The passing of Hugo Chavez has prompted the usual 21st century cycle of news coverage and commentary that follows the death of a polarizing figure: the breaking news on Twitter, followed by the news obits, followed by the hosannahs from supporters, followed by denunciations of the figure, followed by official statements, followed by mealy-mouthed op-eds, followed by hysterical, unhinged criticism of standard diplomatic language. 

Now that the first news cycle has passed, we can get to the more interesting question of assessing Venezuela's future. There was always a fundamental irony to Hugo Chavez's foreign policy. Despite his best efforts to chart a course at odds with the United States, he could never escape a fundamental geopolitical fact of life: Venezuela's economic engine was based on exporting a kind of oil that could pretty much only be refined in the United States. 

So, with Chavez's passing, it would seem like a no-brainer for his successor to tamp down hostility with the United States. After all, Chavez's "Bolivarian" foreign policy was rather expensive -- energy subsidies to Cuba alone were equal to U.S. foreign aid to Israel, for example. With U.S. oil multinationals looking hopefully at Venezuela and Caracas in desperate need of foreign investment, could Chavez's successor re-align foreign relations closer to the U.S.A.? 

I'm not betting on it, however, for one simple reason: Venezuela might be the most primed country in the world for anti-American conspiracy theories. 

International relations theory doesn't talk a lot about conspiracy thinking, but I've read up a bit on it, and I'd say post-Chavez Venezuela is the perfect breeding ground. Indeed, the day of Chavez's death his vice president/anointed successor was already accusing the United States of giving Chavez his cancer. 

Besides that, here's a recipe for creating a political climate that is just itching to believe any wild-ass theory involving a malevolent United States:

1) Pick a country that possesses very high levels of national self-regard. 

2) Make sure that the country's economic performance fails to match expectations.

3) Create political institutions within the country that are semi-authoritarian or authoritarian. 

4) Select a nation with a past history of U.S. interventions in the domestic body politic.

5) Have the United States play a minor supporting role in a recent coup attempt. 

6) Make sure the United States is closely allied with the enduring rival of the country in question.

7) Inculcate a long history of accusations of nutty, American-led conspiracies from the political elite. 

8) Finally, create a political transition in which the new leader is desperate to appropriate any popular tropes used by the previous leader. 

Venezuela is the perfect breeding ground for populist, anti-American conspiracy theories. And once a conspiratorial, anti-American culture is fomented, it sets like concrete. Only genuine political reform in Venezuela will cure it, and I don't expect that anytime soon. 

Oh, and by the way: Those commentators anticipating a post-Castro shift by Cuba toward the U.S., should run through the checklist above veeeery carefully.

Am I missing anything? 

Your humble blogger is a busy man. There are books to write, referee reports to complete, committee meetings to attend, grant proposals to craft, silver prices to fix at the behest of the Council on Foreign Relations, tweets to tweet, witty blog posts to devise, and petty acts of professorial revenge to enact. He doesn't have time to revisit an ongoing international crisis with no changes in the dynamic. 

So, after reading Thomas Erdbrink and David Sanger's front-pager in the New York Times and Jason Rezaian's story in the Washington Post, I think we're at the stage where it's possible to automate any blog post on  the Iran crisis. Here are the seven key points to make in any \post of this nature going forward, with quotes from one of these two stories as evidence: 

1) There is a deal on the nuclear issue that can be agreed upon any time both sides are interested in an agreement. From Erdbrink and Sanger:

The outlines of a nuclear deal have been clear for months: an Iranian agreement to limit the number of centrifuges that produce uranium, a cap on the amount of fuel in Iranian hands, and an agreement to ship its most potent stockpiles — the stuff that can be quickly converted to bomb fuel — out of the country. It would also have to agree to expose its history of nuclear work, including any on weapons technology, which it has refused to show international inspectors. In return, Iran would get an acknowledgment that it has a right to peaceful nuclear enrichment, and a gradual lifting of the sanctions.

2) The sanctions against Iran will be tightened until there is a nuclear deal. From Erdbrink and Sanger: 

The existing sanctions on financial transactions have also forced Iran to engage in unfavorable oil-for-goods barter trade with its biggest customers, China and India. Chinese goods and medicine from India are prominently featured in stores and pharmacies across the country.

And now Iranian economic ingenuity will be tested again. Under the new crackdown, the United States is tightening the rules governing countries it has allowed to keep buying Iranian oil, as long as they show they are weaning themselves of it. From now on, when China, Japan, South Korea and India, among others, pay for oil deliveries, they will be required to put that money into a local bank account, which Iran can use only to buy goods within that country.

It is a way of keeping the money from ever being repatriated to Iran, even through third parties.

3) Iran will reject any linkage between negotiation and coercion, even though any final deal will be a function of both factors. From Rezaian: 

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that will not solve the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.

"I’m not a diplomat, I’m a revolutionary, and speak frankly and directly,” said Khamenei, according to a report by Iran's Mehr News agency. “You Americans have pointed guns toward Iran, but at the same time you want to negotiate. The Iranian nation will not be intimidated by these actions."

4) American officials will express concerns in public about the rationality of the Iranian leadership. From Erdbrink and Sanger: 

Obama administration officials were disturbed by a new analysis, prepared for the president and his staff, that paints a picture of the supreme leader as so walled off from what is happening with his country’s oil revenues that he is telling visitors that the sanctions are hurting the United States more than they are hurting Iran.

“The people may be suffering in Iran,” one senior official involved in Iran strategy said last week, “but the supreme leader isn’t, and he’s the only one who counts.”

5) The sanctions will continue to inflict serious damage on the Iranian economy without beinging the regime to its knees. From Erdbrink and Sanger: 

The Iranian economy’s resiliency could surprise Westerners. The way Iran’s economy is structured, with strong links between state bodies and semiofficial and private businesses, helps shield the country, said Saeed Laylaz, an economist and columnist for the Sharq newspaper, which is critical of the government....

Others are more pessimistic, saying the effects of the sanctions have still not been fully felt.

“If the sanctions, government mismanagement and inflation continue naturally in the future, we will encounter serious difficulties,” said Mohsen Farshad Yekta, a professor of economics at the University of Economic Sciences in Tehran.

6) Force will be brandished as an option but not used against Iran. Nick Burns is not known for being a terribly militaristic diplomat, but here's what he told Erdbrink and Sanger about how to deal with Iran:

[T]he U.S. must remain patient and commit to direct talks at the highest levels. But, ultimately both Obama and Netanyahu also need to make the threat of force more credible to Tehran. Combined with sanctions, this may be the most effective way to convince Iran to agree to a peaceful, negotiated settlement.

Chuck Hagel said similar things during his confirmation hearing.  No U.S. official is gonna take force off the table -- but short of a deliberate Iranian provocation in the region, it's not gonna be used. 

7) And the last, most important point: everyone involved -- with the possible exception of Israel -- is pretty comfortable with the status quo. The U.S. is delighted to keep Iran contained. The Iranian leadership is content to blame the U.S. for all of its woes and possess a nuclear breakout capacity, without actually having nuclear weapons.  Iran's economic elites are delighted to engage in sanctions-busting -- more profit for them. And Iran's neighbors are happy to see Iran contained and not actually develop a nuclear weapon. I think even Israel would be copacetic with the current arrangement if they knew that the Iranian regime had no intention of crafting an actual weapon unless it felt an existential threat. 

So... unless and until there's a change in the status quo -- and there hasn't been for some time -- I'll just link back to this post when I need to post my quarterly musings on What to Do About Iran. Or I'll program a bot to cull the updated version of the quotes above to point out that nothing fundamental has changed. 

The New Republic has relaunched in style, featuring a spiffy new website and a sitdown interview with President Barack Obama.  Alas, much of the interview was about internal GOP politics.  Only the last question was about foreign policy, but Obama provided an interesting answer.  In TNR owner Chris Hughes queried about how he morally copes with the ongoing violence in Syria without substantive U.S. intervention.  Here's his response in full: 

Every morning, I have what's called the PDB—presidential daily briefing—and our intelligence and national security teams come in here and they essentially brief me on the events of the previous day. And very rarely is there good news. And a big chunk of my day is occupied by news of war, terrorism, ethnic clashes, violence done to innocents. And what I have to constantly wrestle with is where and when can the United States intervene or act in ways that advance our national interest, advance our security, and speak to our highest ideals and sense of common humanity.

And as I wrestle with those decisions, I am more mindful probably than most of not only our incredible strengths and capabilities, but also our limitations. In a situation like Syria, I have to ask, can we make a difference in that situation? Would a military intervention have an impact? How would it affect our ability to support troops who are still in Afghanistan? What would be the aftermath of our involvement on the ground? Could it trigger even worse violence or the use of chemical weapons? What offers the best prospect of a stable post-Assad regime? And how do I weigh tens of thousands who've been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?

Those are not simple questions. And you process them as best you can. You make the decisions you think balance all these equities, and you hope that, at the end of your presidency, you can look back and say, I made more right calls than not and that I saved lives where I could, and that America, as best it could in a difficult, dangerous world, was, net, a force for good. (emphasis added)

I hear a lot of loose talk about what Barack Obama's foreign policy is really like, but I'd argue that the bolded sections pretty much encapsulate his foreign policy preferences.  For him, national interest and security trumps liberal values every day of the week and twice on Sundays. 

[But that's a false dichotomy!!--ed.  You've been listening to too many Jon Favreau speeches. The easy foreign policy calls are when values and interests line up.  It's when they conflict that we get a better sense of what's vital and what's... less important.]  Obama looks at Syria and sees a grisly situation where the status quo doesn't hurt American interests -- in fact, it's a mild net positive.  Given that situation, Obama's incentive to intervene is pretty low.

Does this mean Obama is amoral or un-American?  Hardly.  That answer suggests two things.  First. liberal values do matter to Obama -- they just don't matter as much as other things.  Second, to be fair, contra academic realism, there is a set of ethical values that are attached to realpolitik, and I think they inform Obama's decision-making as well.  It seems pretty clear that Obama's first foreign policy instinct after advancing the national interest is the foreign policy equivalent of the Hippocratic oath:  first, do no harm.  If you think about it, the one liberal deviation from Obama's foreign policy is the Libya intervention, where he explicitly authorized the use of force for a mission that he acknowledged was not in the core national interest.  It worked, but we've seen/seeing the second-order effects in Benghazi and across Northern Africa. 

I'm bemused by neoconservatives who simutaneously pillory the Obama administration for the Benghazi screw-up, yet call for greater efforts to "do something" in Syria.  What happened in Benghazi, and Algeria, and Mali are the direct follow-ons from the last time the U.S. ramped up its efforts in a non-strategic situation.  If anything, it seems clear that Obama has learned from that lesson -- as well as the Afghanistan "surge" -- and determined that the utility of military intervention is more limited and the costs are even greater than he imagined in 2008.  Furthermore, as the Congo comment suggests, he's also conscious that if one really wants to apply liberal ethical criteria to the use of Amertican force, then Syria is not at the top of the queue. 

Barack Obama neither an appeaser nor a liberal internationalist.  He's someone who has a clear set of foreign policy preferences and an increasing risk aversion to the use of force as a tool of regime change.  That's not unethical -- it's just based on a set of ethical principles that might be somewhat alien to America's very, very liberal foreign policy community. 

Am I missing anything?

One of the points I was trying to make in my CFR working paper on global economic governance is that the system, while far from perfect, did in fact prevent the worst from happening.  That might sound like lowered expectations, but anyone who knows anything about the history of global governance would appreciate that this would represent a significant upgrading from past centuries. 

I bring this up because of this maddeningly-short-on-detail New York Times front-pager by Eric Shmitt and David Sanger on what went down when the Syrian government inched closer to using its chemical weapons stockpile: 

In the last days of November, Israel’s top military commanders called the Pentagon to discuss troubling intelligence that was showing up on satellite imagery: Syrian troops appeared to be mixing chemicals at two storage sites, probably the deadly nerve gas sarin, and filling dozens of 500-pounds bombs that could be loaded on airplanes.

Within hours President Obama was notified, and the alarm grew over the weekend, as the munitions were loaded onto vehicles near Syrian air bases. In briefings, administration officials were told that if Syria's increasingly desperate president, Bashar Al-Assad, ordered the weapons to be used, they could be airborne in less than two hours — too fast for the United States to act, in all likelihood.

What followed next, officials said, was a remarkable show of international cooperation over a civil war in which the United States, Arab states, Russia and China have almost never agreed on a common course of action.

The combination of a public warning by Mr. Obama and more sharply worded private messages sent to the Syrian leader and his military commanders through Russia and others, including Iraq, Turkey and possibly Jordan, stopped the chemical mixing and the bomb preparation. A week later Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said the worst fears were over — for the time being.

Now if you read the whole thing, it's entirely unclear exactly who communicated to whom and whether these messages were planned and coordinated in advance -- though it reads like it was. 

But this episode, again, seems like an example of the great powers making sure that the worst-case scenario -- for them, at least -- did not transpire.  Now this might seem like small beer compared to the appalling loss of life in Syria and the discomfiting tolerance the Obama admiinistration has with the status quo.  Still, compared to, say, the interwar period of 1919-1939, or the Cold War deadlock from 1945-1990, it's not nothing either.  Clearly, the great powers do seem pretty invested in the idea of keeping the Syrian civil war limited to Syria and not allowing it to consume the entire region. 

In no way should this be taken as a shining moment for global governance, but it does suggest that there is some governing and policing going on, no matter how suboptimal the level.  In much of the social sciences, there's a focus on constrained optimization and maximization.  What's going on in global governance right now highlights the "constrained" part of that equation more than anything else.  Still, compared to some who argue that we operate in a world where no one is powerful enough, perhaps it would be more accurate to phrase it differently.  Formal and informal global governance structures still perform some important tasks at preventing worst-case scenarios from metastasizing, be it in security or economics.  Call it "'good enough' global governance" -- it's not a new world order or anything, but it's also not as chaotic or dysfunctional as many pundits proclaim.

What do you think? 

With 2012 down to its last day, it's now safe to announce this year's Albies -- named in honor of noted political economist Albert O. Hirschman. The Albies are awarded to the best writing in global political economy over the past calendar year.  The writing can be in a book, journal article, think tank report, blog post, whatever -- the key is that the article makes you reconsider the way the world works. 

This time around the bar was rather high, as Hirschman passed away earlier this month.  Still, what with the world supposedly ending this year, there was a lot of really excellent work in this area.  So, in no particular order, here are the ten Albie winners: 

1)  Mario Draghi's September 6th press conference on ECB policy.  In response to a question about whether there would be a limit to the European Central Bank's "outright monetary transactions" -- i.e. buying distressed sovereign debt in secondary markets, Draghi replied, "there is no ex ante quantitative limit to these interventions because we want this to be perceived as a fully effective backstop that removes tail risk from the euro area."  And, with those words, Draghi effectively put a stop to the immediate financial crisis that was crippling the southern European economies.  From a n IPE perspective, Draghi also did something surprising and interesting:  he signaled that the ECB could take steps independent of what the Bundesbank wanted it to do.   With this one statement, Draghi gave the eurozone area room to breathe, stabilized global financial markets, and may have well given a major assist to Barack Obama's re-election.  Now that's a press conference. 

2)  Faisal Ahmed, "The Perils of Unearned Foreign Income:  Aid, Remittances, and Government Survival."  American Political Science Review, February 2012.  Remittances have been the Big Thing in development circles for the past few years, particularly since these flows have been robust even in the face of the Great Recession.  Ahmed's article shows that remittances are not an unalloyed good, however.  Autocratic governments can use these flows as they have used foreign aid -- as a way to divert their own resources away from social programs and towards bolstering the government's coercice apparatus.  Because families have thjis extra income source, their disconent against the state won't rise -- and the state will be better prepared to crack down if citizens do revolt.  Remittances therefore paradoxically help authoritarian governments persist for longer.  This doesn't mean that remittances are a bad thing -- but Ahmed's finding does a lovely job of mucking up some policy truisms. 

3)  McKinsey Global Institute, Debt and Deleveraging:  Uneven Progress on the Path to Growth, January 2012.  Very Serious People across the political spectrum agree that the United States desperately needs to get its debt problem under control.  But as this McKinsey report demonstrates, the United States already has gotten its debt problem under control.  Sure, the federal government's debt-to-GDP ratio has ballooned since the start of the Great Recession, but overall debt levels -- including households, the financial sector, and business more generally -- have shrunk quite nicely, thank you very much.  Indeed, the U.S. approach of swelling government debt to absorb the slack in aggregate demand repeats the successful policies of the Scandinavian countries during their financial meltdowns in the early nineties.  This -- comibined with an energy boom, the insourcing of manufacturing, and even a modicum of sane foreign economic and security policies -- augur a revival in America's economic fortunes. 

4)  Robert J. Gordon, "Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds," NBER Working Paper No. 18315, August 2012.  The doppelgänger to the McKinsey paper, Gordon makes the somewhat speculative argument that the boom times for U.S. economic growth are over.  Arguing that the productivity gains from the Information Revolution are puny compared to the Second Industrial Revolution, Gordon then sketches out a future where the rate of per capita income growth collapses to pre-Industrial levels.  This provoked a lot of pushback -- see Brad Plumer's roundup and Paul Krugman's recent column.  And for that reason alone, Gordon deserves an Albie -- he got people to think seriously about the sources of economic growth, a curiously neglected topic in economics. 

5) Artemis Capital Management, "Volatility of an Impossible Object: Risk, Fear, and Safety in Games of Perception." September 30, 2012. To put it gently, the past few years have not been kind to the financial gurus of the world.  Slowly, they've begun to acknowledge that their job isn't just to deliver the high "alpha" or the "smart beta" anymore -- it's also to recognize where there's a buildup of systemic risk and general uncertainty and hedge against it.  Since perception is a big driver of asset valuation in a world of uncertainty, that makes life even trickier for financial analysts.  In response, this was the year that they began to embrace post-modernism as an analytical tool.  This Artemis newsletter is simply the most obvious example.  After you read it, you could come away with the firm conviction that the author is either onto something truly fundamental, or he's just throwing up his hands and crying "Uncle!"  Either way, some enterprising Ph.D. student is gonna produce one hell of a dissertation by analyzing the baroque literature of investment newsletters.  Bill Gross would be a whole chapter unto himself. 

6) Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Crown Publishing.  What explains why some countries prosper and some don't?  When Mitt Romney credited the gap between Palestinians and Israelis as a matter of "culture," he stumbled into every social scientist's personal nightmare.  The argument de l'année was Acemoglu and Robinson's observation about the power of political institutions to shape immediate economic incentives as well as long-term cultural patterns.  Why Nations Fail is the popular capstone to a decade of Acemoglu and Robinson's research.  It doesn't settle the argument by any means, but it's a powerful brief against those who argue that the sources of prosperity are either geographical or cultural.   

7)  Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats, Penguin. As income and wealth inequality has increased both globally and in the United States, the political implications of this trend have slowly moved into the forefront of political debates.  Freeland's Plutocrats is the perfect jumping off point for this debate. Freeland paints a complex portrait of the rich, demonstrating their worldview while avoiding both condescension and caricature.  This is one of those rare books that actually improves upon the Atlantic cover story that kicked it off.  The final third of the book in particular raises some profoundly troubling questions about the relationship between the uber-wealthy, the state and the rest of us. 

8)  David Barstow, "Vast Mexico Bribery Case Hushed Up After Top-Level Struggle," New York Times, April 21, 2012; Barstow and Alexandra Xanic von Bertrab, "The Bribery Aisle:  How Wal-Mart Got It's Way in Mexico," New York Times, December 17, 2012.  Social scientists often disdain journalists for not paying attention to macro trends and failing to understand statistics.  These are valid concerns, but scholars also need to acknowledge when journalists actually generate data rather than merely report on it.  In these two stories Barstow and his co-authors took a beacon and revealed the extent and methods of corruption in Mexico -- and the ways in which corrupt practices in one country can infect the culture of a multinational corporation.  Outstanding reportage.  This story gets bonus points for being an article about Mexicco but not about either immigration or narcotics. 

9)  FT Reporters, "Chinese Infighting:  Secrets of a succession war," Financial Times, March 4, 2012/John Garnault, "Rotting From Within," Foreign Policy, April 16, 2012/David Barboza, "Billions in Hidden Riches for Family of Chinese Leader," New York Times, October 25, 2012 and "Family of Chinese Regulator Profits in Insurance Firm's Rise," December 30, 2012/Bloomberg News, "Heirs of Mao's Comrades Rise as New Capitalist Nobility," December 26, 2012.   As China underwent its own leadership transition, the lack of a free press in that country did not prevent some crackerjack reporting on the corruption issues that plague the People's Republic.  From the FT's harrowing story of how Bo Xilai used torture to amass his fortune to Garnault's examination of how corruption has ensnared the Chinese military to Barboza's and Bloomberg's explications of how political connections lead to wealth in China, western reporters did an outstanding job in 2012 of demonstrating the inner working's of China's political economy.  If your newspaper or magazine gets blocked by the Great Firewall after a story, that should be taken as a sign of respect. 

10)   Matt Ferchen, "Whose China Model is it anyway?  The contentious search for consensus." Review of International Political Economy, April 2012.  This was a curious year for China-watching. On the one hand, the trend was for analysts to shift from bullish to bearish. On the other hand, some Chinese and a lot of Americans are now feeling pretty confident about the superiority of the Chinese system.  But what exactly is the China Model?  Ferchen does an excellent job dissecting what we're talking about when we're talking about the Beijing Consensus.  He further dives into the internal Chinese debate on the existing model, revealing serious qualms about the stats quo.  Ferchen shows that one of the interesting things about the "Beijing Consensus" is not its content per se, but how policymakers and pundits on both sides of the Pacific deploy the term. 

Honorable Mentions:  Lauren Greenfield's The Queen of Versailles; Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression, Harvard University Press; Christopher Hayes' Twilight of the Elites; Annie Lowrey, "Dire Poverty Falls Despite Global Slump," New York Times; Peyer Doyle's letter of resignation to the IMF, June 16, 2012; and -- just under the wire - the automated Thomas Friedman Op-ed Generator. 

So, to sum up:    two books, to peer-reviewd journal articles, two investment reports, a passle of journalism, one draft paper, and one press conference.   And yet I still feel like I nonly scratched the surface. 

May 2013 be as rich a year for global political economy as this past one!! 

When we last left off, your humble blogger was speculating on the ways in which foreign policy had cost Mitt Romney during the campaign.  In this post I want to expand on that theme -- with an assist from the just-released-this-very-minute-from-embargo 2012 Chicago Council Survey of American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy. 

To set the table: 

1)  Despite the expectations of some Republicans, the traditional economic variables that affect a presidential campaign aren't tilting the needle towards Mitt Romney.  As the New York Times' Jeff Sommer reports:

For a year in which a truly dismal economy sealed the electoral fate of an incumbent president, [Ray Fair] says, look at 1980, when President Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan. In the nine months leading up to that election, per capita gross domestic product actually declined at an average annual rate of 3.7 percent, while inflation increased at an annual rate of 7.9 percent.

Professor Fair estimates that the comparable numbers for President Obama are G.D.P. growth of 1.62 percent and inflation of 1.51 percent. The low inflation rate is a plus for the president, while the mediocre G.D.P. growth rate is a problem — though not a fatal one.

“You can quite properly call this economy ‘weak,’ ” he said, “but it’s nothing like what Carter faced.” Mr. Reagan’s overwhelming victory “fit the economic picture perfectly,” he said. “This is a different situation.”

He added: “If the economy were significantly weaker or significantly stronger — if we were in a recession or if economic growth were really dramatically better — we’d have a much clearer picture of who would win the election. But the economy remains in a range of mediocre growth. It puts us in the margin-of-error range.”....

Professor Fair will compute a fresh prediction based on data available in late October, but at this stage the political probabilities aren’t likely to shift very much, he says. “It looks as though this will be a horse race, a very close one,” he says.

If it's a horse race, then one of the horses has pulled into an ever-so-slight lead. Both FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver and Politico's Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen note that the conventions have given a small but crucial advantage to the incumbent.  VandeHei and Allen talked to both campaigns, and here is the best hope for the Romney camp:   

[W]hen you dig into the small slice of undecided voters (probably only 6 percent to 8 percent of the electorate, according to the campaigns), the demographics are not favorable to Obama: mostly white, many with some college education, economically stressed, largely middle-aged. 

Obama officials have maintained for several weeks that there are too few undecided voters for Romney to get the bounce he needs from the debates. “Romney is not going to win undecided voters 4-to-1,” a senior administration official told reporters on Air Force One on Friday. “If you are losing in Ohio by 4 or 5 points and trailing in Colorado by 2 points, if you are trailing in Nevada by 2 or 3 points, you are not going to win in those states." 

So, for Romney to win, he's going to have to run the table with the tiny sliver of undecided independents. 

And here is where foreign policy becomes a real problem for Mitt Romney -- because if the Chicago Council results are accurate, independents basically want the exact opposite of what Mitt Romney is selling them. 

Let's stipulate that a President Romney might not actually do what he's promising during the campaign -- certainly the smart money doesn't believe him.  Still, based on his rhetoric to date, let's also stipulate that Romney really wants America to lead the world.  He wants to boost defense spending rather than cut it.  He certainly wants to give the appearance that he would pursue a more hawkish policy towards Iran, Syria, Russia, North Korea, China and illegal immigrants than Barack Obama.    

That's great -- except it turns out most of America -- and independents in particular -- want pretty much the opposite of that.  Indeed, as Marshall Bouton says in the Foreword to the report: 

Over time, Independents have become more inclined than either Republicans or Democrats to limit U.S. engagement in world affairs. Because Independents are an increasing share of the electorate, this development in American public opinion warrants attention. 

If you read the whole report, what's striking is how much the majority view on foreign policy jibes with what the Obama administration has been doing in the world: military retrenchment from the Greater Middle East, a reliance on diplomacy and sanctions to deal with rogue states, a refocusing on East Asia, and prudent cuts in defense spending. 

As for Romney, here are some excerpts from the report that suggest where the entire country -- and independents in particular -- are drifting away from his foreign policy rhetoric: 

This survey demonstrates a  strong desire to move on from a decade of war, to scale back spending, and avoid major new military entanglements. The lesson many Americans took away from the Iraq war—that nations should be more cautious about using military force to deal with rogue nations—appears to be taking hold more broadly (p. 13)....

Along with the lessons learned from a decade of war and a reduced sense of threat, Americans are also keenly aware of constraints on U.S. economic resources. When asked whether the defense budget should be cut along with other programs in the effort to address the federal budget deficit, 68 percent of Americans say the defense budget should be cut. This is up 10 points from 58 percent in 2010 (p. 15)....

The most preferred approach to ending [the Iranian nuclear] threat, endorsed by 80 percent, is the one that the UN Security Council is pursuing: imposing tighter economic sanctions on Iran. Essentially the same number (79%) approve of continuing diplomatic efforts to get Iran to stop enriching uranium. Consistent with this strong support for diplomatic approaches, in a separate question, 67 percent of Americans say the United States should be willing to meet and talk with Iranian leaders (p. 29)....

Republicans see greater threats in nearly all areas tested in the 2012 survey. They are more likely than Democrats and Independents to view U.S. debt to China, immigration, terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, Islamist groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Iran’s nuclear program as critical threats (p. 42).

It would appear that Americans -- particularly independents -- have become even more realpolitik than they were when I wrote this five years ago.  Or, to put it more pungently, poll results like these are the kind of thing that will make John Bolton really angry and Jennifer Rubin really scared and William Kristol and the rest of the Weekly Standard gang all hot and bothered -- and not in the good way. 

Now, I strongly suspect that this won't matter to most undecideds.  Foreign policy really isn't a high priority for most voters.  That said, there are three ways in which this could matter. 

First, undecideds likely hold that position because they haven't paid a lot of attention to the campaign yet.  As they start to, it's going to be easier for them to process the rhetorical differences on Iran than on health care.  So if Romney is going to attract the bulk of these undecideds, he's going to do it despite his foreign policy pronouncements -- not because of them.   In an election where a 2% advantage seems insurmountable in a lot of states, even tiny disadvantages matter. 

Second, the Obama campaign seems to be quite eager to micro-target key audiences on foreign policy/national security, as VandeHei and Allen note in their story:

Obama’s plan is to slice and dice his way through myriad campaigns, all distinct, all designed to turn on — or off — very specific subsets of voters in specific states or even counties. Republicans concede Obama is better organized in the areas getting hit with the micro-campaigns....

The Obama plan also focuses on students with an education message; veterans in states that include Virginia, Florida, Colorado and Nevada; housing in Nevada and Florida, where the market tanked; and military families in Virginia, Florida and Colorado (emphasis added). 

I am willing to bet that these groups are not going to be keen to hear anything about a more bellicose foreign policy, and Romney's waning competency on the issue won't help. 

Third -- and finally -- look at it this way:  if the economy doesn't produce the national poll movements that the Romney campaign wants, they'll have to shift to secondary issues.  For the last forty years, the GOP has been able to go to foreign policy and national security.  If Romney does that this time, however, he'll alienate the very independents he needs to win. 

Could Romney/Ryan simply retool their foreign policy message for the general election to allay the concerns of independents and undecideds?  No, I don't think they can.  For one thing, it's simply too late to rebrand.  For another, when cornered on these questions they seem to like doubling down on past statements. Finally, I get the sense that one reason Romney sounds so hawkish is because the campaign thinks it's a cheap way to appeal to the GOP base.  Deviating from that script to woo the undecideds will only fuel suspicion of Romney's conservative bona fides. 

So maybe, just maybe, foreign policy will matter a little bit during this election.  And not in a way that helps Mitt Romney. 

Am I missing anything? 

I should be really pleased with Thomas Friedman's column today.  Entitled "In MItt's World," Friedman pens a substantive column criticizing Romney's foreign policy rhetoric to date and wishing that Romney displayed the same analytic acumen about foreign policy that he displayed as CEO of Bain Capital. 

So I should be happy, except that I passed out from banging my head against my desk after reading the first two paragraphs: 

Mitt Romney has been criticized for not discussing foreign policy. Give him a break. He probably figures he’s already said all that he needs to say during the primaries: He has a big stick, and he is going to use it on Day 1. Or as he put it: “If I’m president of the United States ... on Day 1, I will declare China a currency manipulator, allowing me to put tariffs on products where they are stealing American jobs unfairly.”

That is really cool. Smack China on Day 1. I just wonder what happens on Day 2 when China, the biggest foreign buyer of U.S. debt securities, announces that it will not participate in the next Treasury auction, sending our interest rates soaring. That will make Day 3 really, really cool. 

No.  No, no, no, no, no, and no. 

To elaborate a bit further:  

First, it wouldn't be enough for China to stop buying Treasuries -- as Joe Weisenthal showed with some fun charts a few weeks ago, China has pared back its Treasury purchases intermittently over the past few years -- with zero appreciable effect on U.S. interest rates. (see non-panda-hugger Paul Krugman on this point as well).  No, for China to have the effect that Friedman envisions, they would also have to actively dump most of their holdings of U.S. debt as well.

So what if they do?  Well, second, while Romney's stated China policies border on the destructive, the "labeling" move is bone-headed rather than truly calamitous. China wouldn't dump its debt unless things got really bad between the two countries.  Not even Stephen Roach thinks this would be the initial Chinese response -- and I think Roach is being way too gloomy about Sino-American relations under Romney. 

The reason China won't respond with the nuclear option of dumping all its U.S. debt holdings is that -- to repeat a theme -- this move would hurt China way more than it would hurt the United States.  The far more likely response by China would be to retaliate with trade measures.  This would not be good, as China is now the third largest export market for the United States.  Beijing can hurt a Romney administration by reducing its American imports far more adroitly than trying to trigger another financial crisis. 

Now, for the record, I don't think Romney should label China as a currency manipulator on day one, and I think Friedman makes some trenchant observations on Romney's consequences-free foreign policy statements later in his column.  But this Niall Ferguson-lite version of Sino-American relations is bad international relations theory and really bad economics -- and yet Very Serious People keep trotting it out.  

I really, really wish this would disappear from public discourse.  But it won't.  So, most likely, my desk is gonna get dented a few more times before Election Day. 

Dear Mr. Hiatt (and Mr. Pexton),

Sorry to be writing to you in such a public format.  I'm also sorry to bring up the rather touchy subject of your attempts to find a competent and authentically conservative blogger for the Post.  But can we talk about Jennifer Rubin for a second? 

As I blogged yesterday, Rubin demonstrated incompetence, laziness and/or mendacity in her "hackstabbing" of Robert Zoellick.  In particular, she seemed unable to understand the meaning of the "responsible stakeholder" language that Zoellick started using in 2005, and her weblink to that language wasn't even close to accurate. 

Today I wake up to see that she has offered a follow-up post on Zoellick and an update to the controversial post from yesterday.  Let me just reprint that update in full. 

UPDATE: To clarify, Zoellick in 2005 delivered a speech in which he encouraged China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in international affairs. From 2005 to the present in speeches, articles and interviews (asked in 2009 in Financial Times interview about China’s “scorecard” on acting as a responsible stakeholder he said “I think China has come a long way”), Zoellick repeatedly praised China’s conduct, despite ample signs China was anything but “responsible” and widespread criticism of the policy Zoellick had championed. Given Mitt Romney’s “take China to the WTO” stance and his unsparing criticism of China’s human rights abuses Romney could not be more different in his view of China.

Now this is a bit of an improvement.  Rubin has accurately described what Zoellick was saying in 2005 (as opposed to how it still appears in  her original post).  She also suggests that that Zoellick rubs some neoconservatives/China hardliners the wrong way on positions like human rights abuses.  That's a genuine policy disagreement. 

Still, there are some issues.  One problem is that even in the update, she's still screwing up her evidence.   Her quote from the FT interview of Zoellick is a somewhat out of context -- it seems more like Zoellick was talking about China's economic development in that particular phrase:

Zoellick:  I think China has come a very long long way. I have a special perspective because I was living in Hong Kong in 1980. I went to Guangdong province right after Deng Xiaoping started the reform process. All you have to do is compare the China of that era and the China of today. It’s so startling. 

As for her embedded links:  Rubin's URLs for the "widespread criticism" portion go to two different articles.  The first one is accurate, but, alas, Rubin only bats .500.  The "criticism" link goes to a paper by Jonathan Czin entitled "Dragon Slayer or Panda Hugger?  Chinese Perspectives on 'Responsible Stakeholder' Diplomacy."   Here's Czin's conclusion: 

Zoellick attempted to move U.S. thinking beyond the wholly inadequate dichotomous roles of friend and enemy to define the grey conceptual space that China occupies. To say that China is neither a friend nor an enemy of the United States is not only a truism; it has also become a cliché.  Neither China nor the United States wants to see China become part of a “hub and spokes” alliance system in East Asia. Yet the claim put forth by strategic thinkers such as John Mearsheimer that the changing material balance of power will inexorably and inevitably lead to Sino-American conflict is over-deterministic and threatens to engender a self-fulfilling prophecy. Moreover, it runs counter to the premise of U.S. China policy since Kissinger. Strategically, Zoellick’s “Third Way” offers the most reasonable and palatable option.

I do not think they anyone would characterize this as "criticism" of Zoellick's policy formulation.  I read through the whole article, and couldn't really find any criticism of the policy.  Between you, me and the lamppost, I suspect Rubin saw the "panda-hugger" headline and just put it in.  But I concede that's pure speculation on my part. 

Look, this is tedious stuff, and I don't like descending into the weeds all that much.  Still, if Rubin can't correct her earlier screw-up without making yet another screw-up, doesn't that suggest that something is seriously wrong here?  And don't you, as her publishers, bear just a wee bit of responsibility for this kind of mendacity and laziness? 

Sincerely,

Daniel W. Drezner

Friend of Mitt Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin blogged yesterday about the ten things she thinks Romney needs to talk about with respect to American foreign policy. Now, some of them are pretty anodyne ("Explain why America has to be involved in the world on both practical and philosophic grounds"), and some of them are fair shots at the Obama administration ("Obama dragged his heels for years on three free-trade agreements"). One of them, however, epitomizes a certain kind of right-wing revisionism that needs to be quashed immediately:

Obama made an error of historic proportion in failing to back the Green Movement in 2009 and to adopt regime change as the policy of the U.S. thereafter. His determination to engage a regime that had no intention of being engaged led to muteness when support was most needed by the Greens. Ever since we have failed to hold the regime accountable (for the assassination attempt on a Saudi diplomat, for example) for its actions. Obama has dragged his feet and engaged in self-delusion with regard to his Iran sanctions policy. It hasn’t slowed Iran’s nuclear weapons program. In talking down the military option he’s made the threat of force less credible, and shifted the burden to Israel to take care of a threat to the West (emphasis in original).

Now, there are many, many things wrong with this paragraph: Iran is not really a strategic threat to the West outside of Israel, and the Obama administration clearly hopes that the current sanctions regime could destabilize the Iranian regime. But let's focus on the 2009 moment.

I expect this talking point to pop up again and again among Romney foreign policy flacks, and if I were advising the campaign I'd probably recommend it as a sound political tactic. The beauty of this criticism is that it rests on a magical counter-factual that will never be tested: according to this narrative, if only Barack Obama had been more forceful in June 2009, then the Iranian regime would have crumbled and sweetness and light would have prevailed in the Middle East. It's a great campaign argument, because we'll never know what would have happened if Obama had acted as Rubin, Romney et al would have liked him to act. Romney can pledge that he would have acted differently in the summer of 2009, and he'll never, ever have to flip-flop on it.

The thing is, this argument that Obama could have tipped the scales in 2009 is utter horses**t. Recall that, during the uprising, the leaders of the Green Movement wanted nothing to do with more sanctions against Iran or with military action -- it took them six months of brutal repression for them to even toy with embracing targeted sanctions. Indeed, the reason the administration tiptoed around the Green Movement was that they did not want the Khamenei regime to taint the resistance as a Western-inspired creation. If Obama had been more vocal during the initial stages of the movement, it likely would have accelerated the timetable of the crackdown. And no U.S. action short of a full-scale ground assault could have stopped that.

Let's get rid of the fantasy counter-factual in which U.S. measures short of a ground campaign would have ejected the current Iranian regime. Let's also dismiss the idea that the Green Movement would have welcomed greater U.S. support.

Rubin, Romney et al want the Obama administration to be blunt about its desire to depose the current Iranian regime. This kind of policy statement does have the virtue of simplicity: it ends the negotiation track and leaves only military force as a viable option. Of course, such an approach would also spur Tehran into accelerating its nuclear program as a means of guaranteeing its own survival (which is, by the way, the one constant of Iranian foreign policy). And, again -- short of a ground campaign -- Iran's regime ain't going anywhere.

GOP foreign policy advocates want to argue that Obama screwed up in 2009. Understand, however, that when they argue that the United States should have taken more forceful action three years ago, the only forceful action that would have mattered was another ground war.

Am I missing anything?

The news that Mitt Romney is planning a overseas trip/foreign policy address has led to some... interesting reactions among libertarians/realists.  Even before the trip was announced, Daniel Larison thought it was a bad idea for Romney to focus on foreign policy at all.  After the trip was trial-ballooned, Larison still thought it was a bad idea -- as did Justin Logan at the Cato Institute (guest-posting on Steve Walt's blog). 

As someone who thought this wasn't the worst notion in the world, it's worth reviewing their objections.  In toto:

1)  Romney's neoconservative-friendly foreign policy views are unpopular in both the United States and many of the countries on Romney's itinerary -- so there's no upside.  As Larison puts it:  "Romney’s hawkish critics haven’t fully grasped that foreign policy has become a weakness for the GOP over the last six years, so it makes no sense to them that it might help their presidential candidate to avoid talking about it."

2)  This is an election about the economy, and any energy Romney devotes to foreign policy is wasted.  As Logan notes, "Sometimes foreign-policy wonks have trouble divorcing what they are interested in from what voters are interested in.... Unless I'm missing something big here, every minute Romney spends overseas is a minute he's spending away from winning the election."

3)  Even if (1) and (2) do not apply, there is very little political upside to be gained from visiting other countries.  Larison goes through the various possible upsides for a challenger to go abroad, but doesn't find them terribly convincing. 

So, how to respond?  First, let's parse this out into two questions.  First, should candidates talk more about foreign policy because it's good for democracy?  Second, is it in their own political interests to talk more/visit other countries? 

I hope Larison and Logan would agree that, political imperatives aside, it would be A Good Thing for the Country if presidential candidates talked more about foreign policy.  Presidents have much more leeway in conducting foreign policy than domestic policy.  They wind up spending about half their time and energy as president on foreign policy.  Given its importance to the office, the fact that it's not talked about all that much during the campaign is kinda problematic.  It might be worthwhile for major party candidates to openly discuss/think about their foreign policy views just a bit.

Now, on whether it's politically savvy for presidential candidates to talk about this stuff, I largely agree with Logan and Larison.  Voters don't care about foreign policy.  In Romney's case, however, there are a few reasons why a summer foreign policy trip makes some sense. 

First, er, it's the summer.  Logan is correct that foreign policy wonks tend to confuse what interests them with what interests the public, but so do campaign advisors.  The undecideds aren't dwelling on politics at the moment, and likely won't do so until after the Summer Olympics are over.  All these peple will do is process the occasional headline.  If Romney has to choose between this headline and ones about foreign policy, he might prefer the latter. 

Second, at least one of his foreign policy trips will play well domestically.  Larison and Logan grumble about it, but they both appear to acknowledge that the Israel leg of the trip would likely fire up the evangelical base and peel off disaffected Jews from Obama's coalition.  If he's going all the way to Israel, then a few more days/stops make some sense.

Third, and finally, Romney dug his own grave on this issue.  In op-ed after op-ed, Romney has relied on blowhard rhetoric and a near-total absence of detail to make his case.  In doing so, Romney is the one who has sowed the doubts about his foreign policy gravitas in the first place.  If his campaign manages to produce a successful foreign policy speech/road trip, he can dial down one source of base criticism -- and focus again on the economy in the fall.  And eliminating base citicism matters domestically -- the media tends to magnify within-party critiques as being more newsworthy. 

The best criticism is Larison's contention that the actual content of Romney's foreign policy vision might not go down so well with the American people.  This might be true, but it might not be.  The thing is, no one is entirely sure what Romney thinks about foreign policy.  Maybe his op-eds were nothing but rhetorical bluster -- as campaign musings about foreign policy tend to be.  It's also possible/likely that whatever foreign policy speeches he delivers in the next month or so wouldn't match his actions once in office.  As I noted last year, however, there is value in having a presidential candidate demonstrate "generic foreign policy knowledge." 

I suspect both Larison and Logan would prefer a foreign policy in which the United States doesn't aim to do as much abroad, allowing the country to retrench and revitalize the domestic economy.  That's a compelling argument (and, actually, one that President Obama made in his first few years of office).  Just because Romney might disagree with that approach, however, is no reason for him to clam up on foreign affairs this summer.  As a democracy, we're entitled to hear about how he thinks about these issues.  Politically, a well-executed foreign policy trip won't net him a lot of votes, but it would cauterize a festering politcal wound and allow him to pivot back to the economy. 

I've received some pushback in the blogosphere in response to my last post, an effort to goad Mitt Romney into making saome substantive foreign policy critiques.  Let's talk them out. 

First, I wrote that, "relations with Pakistan, Russia, India and Canada have cooled off considerably since the Bush years."  There's been some justifiable pushback on that sentence -- but within that pushback there's some interesting things to note about the politics of perception. 

I linked to a Foreignaffairs.com essay on the Canadian-American relationship, but Roland Paris does a pretty effective job of shredding their argument, in no small part by reminding readers of the true low point in bilateral relations this century:

Between 2003 and 2005, I had the privilege of serving as an advisor on Canada-U.S. relations in the Department of Foreign Affairs and in the Privy Council Office. Relations today are no worse, and probably better, than they were then. Jean Chrétien had just declined to send Canadian troops to Iraq – the right decision, but one that nevertheless angered officials in the George W. Bush Administration, who were hoping at least for an expression of political support. (It didn’t help that Chrétien announced his decision in the House of Commons to a throng of cheering Liberal MPs.) Bush then cancelled a planned state visit to Canada....

Here is a different picture that fits better with the facts: The state of the Canada-U.S. relationship today is sound. Yes, there are irritants, but they are no more challenging than the irritants of the past. Nor does only one country – or one leader – bear the fault for these irritants.

This is a pretty powerful critique.  As someone who has too much experience in making this kind of argument, however, I fear it won't carry much weight in the American body politic.  The reason is that Paris' basic point is that, "look, things were a lot worse a little while ago."  But that's not a point that plays politically.  When talking about bilateral relations in a political context, analysts and pundits care about the trendline more than the base level.  The trendline suggests a mild cooling of a very warm and multidimensional relationship.  So people will focus on the cooling. 

Still, in linking to the article in the first place, I did perpetuate the meme.  So, apologies. 

There was also some pushback on Russia as well.  Daniel Larison notes:

One needn’t be a supporter of current Russia policy to recognize that it isn’t the complete disaster of the late Bush years. I know I’ve beaten this topic to death lately, but this claim about relations with Russia being worse than they were during “the Bush years” is simply wrong.

This may be easy to overlook at a time when U.S.-Russian relations are cooler than they were a year or two ago, but apparently it can’t be repeated too often that the Bush administration drove the U.S.-Russian relationship into the ground starting in 2002-03 and then kept going down. U.S.-Russian relations were widely recognized to be at a post-Cold War low in August 2008 and during the months that followed, and administration policies and decisions contributed significantly to that outcome. The current administration had repaired a fair amount of the damage, but quarrels in the last year have undone some of that improvement. Outgoing President Medvedev said that the last three years “have perhaps been the best three years in relations between our two countries over the last decade.” Maybe that’s damning with faint praise. Relations between the two countries from 2002 to 2012 were mostly mediocre or poor. That doesn’t make the claim any less true.

Indeed, in a related post, Dan Nexon notes the benefits of the "reset" relationship with Russia:

The basic theory behind the Obama Administration's "Reset" policy was that US-Russian relations could be disaggregated: that it is possible for two countries to disagree on a range of issues and still cooperate on matters of common interest. That bet looks to be correct; despite a significant deterioration in relations between Washington and Moscow, the pursuit of common interests persists.

The Russian government has given approval for the United States and its NATO allies to use a Russian air base in the Volga city of Ulyanovsk as a hub for transits to and from Afghanistan....

Unfortunately, too many pundits and policymakers continue to reduce US bilateral relations with other countries to single "barometers."

Again, this is factually correct, but to go all emo on Larison and Nexon, it "feels" wrong somehow.  Why?  I think it's based on some combination of the following: 

1) The arms control dimension of the "reset" took much longer to play out than anyone expected -- including Obama administration officials.  Everything eventually got signed and ratified, but Russia's prickliness during the whole episode seemed to baffle American officials. 

2) Russian rhetoric towards the United States continues to be quite hostile -- and has become even more hostile since large-scale protests began in December of last year.  Vladimir Putin isn't fond of Michael McFaul, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama -- so even cooperative moves are obfuscated by bellicose rhetoric. 

3)  Syria. 

Nexon is correct to observe that there are key dimensions on which cooperation has been significant.  I do wonder, however, if too many Americans have imbibed the simple Schmittian  dichotomy of friend and enemy to view other countries.  We're unpracticed as a country in dealing with the category of "rival" -- or, in the case of Russia, "demographically crippled rival." 

Finally, the very smart Will Winecoff responds with a curiously lazy post.  The key points:

At some point Romney will be asked direct questions about foreign policy. When he asked those questions he will say things like "I will get tough with China to make sure they play by the rules and stop stealing American jobs" and "I will not let terrorists kill American citizens, and I will do whatever is necessary to keep Americans safe" and "I will keep America strong by not cutting our military budget" and "Screw Russia". He will not say whether he favors neoconservatism or realpolitik because he does not know what those things are. Neither does any of the people who will be asking him questions (unless Fareed Zakaria gets a crack, which he won't), nor will 99.9% of the people who will hear his answers.

His actual foreign policy will be run by the bureaucracy, which will be highly constrained by structural factors, and will be reactive to events yet to occur.

A few responses: 

1)  Mitt Romney is many things, but he's not an idiot.  He knows perfectly well what realpolitik and neoconservatism are. 

2)  I don't want Romney to talk about foreign policy because it will provide a sneak peek into what he'll actually do.  I want him to talk about it as a way of A) demonstrating leadership over how own friggin' campaign machine; and B) demonstrating the necessary background knowledge to reassure people like me that he can handle a foreign policy crisis.  By not talking about it, all he's doing is encouraging his own loyalists to leak like crazy.  And by repeatedly ghosting God-awful op-eds, he's sowing doubts that he has any kind of game plan about how to be proactive about foreign policy.  Oh, and that reminds me...

3)  Winecoff's structuralist view of foreign policy might be true in the long run.  Presidents who deviate away from the foreign policy "mainstream" for too long usually have to reverse course.  The notion that any president's foreign policy is "will be run by the bureaucracy," however, vastly underestimates the president's short-term flexibility.  So it does kinda matter who's working in the Oval Office come January 21st, 2013. 

I spent most of today on a transcontinental flight either sitting on the tarmac or cursing at the executives at United Airlines dumb enough to think 1) A Katherine Heigl movie will put everyone in a better mood; and 2) Running out of food -- for purchase, mind you -- halfway through the flight would be a swell idea.

I was, in other words, in a very cranky mood.  And then someone asked me to look at a Paul Saunders essay over at The National Interest.  Here's how it opens:

The Obama administration’s poor handling of its interaction with Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng has prompted renewed denunciations of its “realist” foreign policy, already a focus for critics of its approach to Russia, the Middle East and other major international issues. Yet while criticism of the administration’s conduct is appropriate, calling it “realist” is misguided. In fact, the administration’s aimless and stumbling pragmatism is giving realism and realists a bad name.

Pragmatism is a central component of foreign-policy realism, but it is only so when firmly subordinated to a strategic vision founded on American interests and reflecting American values. While President Obama and senior administration officials cling rhetorically to a strategic vision based on a pragmatic version of liberal internationalism, attempting to build a rule-based liberal international order, the sum total of U.S. policy appears instead to define a considerably narrower goal: avoiding international problems, particularly when they have domestic political consequences.

Oh thank you thank you thank you -- there's nothing that puts me in a better mood than seeing tripe like this and ripping it to shreds.

Look, there's been a lot of debate nowadays about what a realist foreign policy would look like and what that really means, but I am sure of a few very important things about realists: 

1) They don't give a flying fig about promoting "American values" overseas;

2) They don't sweat the small stuff.  

The first point is Realism 101, and doesn't need to be elaborated upon.  It's the second thing that matters more here.  Seriously, all realists pretty much care about is the relationships among the great powers.  And if you step back, the signal theme of the Obama administration's foreign policy guidance and national security guidance has been to disengage from costly ground campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and refocus energy on the most dynamic region in the global economy and the only one with a possible rising hegemon.  That seems to fit this description of a realist foreign policy pretty well.  That's exactly what the Obama administration has done with its "strategic pivot" or "rebalancing" or whatever they're calling it this week. 

If you focus on the big picture, this administration is really realist.  If you focus on small tactical errors like the Chen case and inductively generalize from that, well, you've revealed yourself to be someone without a firm grasp of realpolitik principles in the first place. 

Congratulations to Mr. Saunders for being this week's Vizzini Award winner -- I don't think "realism" means what he thinks it means. 

So it turned out that this was the week that both the Romney campaign and the Obama campaign decided that foreign policy was an important thing to talk about during election season.  Speaking personally, this is great!! I seem to have moved up in the Rolodex of those covering the campaign.  Expect lots of juicy quotes in the months to come, and readers are warmly encouraged to proffer useful metaphors that I can provide in soundbite fashion  over the next six months.

Unfortunately for the Romney campaign, this was not a great week to ramp up attacks along this line.  The reasons is that, all told, the Obama administration had a pretty good foreign policy week.  Not all, or even most of this, was of its own doing, but consider the following: 

1)  Iran has signaled a genuine willingness to talk compromise on its nuclear program in order to avoid the EU oil embargo kicking in.  That might just be rhetoric, but it's interesting to note that even senior Israeli officials are starting to talk down the Iranian threat.  The less Iran becomes a thing, the lower gas prices can fall better for the administration. 

2)  The United States has maybe, just maybe, eliminated a major thorn in bilateral relations with Japan by finally reaching agreement on moving U.S. troops from Okinawa.  We'll see if this holds -- everyone assumed that a 2006 agreement had put this problem to rest before successive Japanese governments shot themselves in the foot raised it again,  but this is the thing on this list for which the administration deserves the most credit.  As an added bonus, the administration  actually got some nice words from John McCain on comity with the Senate.

3)  For some reason China seems to be in a more productive mood in their dealings with the United States, and Mark Landsler and Steven Lee Myers have taken notice in the New York Times: 

For years, China  stymied efforts to pressure Iran. Now, in addition to  throwing its weight behind the sanctions effort, officials say,  Beijing is also playing a more active role in the recently revived nuclear talks between Iran and six world powers — the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany. While in past negotiations, Beijing has followed in lockstep the positions taken by Russia, this time Chinese diplomats are offering their own proposals.

“One of the key elements of making this work is unity among the major powers,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic exchanges. “The Chinese have been very good partners in this regard.”

There are also signs of new cooperation on Syria. Only weeks after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called China’s veto of a United Nations Security Council resolution “despicable,” China is supporting Kofi Annan’s peace plan for the strife-torn country and is deploying monitors to help oversee it. Even on North Korea, which China has long sheltered from tougher international action, the Chinese government quickly signed on to a United Nations statement condemning the North’s recent attempt to launch a satellite.

And there is progress on the economic front: American officials said China recently loosened trading on its currency, the remninbi, which could help close a valuation gap with the dollar that has stoked trade tensions between China and the United States during an election year.

To some seasoned observers of China, these developments are less a harbinger of a new era of cooperation between Beijing and Washington than evidence that, at least for now, the interests of the two countries coincide in some important areas.

The administration will nevertheless be happy to pocket the policy dividends.

4)  Staying in Northeast Asia, it turns out that the big bad North Korean ICBMs are little more than a pipe dream -- and western analysts are starting to say that Kim Jong Un is naked in the public square:

North Korea tried to flex its military might with an extravagant parade on April 15, just three days after it admitted that its missile test had been a failure, but analysts now say that the new intercontinental ballistic missiles on display in the meticulously choreographed parade were nothing more than props.

The analysts studied photos of the six missiles and came to their conclusion for three primary reasons: 1. The missiles did not fit the launchers that carried them. 2. The missiles appear to be made out of both liquid-fuel and solid-fuel components that are unable to fly together. 3. The casings on the missiles undulate which suggests the metal is not thick enough to hold up during flight.

"There is no doubt that these missiles were mock-ups," Markus Schiller and Robert Schmucker, of Germany's Schmucker Technologie , wrote in a paper recently posted on Armscontrolwonk.com. "It remains unknown if they were designed this way to confuse foreign analysts, or if the designers simply did some sloppy work."

If the U.S. government can claim progress on Iran, China, North Korea, and Japan in one week, that's a good foreign policy week.  Of course, for a lot of these issues, the administration is the beneficieary of circumstances rather that pro-active policies.  Still, the administration deserves some credit for some of these development.

It's just one week, though.  And I fear the most memorable statement about American foreign policy is this rather unfortunate choice of words: 

NOTE TO WHITE HOUSE/CAMPAIGN SPEECHWRITERS:   In the future, avoid having Biden utter any of the following:  "big stick", "hard power", "pounding the enemy",  "won't take no for an answer", and "smooth-talking his adversaries".

Am I missing anything?

After the latest demonstration of Syria thumbing its nose at the Annan plan, Walter Russell Mead decided to go on a rhetorical bender against the United Nations: 

The reality is that the UN today is less prestigious and influential than it was in the 1940s and 1950s. There used to be a time when General Assembly votes actually meant something. Newspapers used to report its resolutions on the front page. And the Security Council, on those rare occasions during the Cold War when it could actually agree on something, was seen as laying down the basic principles along which an issue would be resolved.

Now, this kind of rant is a rite of passage for a foreign policy pundit.  I mean, there's no way you make it into the Council on Foreign Relations -- or Twitter Fight Club -- without at least one good, solid bashing of UN fecklessness. 

That said, Mead's rant has this whiff of ... well, let's say erroneous assertion about it. Hayes Brown fisks Mead's blog post thoroughly and effectively, but I want to focus just on the above paragraph, because it makes such little sense.   

First of all, exactly when did General Assembly votes ever mean anything? The only time during Mead's halcyon Cold War days of the UN in which the General Assembly mattered was the "Zionism = racism" resolution in 1975.  I don't think making news because of an assinine statement really qualifies as "meaning something." The General Assembly was besotted with the New International Economic Order during the 1970s as well -- and, thankfully, these affirmations didn't amount to much either. 

Second, Mead is correct that during the Cold War, Security Council agreeement made the front pages -- but that because it was just so friggin' rare. The Security Council was essentially in a state of permanent deadlock from the Korean War to the height of perestroika. Economic sanctions were approved a grand total of twice; the Security Council has imposed them juuuuust a wee bit more in recent years. 

Sanctions are for sissies, though -- what about the blue helmets? Well, if Wikipedia is correct, UN peacekeepers were dispatched on thirteen missions during the Cold War era.  Which happens to be exactly the same number of times UN peacekeepers have been approved since George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech -- a period that is only one-fourth as long as the Cold War. There are, by the way, 16 ongoing UN peacekeeping missions. I can bash aspects of the United Nations as well as the next commentator, but this is not an organization that even remotely resembles its Cold War state of decrepitude. 

Look, the effectiveness of the United Nations as an instrument of statecraft is entirely a function of the current state of great power politics. This means that it was close to useless during the Cold War, pretty damn useful during the heyday of U.S. unipolarity, and now somewhere in between with the growth of the BRICs. The United Nations is to the great powers as Michael Clayton was to his law firm. 

If great power gridlock grows, the United Nations will likely grow more dysfunctional. But we're a looooooooooong way from the Cold War. And Mead should know that.