Over at the German Marshall Fund's blog, Andrew Small articulates an interesting thought on the recent spot of trouble between China and the west: 

The mood on China in Western capitals is beginning to darken. From cyber-attacks to obstinacy in Copenhagen, Beijing’s assertiveness and the hardening tone of its diplomacy are prompting a rethink. If the competitive aspects of the relationship with China are going to dominate in the years ahead, have the United States and Europe got their strategies right? And if not, what are the options?....

Many Western officials believe, however, that China has miscalculated — and is shooting itself in the foot.  Talk of giving Beijing more space on sensitive issues has evaporated.  Support from business lobbies has weakened.  Heads of government who would happily push China into the “important but not urgent” file have begun to review their strategies.

Already, Beijing is feeling the effects of this pushback.  Recent weeks have seen the announcement of arms sales to Taiwan, confirmation of a U.S. presidential meeting with the Dalai Lama, and public criticism from President Obama and Secretary Clinton of China’s currency policies and its stance on the Iranian nuclear issue.  The West hopes China will realize it has overplayed its hand and will make some conciliatory moves — such as a modest revaluation of the yuan and acquiescence to tougher sanctions on Iran — to reverse the political dynamic. For all the noise in the last week, Washington has made only a modest tactical shift. But the United States and Europe may yet see this as a wake-up call and make a more serious set of changes to their China policies.

Indeed, for all the wailing about how America can't commit to certain policies for fear of angering the Chinese, the United States seems to be doing whatever it wants.  Hmm.... that sounds familiar. 

As I keep saying in this space, China is a rising power, but they're still not in the same league as either the United States or the European Union in terms of material wealth, military infrastructure, or soft power.  Joshua Kurlantzick  provided a concise summary of this point in yesterday's Boston Globe which is worth reading.   

The question I have is whether any of this will matter.  My hunch is that China's various actions play well domestically -- and that has top priority for Beijing's leaders.  China is not a superpower, but it is still powerful enough to "go it alone" if it so chooses on a number of policy dimensions. 

Question to readers:  will the U.S. and China continue to pursue the status quo, or will they  respond to each other's actions by dialing the conflict down? 

Your humble blogger watched the Super Bowl and found it both surprising and entertaining.  I'd read so many paeans to Peyton Manning over the past week that I'd come to believe that the game itself was just a formality. Oops.

The ads, however, have made me fear for America. The Super Bowl is the place to launch memorable campaigns. For most of my adult life, I can remember laughing pretty hard at a couple of the ads at the very least. 

This year? Dear God, they were abysmal. It's telling that the funniest one was the Snickers spot featuring Betty White and Abe Vigoda. And the Coke ad featuring The Simpsons was kind of intriguing, with a very anti-populist message. 

Other than that, the ads showed as much snappiness as The Who's halftime show -- which is to say, none at all. There were back-to-back ads where the joke was not wearing pants. My son described the Intel ad as "kind of creepy." The Audi Green ad was so over-the-top about eco-protection that for 90 percent of the ad I thought it was trying to covince Americans to block any measures to halt global warming. This Bridgestone ad was downright offensive. And, as near as I can figure, all of the Bud Light ads were designed by people forced to imbibe at least a keg of their product.

Screw the National Export Initiative -- the Obama administration should set minimal quality standards  for Super Bowl ads.   

Later today I promise to mock the Obama administration's National Export Initiative to within an inch of its life; on a Friday morning, however,  FP readers deserve a dose of whimsy. 

With pitchers and catchers due to report later this month, I bring you the greatest nexus between sports, world politics, and Web 2.0 technologies yet discovered:  Ichiro Suzuki as a both a precision-guided munition and a weapon of mass destruction. 

Hat tip:  ESPN's Rob Neyer. 

Well, there certainly are a surfeit of Sino-American tiffs going on at the moment. 

Over at Reason, Ron Bailey offers an intriguing solution to one of these problems -- use the WTO as a crowbar to bring down the Great Firewall of China:

 

When China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 it agreed that foreign service companies would have the same access to markets in China as domestic companies do. Now the European Union and the U.S. Trade Representative office are considering an argument that the Great Firewall violates China’s obligations to permit free trade in services under its agreements with the WTO. Last year, in a working paper titled Protectionism Online: Internet Censorship and International Trade Law, the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) think tank argued that “WTO member states are legally obliged to permit an unrestricted supply of crossborder Internet services.”

Since 2007, the California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC) has been pushing the U.S. Trade Representative to file a case against China on the grounds that it has been violating its WTO obligations. CFAC argues that, among other violations, China discriminates against foreign suppliers of Internet services by blocking them at the border while allowing domestic suppliers to offer like services. In addition, China has violated its commitments not to introduce or apply non-tariff measures when it joined the WTO by blocking a number of imported products without explanation or justification. China has also not set up any administrative procedures through which foreign suppliers of online services could appeal the blocking of imported publications and content.

I'll defer to smarter law blogs for correction, but I really don't think this is going to work.  First, I'm not sure the differences in national treatment are great enough to constitute a WTO violation (remember, the Chinese position on the Google controversy is that Google has to obey Chinese laws, which appply to both domestic and foreign search engines).  Second, China can respond not by lifting the Great Firewall, but by setting up administrative procedures to handle complaints.  Third, as Bailey acknowledges, if China were to lose such a case, one option would be to simply refuse to comply.  The U.S. would be allowed to respond with trade sanctions, but I suspect China's government will take that bargain every day of the week and twice on Sundays. 

Simon Lester suggests that a bilateral investment treaty (BIT) would be a more useful crowbar -- which is great, except the U.S. and China don't have one.  A BIT is being negotiated, and some experts are optimistic that it will be completed by this summer.   Call me crazy, but I can't see the Chinese government negotiating anything that would affect their ability to censor. 

Am I missing something?

Yesterday The Lancet retracted a controversial 1998 study that linked a British vaccine for measles/mumps/rubella to the onset of autism.  This comes on the heels of multiple scientific studies that have failed to replicate the 1998 study's results, as well as the revelation that the paper's lead author, Andrew Wakefield, had failed to disclose commercial conflicts of interest. 

So, this should put an end to the whole debate then, right?  Well, New York Times reporter Gardiner Harris gets some quotes that suggest otherwise.

the retraction may do little to tarnish Dr. Wakefield’s reputation among parents’ groups in the United States. Despite a wealth of scientific studies that have failed to find any link between vaccines and autism, the parents fervently believe that their children’s mental problems resulted from vaccinations....

Jim Moody, a director of SafeMinds, a parents’ group that advances the notion the vaccines cause autism, said the retraction would strengthen Dr. Wakefield’s credibility with many parents.

“Attacking scientists and attacking doctors is dangerous,” he said. “This is about suppressing research, and it will fuel the controversy by bringing it all up again.”

Unfortunately, Moody's statement does seem to evoke Drezner's Eleventh Commandment of Policy Wonks.  Activists will argue that this is an example of Big Science suppressing counterintuitive research.  And in a public battle between the Jenny McCarthy/Oprah media-industrial complex and a bunch of science nerds, I'm putting my money on Mustard Girl.  And I'm not the only one. 

In my prior research, I've seen this kind of dynamic play out in the debates over genetically modified foods, and we're still seeing it play out in the debate over climate change.  Furthermore, because scientists are not perfect., it's becoming easier to point out flaws that don't necessarily compromise the basic science but do tarnish the image of scientists as neutral arbiters of fact. 

To be fair, it's true that individual scientists aren't really completely neutral -- especially when it comes to politicized debates.  The scientific method, on the other hand, is about as neutral as you can get.  But that's not as sexy a sell to the public.   

Question to readers:  is there a way to make scientific consensus more acceptable to a public that doesn't want to hear the results? 

The New York Times' Jason McLure reports that Libya leader Muamar Qaddafi did not take well to losing his perch as the head of the African Union: 

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi , the Libyan leader, delivered a rambling rebuke of fellow African heads of state Sunday after they chose to replace him as chairman of the African Union and failed to endorse his push for the creation of a United States of Africa.

“I do not believe we can achieve something concrete in the coming future,” said Colonel Qaddafi, before introducing President Bingu wa Mutharika of Malawi as his successor at the African Union’s annual summit meeting, held in Addis Ababa. “The political elite of our continent lacks political awareness and political determination. The world is changing into 7 or 10 countries, and we are not even aware of it.” (emphasis added)

This is interesting.  It would appear that Qaddafi has been reading himself some E.H. Carr.  Carr argued in Nationalism and After that the nation-state eventually the world would agglomerate itself into about 10-15 superstates.  Which is fine, except that Carr wrote his book in 1945 -- and the world has been trending in the exact opposite direction ever since. 

Blake Hounshell highlights a tidbit from Henry Paulson's new memoir that caught my attention as well.  According to Paulson, in the summer of 2008 Russia approached China to sell off their Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt.  This merited stories from Bloomberg and the Financial Times.  According to the FT:

Russia proposed to China that the two nations should sell Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds in 2008 to force the US government to bail out the giant mortgage-finance companies, former US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson has claimed....

Mr Paulson said that he was told about the Russian plan when he was in Beijing for the Olympics in August 2008. Russia had gone to war with Georgia, a US ally, on August 8.

“Russian officials had made a top-level approach to the Chinese, suggesting that together they might sell big chunks of their GSE holdings to force the US to use its emergency authorities to prop up these companies,” he said.

Fannie and Freddie are known as GSEs or government sponsored enterprises.

“The Chinese had declined to go along with the disruptive scheme, but the report was deeply troubling,” he said. A senior Russian official told the Financial Times that he could not comment on the allegation.

The Russians deny the story in the Bloomberg story, but Ashby Monk points out the possible implications: 

Paulson’s report is pretty amazing. If true, it would appear that Russia was plotting economic warfare against the US during the summer of 2008; I don’t really know what else to call it. Their intention was to use their sovereign wealth to purposely weaken and damage the US economy. The fact that all this apparently occurred around the same time that Russia was engaged in a traditional war with Georgia, a US ally, lends some credibility to the idea.

This revelation–while unconfirmed–will not comfort those in the West that fear SWFs; it doesn’t help anybody if these funds are seen to be potential weapons of economic destruction…

Let's assume this is true for the sake of making life interesting.  There's still a few more pieces of data I'd like to have before drawing conclusions. 

Monk assumes that the Russians did this for geopoltical reasons. If memory serves, however, China and Russia were both concerned about protecting the value of their GSE debt.  Forcing the U.S. government to intervene would have helped protect their remaining holdings.  So this might have been an entirely commercial gambit. 

Second, this really isn't about sovereign wealth funds per se but about official holdings of U.S. debt and equities.  Some people think this is a real problem -- others don't.  Readers should provide their thoughts in the comments.

Third, the fact that the Russians thought the Chinese would go along with them on this says a lot about the delusions Russian leaders had during the Russian-Georgian conflict.  They really seem to have believed that China, other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the rest of the Collective Security Treaty Organization  would be perfectly cool with Russia recognizing the independence of two secessionist states -- just because it would be an affront to the U.S.A.  Whoops.

This raises my provocative but closing point -- that the Russian-Georgian war might have been the best thing that could have happened for the bilateral relationship.  Despite all the doomsaying at the time, the conflict -- combined with Great Recession -- had a modest humbling effect on Russian ambitions.  The commodity bubble - which had fuelled Russia's economic growth and self-confidence for the past decade - popped in the summer of 2008.  The recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia abetted a capital outflow that had begun in reaction to the Russian government's heavy-handedness in picking winners and losers in the domestic economy.  These trends, if nothing else, likely highlighted the opportunity costs of continued bellicosity to Russian elites and Russian policymakers. 

At the same time, the invasion itself provided a moment of clarity to U.S. policymakers about the precise limits of their influence when dealing with balky republics in the Caucasus.  Even as a candidate, Obama articulated a "realist internationalist" position towards the Russian Federation.  This approach recognizes Russia's great power status and the utility of a great power concert in dealing with global trouble spots.  Rather than prioritizing human rights, democratization, or even economic interests in the bilateral relationship, this policy position prioritizes great power cooperation on matters of high politics, such as nuclear nonproliferation and the containment of rogue states that transgress global norms.

You can argue about the priorities, but on the whole I think this policy has worked.  The war allowed both sides to confront the costs of continuing down a very negative trajectory.  They both stepped away from the brink.

This is worth thinking about whem mulling over a different bilateral relationship that's had a bad few months.

I was planning to liveblog last night's State of the Union address, but as the hour approached, your humble blogger couldn't muster the energy for it, and resorted to sporadic  tweets instead. 

As it turns out, that was the appropriate tack, because my lackluster effort to process the speech matched the Obama administration's lackluster effort to incorporate foreign policy into the speech (FP's Josh Rogin has expertly parsed the little foreign policy content there was).  As predicted, there wasn't a whole hell of a lot of international relations content in the SOTU, despite Heather Hurlburt's best efforts to argue otherwise. 

Politico's Laura Rozen noted "the seeming downgrading of foreign policy emphasis in the speech," and The Spectator's Alex Massie observed "Foreign policy received very little, even perfunctory, attention."  [UPDATE:  oooh, Jeffrey Laurenti has data]: 

[Obama] devoted just 14 percent of his speech to international concerns – a far cry from George Bush, who regularly devoted half his State of the Union addresses to foreign policy and national security themes (and fully 88 percent of the infamous “axis of evil” address in 2002, which laid out the road map for war in the Middle East).

What attention was paid to foreign economic policy was desultory when it wasn't firmly wedged in Fantasyland. 

In fact, let's deconstruct that entire section of the speech -- it won't take that long: 

[W]e need to export more of our goods. Because the more products we make and sell to other countries, the more jobs we support right here in America. So tonight, we set a new goal: We will double our exports over the next five years, an increase that will support two million jobs in America. To help meet this goal, we're launching a National Export Initiative that will help farmers and small businesses increase their exports, and reform export controls consistent with national security.

We have to seek new markets aggressively, just as our competitors are. If America sits on the sidelines while other nations sign trade deals, we will lose the chance to create jobs on our shores. But realizing those benefits also means enforcing those agreements so our trading partners play by the rules. And that's why we will continue to shape a Doha trade agreement that opens global markets, and why we will strengthen our trade relations in Asia and with key partners like South Korea, Panama, and Colombia.

 Now, let's see if there's anything of substance in there:

1)  "We will double our exports over the next five years..."  Well, the President said this would happen, so it must be so!!  I would humbly request that the president also decree that the pull of gravity be cut in half.  The government has an equal chance of making that happen. 

2)  "we will continue to shape a Doha trade agreement that opens global markets..."  The key word there is "shape."  I have every confidence the administration will do this, because they make this pledge in every communique they ever issue.  It's a tradition now, like playing "Hail to the Chief."  Play the music, pledge to work on Doha, and then go about your business.  

3)  "we will strengthen our trade relations in Asia and with key partners like South Korea, Panama, and Colombia."  You mean, by ratifying the threee trade agreements that have already been signed and negotiated?  Oh, you don't mean that?  Well, never mind, then. 

State of the Union speeches are usually about domestic priorities, and it's not surprising that this one played to type.  Still, I would have liked to have seen a more robust effort to link foreign policy priorities to domestic priorities -- because the two are more linked than is commonly acknowledged.