how cool it is for Suu Kyi and Pussy Riot to be sharing a stage and a spotlight. But the article is more interested in a faux anthropological-sociological analysis of the difference between being on Washington's A-list, which Suu Kyi is, and the contrasting status of the Pussy Riot people, who have to be driven by someone from Amnesty rather than getting a Secret Service escort.

Does anyone really care about this kind of gossipy trivia? The answer is apparently yes: readers of the WaPo Style section. Year after year, decade after decade, the Style section has specialized in this sort of thing, always guided by the comforting and false assumption that its readers unfolding the paper at breakfast were privileged participants in, or at least privileged onlookers to, the most important happenings in the most important place in the world.

That assumption was never true, but at least in the days when most readers unfolded a hard-copy Washington Post at breakfast it had a certain surface claim to wink-iness. As in: we the people writing and you the people reading this newspaper are (wink) important, we are (wink) in the know, we are (wink) where it's at, we are mere steps from the corridors of power. Now that many people read the paper online and can do it anywhere from Wheeling to Waukesha to Nairobi to Oslo, this kind of insular appeal no longer has even much surface plausibility.

But that hasn't stopped the Style section from continuing to use the same old figures of speech, the same old conceits, patting its (local, if not other) readers on the back for their enormous luck in happening to live where they do.

The reporters who churn out this stuff probably don't even know that the phrase "the corridors of power" was not coined by someone in D.C., not even by an American. It comes from the title of a novel by the British scientist and writer C.P. Snow.

Romney's latest howler; or, he's no Reagan

Update: Turns out the Romney people cut off the last sentence of the Obama quote in question.

So now Romney is picking on Obama's 1998 remarks about "redistribution," claiming that redistribution has "never characterized America" (paraphrased). Ye gods. One has to be either profoundly ignorant or profoundly stupid (or both) to say such a thing. I guess I'll go with profoundly ignorant.

This is just more of the same old tired ploy of trying to portray Obama as a socialist. I know some socialists. Believe me, Obama is not one. And that will remain true no matter how often Romney repeats that he, Romney, is for a "free society" as opposed to a "government-centered" society, that he (Romney) knows that "redistribution" is so un-American, blah blah blah.

Ever since Reagan's election in 1980 Republicans have been trying to bottle the Reagan magic by repeating his bromides. But Reagan didn't win because of his bromides. He won because he projected an image of confidence and optimism. He was an actor by profession whose favorite recreation was to ride horses and split logs. Romney does not, as far as I know, split logs (although his wife does like horses). As a youth, Reagan was a lifeguard. Romney by contrast carried the hockey team's sticks and helped cut off a kid's hair because he thought it was too long. Romney's efforts to channel Reagan by repeating all this garbage about redistribution will fail. It's really a sign of desperation.

Added later (to cross the t's and dot the i's): Virtually every country's public policies are redistributive, both upward and downward, to one extent or another. That there is less redistribution, particularly less downward redistribution, in the U.S. than in certain other countries does not mean there is no redistribution at all or that the notion of redistribution is alien to the U.S.
Romney is interested in contrasting European domestic policies on redistribution to U.S. policies but this is a contrast that easily can be overdrawn. Of course, for political reasons Romney has an incentive to overdraw it, or at least he thinks he does.

A.m. linkage

- Annan interviewed on his new memoir.

- The new issue of International Relations is a special number on the Cuban missile crisis 50 years on.

Noted

Today is the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam (a/k/a, in the South, the Battle of Sharpsburg).

Nuclear insanity to the nth degree

The U.S. is set to spend billions on refurbishing the B-61 gravity nuclear bomb, the kind of thing Slim Pickens rode in the closing frames of Dr. Strangelove. Would that this were only a movie. A WaPo editorial observes that about half of the refurbished B-61s would replace ones that are currently deployed as 'tactical' weapons in Europe. The U.S. nuclear arsenal as a whole has to be maintained, I suppose, in some reasonable state of non-decrepitude but the notion of spending billions of dollars to refurbish tactical nuclear weapons in Europe is insane.

(note: edited slightly after first posting)

On citing articles without really bothering to read them

It's one thing to skim an article and write a blog post taking off from the article or commenting on an aspect of it; blogs are not journals. It's quite another thing to submit a paper to a refereed journal and cite an article for an opposite argument than the one it actually makes, or for some proposition it has nothing to say about. C. Blattman draws attention to the editors' notes in the current APSR which mention this as a widespread problem. If it is a widespread problem -- and although I don't follow the journals all that closely, I'm inclined to think it probably is -- it's deplorable. There are two possible reasons for this: carelessness or outright dishonesty. I've also noticed problems with the way books are cited, which the APSR editors also mention. Recently I've seen an article that cited a book for a proposition that the book had little or nothing to do with; I've also seen an article, in a 'top journal', that cited books this way, not once or twice but quite a lot: Smith 1998 or Jones 2002 -- no page numbers, no chapter numbers even, just the author's last name and the publication date. This is often both unhelpful and potentially misleading, as it can create the impression that the entire book fully supports whatever point in the text it's being cited for. It's certainly not a completely indefensible practice and there are times when it's entirely appropriate but, IMO, it should be used with some discrimination.

Just so I don't come off as a disgruntled grouch, there are of course still articles published which cite works in an exemplary way. But this shouldn't really be an issue at all. Part of the problem is that there is too much being published and authors are afraid their submissions will be rejected for failure to cite some allegedly relevant piece, so they will cram in tons of citations whether they have actually read them carefully or not.

I have had only one experience with submitting an article and getting readers' reviews of it -- it was about five years ago and the article was, admittedly, not fully baked (it was not drawn from my dissertation but was about something entirely different). There were two reports, one quite cursory, the other impressively long and detailed, both recommending rejection. The long, detailed report faulted the piece on several grounds ("undertheorized and empirically weak" is the phrase that I recall) but one of the criticisms was that I hadn't cited this, that and the other. The reviewer was right: I hadn't cited X and Y. Should I have? Quite possibly. On the other hand, I would rather have had the article rejected, as it was (I never did anything with it after that or tried to get it published anywhere else) than have cited works I hadn't actually read or at least looked at with sufficient care to determine what they were actually saying.

I think this post probably should be filed under "rants" but I'm just going to put it under "miscellaneous."

(P.s. I've published book reviews but they're a different kettle of fish than articles.)

Is it about the video?

Are the recent protests and assaults on U.S. facilities in the Muslim world about that anti-Muslim video made by some shady person in California? Yes, in the sense that the video was the proximate cause; but protests of this sort obviously don't happen unless there is a reservoir of anti-U.S. sentiment just waiting for a spark to give it expression. A WaPo piece largely on the situation in Egypt, highlighting the role of the Salafists and their political party, contains a few revealing quotes from people on the street.

“What happened in Egypt was the minimum response to the movie,” said Abdelrahman Said Kamel, 30, who was selling brightly colored women’s clothing at a street kiosk Saturday and said he had protested at the U.S. Embassy several times this week. “I can’t understand how America is trying to help us economically but insulting our prophet.”

Note the metonymic phrasing: America is insulting the prophet; the actions of an isolated crank are taken as representative of the whole country. Later in the same article another Egyptian is quoted as saying that the U.S. never helped Egypt; rather it helped the Mubarak regime keep Egyptians oppressed and unemployed. These views are widespread enough to make a spark like the video an effective catalyst of protest.

Dan Nexon notes that the video acted as a trigger because it fit "a particular pre-existing script concerning identity relations: 'Americans/Westerners hate/disrespect Islam/Muslims.'" I would only add that this script has existed for a long time and has proved very durable: statements by U.S. presidents and officials repeatedly distinguishing between Islam on the one hand and extremist violence on the other have not apparently had much effect in diminishing the script's force. Scripts about identity relations presumably can take on lives of their own and become almost impervious to alteration, but the remarkable durability of this script must lie in, among other things, deep-rooted historical and ideological sources, which are kept fresh, so to speak, by some aspects of U.S. foreign policy. (I am leaving this deliberately vague; people can fill in the blanks in their own ways.)

A final note on U.S. embassies: The attack on the compound in Benghazi may have led some people to think that U.S. embassies (as opposed to consulates, etc.) are not well protected. My impression is that this is not true. U.S. embassies in many parts of the world, I suspect, resemble rather forbidding fortresses (certainly that was the case in Bangladesh when I was there a number of years ago) and routinely have armed guards. That doesn't mean they can't be stormed by determined protestors, but people whose image of an embassy is a nice little townhouse in a leafy portion of northwest Washington, D.C. should know that U.S. embassies in many parts of the world are not like that at all.

Update: Fouad Ajami has a WaPo op-ed on this. I'm not a big fan of his but at least parts of this piece are ok. He downplays the role of U.S. policy, however.

'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.