It's the last day of the International Studies Association annual meetings. I'm sleep-deprived, hung over, moderately sunburned, and pretty sick of international relations theory. While this throwback to my college days is moderately nostalgic, it is usually not a good state for blogging. Trying to tackle or critique the finer points of a nuanced argument takes energy and analytic skills, and after losing Twitter Fight Club 2012, I'm feeling wanting in both.
But, just when it seems like there's nothing I'm capable of blogging about in such a state, along comes Donald Trump.
I happen to think that the President is going to start a war with Iran. I think it will be a short-term popular thing to do, and I think he’s going to do that for political reasons, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know if anyone says this as openly, but I think he’s going to start a war with Iran. And, that will be short-term popular. If you remember Bush, Bush was unbeatable for about two months, and then all of the sudden the world set in when he attacked Iraq. And he went from very popular to not popular at all. But I think that Obama will start in some form a war with Iran, and I think that will make him very popular for a short period of time. That will make him hard to beat also.
Now I could go on a long-winded rant about Trump's stupidity, but I think it's more fun to treat this as a challenge to my readers. See, it's not just that Trump makes a few errors in that paragraph, it's that with one partial exception, every single statement he just said was factually wrong.
So, rather than ask my readers to point out the myriad ways in which Donald Trump is in error, here's my challenge -- what sentence in the above paragraph contains the most truth value?
Get to it, dear readers -- while I go search for Advil.
UPDATE: So I see that Trump has said other controversial things today. I will leave it to readers to judge whether the veracity of his later comments are greater than his foreign-policy musings.
In the world of international relations and foreign policy, if you can coin a new phrase or neologism, you've hit the big time. Think "containment," "clash of civilizations," "end of history," "Washington Consensus," and so forth. How this happens is some weird alchemy of the term itself, the idea it encapsulates, and the receptivity of the foreign affairs community. Once it happens, it can't be undone -- and this isn't always a good thing: Joseph Nye has spent decades trying to rebrand "soft power" as "smart power" to little avail (possibly because someone else popularized the latter term first). I'm sure whichever Obama administration official said "leading from behind" wishes that Ryan Lizza had never used the quote. Still, if you suggest a new term of art and it catches on, you've secured speaking engagements for the rest of your days.
This assumes, however, that your neologism will catch on -- and most of them don't. This is a good thing, I might add, because most of them are dreadful. For example, Zalmay Khalilzad has a new essay in The Washington Quarterly entitled, "A Strategy of 'Congagement' toward Pakistan." If you're wondering what "congagement" means, it's "applying a mixed arsenal of methods to contain Pakistan’s dangerous and destabilizing policies but also to engage Islamabad to sustain existing cooperation and incentivize it to move toward more." Now, this just sounds awful, which is why it hasn't caught on despite the attempts of Khalilzad and others to incept it into the foreign policy community's collective subconscious.
I don't mean to pick on Khalilzad -- he's hardly the only offender. James Rosenau tried to introduce "fragmegration" -- blech. The term "glocalization" has had a somewhat more successful run, but that's only by comparison to "fragmegration." For my money, "slacktivism" is the only example of this genre of fusing two words together that sounds even remotely good. Just as bad were the raft of grand strategy terms that came out in the middle of last decade that attempted to fuse realism and liberalism together: progressive realism, realistic Wilsonianism, ethical realism, liberal realism, etc. None of them really took off.*
In the interest of improving foreign policy writing and reducing the pain one encounters when reading these awful neologisms, there needs to be a flexible freeze on these efforts. Even if most phrases of this kind are accurate in what they are describing, the neologisms are so painful to the eyes and grating to the ears that they leech away any force that exists in the underlying argument.
Instead, I hereby offer a humble suggestion: embrace the metaphor. The problem with most efforts to brand a term is that they're too literal: a fusion of two nouns, or an adjective and a noun, to explain a concept. Metaphors, because they make the intangible more tangible, stick in the brain better. This is one reason why "leading from behind" worked, as has "the pivot."
The danger of course, is that metaphors don't always perfectly capture the foreign policy concepts one wants to describe (such as the pivot). It's a dangerous game -- but so is world politics. As someone who's had to wade through this crap for well over a decade now, failed metaphors will at least entertain the reader better than God-awful neologisms. So give the literary device a try, members of the foreign policy community -- and please, for the love of God, stop trying to fuse words together!!
Full disclosure: I've haven't really succeeded in this task either, although the only time I think I ever tried was "counterpunching."
I think it's safe to say that the vampire squid Goldman Sachs brand has taken a few hits in recent years. To add to the calumny, Greg Smith, an executive director and head of the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, is leaving Goldman today after publishing an op-ed in the New York Timesexplaining why he's leaving. It's not pretty:
Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.
Man, that best-of-luck office party is going to be awkward.
The fact that this op-ed has already spawned its own satire suggests that it's not going to have much of an effect on the larger debate on Goldman Sachs. Which is a shame, because such a debate would be pretty useful when thinking about Big Finance (though see Gabriel Sherman's excellent New York essay on this topic from a few weeks back). Indeed, this is a teachable moment for how to compose a memo, or a mission statement, or an op-ed that will provoke a deep debate over corporate culture. Let's see where Smith went wrong:
1) He made it all about himself. The ostensible point of this exercise is to shine a light on a shady corporate culture that values sins over virtues. In these instances, the following paragraph should never appear:
My proudest moments in life — getting a full scholarship to go from South Africa to Stanford University, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics — have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts. Goldman Sachs today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about achievement. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore.
See how that was ostensibly about Goldman Sachs but was really about the author? Not a good sign.
2) His job apparently required him to burrow out and reside in a large soundproof hole in the ground. Let's take a look at what Smith said about the halcyon, early days of his Goldman Sachs tenure -- i.e., when he started in 2000:
It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients....
How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.
Excuse me for a sec, I need to do this for a spell.
Look, Smith should know the Goldman Sachs culture better than I do, but as an outsider, I am fairly certain of two things: A) Before Smith's op-ed, the terms "humility" and "Goldman Sachs" never appeared in the same sentence.... ever; and B) Making money was always how people got promoted at Goldman Sachs.
There's been enough written about Goldman Sachs to know that by 2006, the firm had recognized that it was badly overexposed in the subprime market and decided to dump their holdings onto their clients. We know that in 2007, the firm went so far out of bounds that the SEC actually brought a civil suit against them, securing a $550 million settlement more than 18 months ago. And now Smith notices something is amiss??!! While the Wall Street Journal suggests Smith's role at Goldman wasn't pivotal, this kind of naivite requires a special kind of willful blindness.
If you're going to be a whistle-blower, you need to acknowledge upfront your complicity in any malfeasance, be it legal or ethical. Smith's op-ed doesn't come close to doing this.
The term "inflection point" has become one of those overused bits of meaningless jargon in political discourse. I'm rather more fond of the notion of a "focal point" -- that is to say, an event or cluster of events in which everyone that cares about a particular problem focuses on the same set of stylized facts -- after which, they conclude that, gee, maybe the status quo set of policies ain't working so well and there should be a new status quo.
The fall of 2008 was one such focal point, during which there was remarkable consensus that a Keynesian boost in public spending was the only way to avert another Great Depression. At the fiirst G-20 leaders summit in Washington, there was consensus on expansionary fiscal policy. Oh, sure, there were grumblings about "crass Keynesianism," but even Germany reluctantly went along.
The Greek sovereign debt crisis was another such focal point. Greek profligacy seemed to be a synecdoche for excessive government borrowing and lax fiscal discipline. With the global economy seemingly still in the doldrums, a lot of Europrean governments climbed on the "expansionary austerity" bandwagon. By the Toronto G-20 summit in June 2010, the consensus had switched from Keynesian stimulus to fiscal rectitude. Oh, sure there were mutterings about "short-term austerity makes no macroeconomic sense whatsoever in a slack economy" but even Barack Obama started talking about slashing government spending.
Are we at another focal point? Consider the following:
Bowing to mounting evidence that austerity alone cannot solve the debt crisis, European leaders are expected to conclude this week that what the debt-laden, sclerotic countries of the Continent need are a dose of economic growth.
A draft of the European Union summit meeting communiqué calls for ‘‘growth-friendly consolidation and job-friendly growth,’’ an indication that European leaders have come to realize that austerity measures, like those being put in countries like Greece and Italy, risk stoking a recession and plunging fragile economies into a downward spiral.
2) The data is starting to come in on governments that have embraced austerity whole-heartedly, and it's pretty grim. Cue Paul Krugman on Great Britain:
Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, released a startling chart comparing the current slump with past recessions and recoveries. It turns out that by one important measure — changes in real G.D.P. since the recession began — Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained its previous peak; four years after the Great Recession began, Britain is nowhere close to regaining its lost ground.
Nor is Britain unique.Italy is also doing worsethan it did in the 1930s — and with Spain clearly headed for a double-dip recession, that makes three of Europe’s big five economies members of the worse-than club. Yes, there are some caveats and complications. But this nonetheless represents a stunning failure of policy.
And it’s a failure, in particular, of the austerity doctrine that has dominated elite policy discussion both in Europe and, to a large extent, in the United States for the past two years.
3) Even commentators who would be tempermentally sympathetic with austerity are starting to bash Germany question whether it's a solution. Consider Walter Russell Mead:
It takes some truly talented screw ups to come up with a worse plan for Greece than the one the Greeks have developed for themselves, but the Germans have risen to occasion in fine form....
Deep reform is needed if Greece is to stay in the euro, and so far the Greek political establishment — firmly backed by public opinion — is digging in its heels. Much whining, much talk, many promises and precious little action seems to be the favored Greek approach to the crisis. On the other hand, the austerity policies the Germans favor are hopelessly biased in favor of German banking interests and are aimed more at the preservation of the reputations of German politicians than at helping Greece.
The German political establishment seems willing to destroy Europe to avoid telling German voters the truth about how stupid it has been.
[UPDATE: For exhibit B of this trend, see this Niall Ferguson interview with Henry Blodget. My favorite part of the interview is this quotation: "I think the reason that I was off on that was that I hadn't actually thought hard enough about my own work.... My considered and changed view is that the U.S. can carry a higher debt to GDP ratio than I think I had in mind 2 or 3 years ago."]
4) U.S. 4th quarter data reveals that, consistent with GOP criticisms, the government has been the real drag on the U.S. economy. Not quite consistent with GOP criticisms: the reason why the government is dragging down the U.S. economy. Cue Mark Thoma:
[P]remature austerity -- cutting spending before the economy is ready for it -- is taking a toll on the recovery. The fall in government spending reduced fourth-quarter growth by 0.93 percent; if government spending had remained constant, GDP growth would have been 3.7 percent, rather than 2.8 percent.
This is the opposite of what the government should be doing to support the recovery. We need a temporary increase in government spending to increase demand and employment through, for example, building infrastructure. That would help to get us out of the deep hole we are in. Instead, the government seems to be trying to make it harder to escape.
We do need to address our long-run budget problems once the economy is healthy enough to withstand the tax increases and program cuts that will be required. But the idea of "expansionary" austerity has failed. Austerity in the short-term simply makes it harder for the economy to recover and delays the day when you can finally address budget issues without harming the economy. The lesson is that government needs to support the recovery, not oppose it through a false promise that contraction of one sector in the economy will be expansionary.
5) Central banks are acting more gung-ho on expansionary monetary policy. The unspoken quid pro quo in Europe seems to the that the ECB will expand its balance sheet and turn on the monetary taps in return for some kind of fiscal compact. The U.S. Federal Reserve announced a zero-interest rate policy for the next three years. Even China is showing (halting) signs that its reverted back to monetary easing.
Given that the United States has been the country to move the slowest on austerity, and given that the United States is doing the best job among the OECD economies (an admittedly low bar) of restoring confidence among investors and paying down non-governmental debt, have we reached another focal point?
One could argue that Krugman and Thoma are just biased in favor of Keynesianism, that Greece and the other Club Med countries haven't really embraced austerity, that the Euromess is dragging down British economic growth, and that the long-term numbers on developed country debt are really very scary. There are some large grains of truth in many of those statements.
It doesn't necessarily matter, however. Greece was not a genuine harbinger of the fiscal problems of large markets -- but it was a useful hook for austerity advocates to spread their gospel. What matters now is not whether these perceptions about the failure of austerity are 100% accurate, but whether they are accurate enough to become the new conventional wisdom.
Let's face it, there's a general anxiety about the future of America. There's Tom Friedman's column today, which my doctors have now forbade me from critiquing in order to keep my blood pressure down. Books suggesting the United States is kowtowing to China are forthcoming. The Economist recently observed on the highlights of a sobering survey of Harvard Business School graduates, which contained the following:
Fully 71% of the businesspeople polled expected America’s competitiveness to decline over the next three years. (National competitiveness is a slippery concept: countries do not compete in the same way that firms do. But the businessfolk in question answered some clearer questions, too.) Some 45% said that American firms will find it harder to compete in the global economy. A startling 64% said that American firms will find it harder to pay high wages and benefits.
Intriguingly, the Harvard alumni were gloomy about where America is headed, rather than how it is now. Some 57% felt that today the business environment in America is somewhat or much better than the global average; only 15% said it was worse. But when asked to compare its prospects with those of other industrialised economies, only 9% felt that America was pulling ahead; some 21% said it was falling behind. A striking 66% expected America to lose ground to Brazil, India and China; only 8% thought it would pull away from them.
To be honest, this sounds like a lot of pious baloney. As Michael Beckley points out in a new article in International Security, "The United States is not in decline; in fact, it is now wealthier, more innovative, and more militarily powerful compared to China than it was in 1991." The whole article is worth a read, and a good cautionary tale on the dangers of overestimating the ease of national catch-up:
The widespread misperception that China is catching up to the United States stems from a number of analytical flaws, the most common of which is the tendency to draw conclusions about the U.S.-China power balance from data that compare China only to its former self. For example, many studies note that the growth rates of China’s per capita income, value added in hightechnology industries, and military spending exceed those of the United States and then conclude that China is catching up. This focus on growth rates, however, obscures China’s decline relative to the United States in all of these categories. China’s growth rates are high because its starting point was low. China is rising, but it is not catching up.
What about the future? One could point to the last few months of modestly encouraging economic data, but that's ephemeral. Rather, there are three macrotrends that are worth observing now before (I suspect) they come up in the State of the Union:
1) The United States is successfully deleveraging. As the McKinsey Global Institute notes, the United States is actually doing a relatively good job of slimming down total debt -- i.e., consumer, investor and public debt combined. Sure, public debt has exploded, but as MGI points out, that really is the proper way of doing things after a financial bubble:
The deleveraging processes in Sweden and Finland in the 1990s offer relevant lessons today. Both endured credit bubbles and collapses, followed by recession, debt reduction, and eventually a return to robust economic growth. Their experiences and other historical examples show two distinct phases of deleveraging. In the first phase, lasting several years, households, corporations, and financial institutions reduce debt significantly. While this happens, economic growth is negative or minimal and government debt rises. In the second phase of deleveraging, GDP growth rebounds and then government debt is gradually reduced over many years....
As of January 2012, the United States is most closely following the Nordic path towards deleveraging. Debt in the financial sector has fallen back to levels last seen in 2000, before the credit bubble, and the ratio of corporate debt relative to GDP has also fallen. US households have made more progress in debt reduction than other countries, and may have roughly two more years before returning to sustainable levels of debt.
the economy is depressed, in large part, because of the housing bust, which immediately suggests the possibility of a virtuous circle: an improving economy leads to a surge in home purchases, which leads to more construction, which strengthens the economy further, and so on. And if you squint hard at recent data, it looks as if something like that may be starting: home sales are up, unemployment claims are down, and builders’ confidence is rising.
Furthermore, the chances for a virtuous circle have been rising, because we’ve made significant progress on the debt front.
2) Manufacturing is on the mend. Another positive trend, contra the Harvard Business School and the GOP presidential candidates, is in manufacturing. Some analysts have already predicted a revival in that sector, and now the data appears to be backing up that prediction. The Financial Times' Ed Crooks notes:
Plenty of economists and business leaders believe that US manufacturing is entering an upturn that is not just a bounce-back after the recession, but a sign of a longer-term structural improvement. Manufacturing employment has grown faster in the US since the recession than in any other leading developed economy, according to official figures. Productivity growth, subdued wages, the steady decline in the dollar since 2002 and rapid pay inflation in emerging economies have combined to make the US a more attractive location.
“Over the past decade, the US has had some huge gains in productivity, and we have seen unit labour costs actually falling,” says Chad Moutray, chief economist at the National Association of Manufacturers. “A lot of our members tell us that it sometimes is cheaper to produce in the US, especially because labour costs are lower.”
Now, whether this boom in manufacturing will lead to a corresponding boom in manufacturing employment is much more debatable. Still, as The Atlantic's Adam Davidson concludes: "the still-unfolding story of manufacturing’s transformation is, in many respects, that of our economic age. It’s a story with much good news for the nation as a whole. But it’s also one that is decidedly less inclusive than the story of the 20th century."
Growth in shale oil and gas supplies will make the US virtually self-sufficient in energy by 2030, according to a BP report published on Wednesday.
In a development with enormous geopolitical implications, the country's dependence on oil imports from potentially volatile countries in the Middle East and elsewhere would disappear, BP said, although Britain and western Europe would still need Gulf supplies.
BP's latest energy outlookforecasts a growth in unconventional energy sources, "including US shale oil and gas, Canadian oil sands and Brazilian deepwater, plus a gradual decline in demand, that would see [North America] become almost totally energy self-sufficient" in two decades.
BP's chief executive, Bob Dudley, said: "Our report challenges some long-held beliefs. Significant changes in US supply-and-demand prospects, for example, highlight the likelihood that import dependence in what is today's largest energy importer will decline substantially."
The report said the volume of oil imports in the US would fall below 1990s levels, largely due to rising domestic shale oil production and ethanol replacing crude. The US would also become a net exporter of natural gas.
Note that this will take a while, and doesn't mean that the U.S. will be energy independent. Still, it's quite a trend. Or, rather, trends.
Since the Second World War, the pattern in the global political economy has been for the United States to adjust to systemic shocks better than any potential challenger country. A lot of very smart people have predicted that this time was different -- the United States wouldn't be able to do it again. These trends suggest that maybe, just maybe, that might be wrong.
Let's consider and contrast American foreign policy towards Russia and China over the past few years.
With Russia, the Obama administration announced a much-ballyhooed "reset" with the goal of improving bilateral relations. In an effort to advance that goal, the administration reworked missile defense system plans in eastern Europe, creating political headaches for governments in the region to make Moscow happy. The administration took great pains to endorse a Russian proposal on Iran's nuclear program. The administration signed a fresh new arms control treaty and then expended a decent amount of political capital to get NewSTART ratified. Washington conducted some serious behind-the-scenes diplomacy to get Russia into into the WTO. Most recently, the administration appointed a chief architect of the "reset" policy as ambassador to Russia.
With China, the Obama administration (after some idle G-2 talk) has been far more aggressive. The administration has "pivoted" it's foreign policy resources toward the Pacific Rim, with the not-so-subtle signal that China is the focus of this pivot. Washington has poked its nose into the South China Sea dispute, and recently announced a decision to station troops in Australia. It pushed forward a framework trade agreement that pointedly does not include China, while simultaneously calling on that country to let its currency appreciate. The State Department has reached out to one of China's longstanding allies in an effort to coax the nascent democratization in that country into something more long-lasting. This is simply part of a larger theme in which Washington is seemingly bear-hugging any significant country that is concerned about Beijing. The U.S. ambassador to China, when not becoming an online sensation among ordinary Chinese, is busy criticizing Beijing's human rights record.
So, to sum up: the Obama administration has made it something of a priority to improve relations with Russia, while at the same time investing serious amounts of diplomatic capital into various frameworks and initiatives that hedge against a rising China.
Now compare and contrast how Moscow and Beijing are thinking about Washington this week. In Beijing:
China and the United States should cooperate more closely to defuse international crises and ensure friction does not overwhelm shared interests, China's likely next president, Xi Jinping, said on Monday, setting an upbeat tone for his impending visit to Washington.
"No matter what changes affect the international situation, our commitment to developing the Sino-U.S. cooperative partnership should never waver in the face of passing developments," Vice President Xi told a meeting in Beijing.
"In dealing with major and sensitive issues that concern each side's core interests, we must certainly abide by a spirit of mutual respect and handle them prudently, and by no means can we let relations again suffer major interference and ructions."
Xi's mood-setting speech did not unveil new policies or give the precise date for his U.S. visit. But he stressed Beijing's desire for steady relations for his visit and his accession to running the world's second biggest economy after America's.
Russia's foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, warned Wednesday that outside encouragement of antigovernment uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa could lead to “a very big war that will cause suffering not only to countries in the region, but also to states far beyond its boundaries.”
Mr. Lavrov’s annual news conference was largely devoted to a critique of Western policies inIran and Syria, which he said could lead to a spiral of violence.
His remarks came on the heels of a report on state-controlled television that accused the American ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, who has been in Moscow for less than a week, of working to provoke a revolution here. Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, at an impromptu meeting with prominent editors, also unleashed an attack on the liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy, which he said was serving American interests.
Now, it's possible to find other news stories that suggest China might not be handling all aspects of the bilateral relationship with equal aplomb, and its possible that these Russian statements contain more bluster than bite. Still, stepping back, the larger narrative does seem to be that Russia has adopted an angrier and more belligerent posture toward American foreign policy in recent months, while China has responded with more aplomb.
Why? I don't know if there's an easy and accurate explanation. Some neoconservatives might proffer that authoritarians only respond positively to strength, and therefore Russia feels more emboldened than China. I seriously doubt that this is about bandwagoning. Similarly, it could be argued that Russia is more domestically insecure than China, what with the recent protests and all. Again, I seriously doubt this, as it's not like China hasn't experienced some domestic hiccups as well this year.
There are two more compelling explanations, but I honestly don't know if they work either. The first is that Russia and China have different diplomatic styles. Russian diplomats are far more comfortable with being blunt in their assessments of American intentions and actions, whereas Chinese diplomats are more comfortable laying low and not making as much of a public fuss. Furthermore, China has moved down the learning curve, recognizing that its 2009-10 policy of "pissing off as many countries as possible" didn't turn out so well. It's possible that the substance of both countries' approaches toward the United States are not that different -- they just go about it in ways that play very differently in the media.
The second, more realpolitik explanation is that China and Russia are looking into the future, and Beijing is far more sanguine than Moscow. Russia is suffering from institutional dysfunction and demographic decay. It's only great power assets are bountiful natural resources, a huge land mass, and nuclear weapons. China will encounter difficulties in the future, but does not have nearly the same kind of structural stresses as Russia. Beijing is therefore simply less anxious than Moscow about U.S. policy, because it has more hard and soft power resources.
To be honest, I'm not thrilled with either of these explanations. So, dear readers, I put it to you: why is Russia acting more bellicose toward an accommodating policy from the United States, whereas China is reacting calmly toward a more aggressive United States?
The genesis of this blog post is a bit arcane. In response to news reports about proposed changes in U.S. defense doctrine, Andrew Exum jokingly suggested "replacing the 'Two Wars' strategy with a 'Who Wants Some? You? How About You, Tough Guy?' strategy" on Twitter. This led to other suggested mottos, expressed in YouTube videos, which eventually led to me issuing a grandiose call: suggest the YouTube clip that "best encapsulates American grand strategy."
Yeah, that should bring you up to speed.
Below you will find the ten eleven suggested clips that resonated the most for me, with some further elaboration by your humble blogger. WARNING: some profanity. Then again, if the profane is offensive to you, it's best that you not think too hard about American foreign policy.
A penetrating critique of the orrery of errors that have befallen American foreign policy as of late. Clearly, the United States is trying to conduct its international affairs in a sea of darkness, lacking crucial information to light the way. Despite the best efforts to get all the components of American power into alignment, it's hard to pull off.
The new or not so new defense strategy of having enough of a military to fight one war while deterring or spoiling an adversary's plans requires a "bigger knife" not to use but to dissuade challengers.
Such a grand strategy also plays to the U.S.'s current strength -- dominating conventional war through bigger and better weapons. In the video, Croc Dundee is confronted not by one mugger but several (and one can read race into this if one wants, since the mugger was African-American, and most threats to the U.S. are by non-white folks). His big knife spoils the plans of each of them. Sounds like a good use of resources.
I think it works as an example of soft power and American exceptionalism. Via her affirmations Jessica demonstrates that Americans think America is awesome -- and therefore, why the rest of the world will/should want the same things Americans want.
Not bad, actually. Note that Bluto's inspiring speech has no appreciable effect on the apathetic Deltas at first. Only when other elites -- like Otter -- indicate their support, does the rest of the country -- I mean, fraternity -- rally around the flag. A subtle exegesis of how elite consensus can drive the mass public into stupid, futile gestures.
An utterly brilliant exposition of the ways in which the best strategy in the world will be subverted by the cowboy who shoots first and asks questons later. Indeed, this clip works on two levels. On the one hand, you can think of it as the struggles that go on within the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy to make sure everyone is on the same page -- and the ways in which hawkish actors can unilaterally set the agenda. Or, look at it as an exegesis of how the United States, through its willingness to take immediate aggressive action, can exacerbate tensions among its less powerful allies. This exuberance can breed resentment among America's partners, but often, Washington doesn't care, because, well, at least we ain't chicken.
Hmmm ... I'm intrigued. This appears to be a subtle indictment of the idealpolitik that occasionally governs American foreign policy. After all, Ray is trying to "think of the most harmless thing ... something that could never destroy us." Naturally, this leads to the creation of an entity that causes his paranormal colleagues to be "terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought." Think of this as a potential metaphor of both liberal and neoconservative enthusiasm for democracy promotion. Sure, it sounds good in your head, but then you see who winds up doing well in the post-Arab Spring political environment, it's easy to lose the capacity for rational choice.
Ha, I bet you think you've been rickrolled. Think again! Rick Astley smartly presaged one of the central dilemmas of America's post-Cold War foreign policy: how do you get nervous allies to believe that the United States will honor its overseas obligations? You have to have attractive bleach-blonde back-up singers reassure them that "a full commitment's what I'm thinking of" and that "you'll never get this from any other guy." You have to pledge, repeatedly, that America is "never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down." Furthermore, the United States is "never gonna run around and desert you." This kind of reassurance mechanism, done with the proper tone and in harmony with other voices, can make even the wariest of allies vault over political barriers and do backflips in celebration of their alliances with the United States.
Steven suggests that, at a minimum, this explains public discourse on grand strategy, and he has a point. On the one hand, you have an angry public that appears to be willing to fabricate evidence to justify taking aggressive action. On the other hand, you have elites that reject the absence of any logic to justify action. Instrad, they rely on their own galactically stupid set of axioms to guide their thinking.
Sure, the song is an obvious choice, but as he notes, it was no accident that he chose this version. The joyful version makes light of America's exuberance for all things American. That's not the point of this clip -- it suggests the dark side of American exceptionalism, the burden that the United States faces as it tries to preserve global order in a world gone amok by odd, tacit alliances between terrorists and rogue states.
Hayes Brown, however, submitted my hands-down favorite, a short but sweet clip: "Go! Bwaaaah!"
In less than three seconds, this clip hints at a myriad number of rich textual interpretations. Does the dog represent what happens when force is used, dragging the rest of the country along? Or, perhaps the canine symbolizes the big influence of small allies. Actors that the United States thinks it has under its thumb are actually driving foreign policy more than you would think. Without question, however, critics of the Obama administration would conclude that this clip is the definitive explication of the perils that come with "leading from behind."
UPDATED BONUS CLIP: Diana Wueger submitted this very late, but it's too good not to add: "Like a BUS!"
Like most of these seemingly short clips, Wueger's submission works on two levels. On the one hand, it demonstrates the ways in which hegemonic power allows some actors to be able to pursue policies that small actors simply cannot. In this comparison, this clip reminds the viewer of the many global public goods that a hegemonic actor might feel obligated to provide. Compare Bus 62 with the U.S. Navy after the 2004 tsunami, for example. On the other hand, hegemonic power can also have unanticipated negative externalities. Sure, Bus 62 simply plows through the barrier. However, it does so without helping the other people stuck in traffic, and, like a boss, nearly plows over the person in the way. A cautionary tale about the uses and possible abuses of power.
Continuing this week's theme of travel-related advice, we come to the luggage awards.
Now, my goal with luggage is very simple:
A) To be able to pack at least one nice change of clothes without said garments being wrinkled beyond all recognition after the trip.
B) To keep my luggage out of the hands of baggage handlers and TSA. Really, I know that 95% of the time if I check my bag it will get to its destination unscathed, uninspected, and on time. It's that 5% that preys on my mind every time I check a bag, however. Even gate-checking on a regional puddle-jumper flight makes me jittery.
So, with these simple criteria in mind I hereby present:
Most Underrated Piece of Luggage: The Victorionox Standard Issue Overnighter does not have wheels -- it has to be carried with a shoulder strap. It has also been the most elastic piece of luggage I own, good for overnight trips and those lasting a week. The folded garment bag works extremely well. As an overnight bag, it fits into the narrow overhead bins on commuter planes. As an expanded bag, it can carry enough clothes for a week. It's the most useful piece of luggage I own.
Most Overrated Piece of Luggage not named "Newt Gingrich": The entire Tumi carry-on line is baffling -- for the life of me I can't see the appeal. There isn't nearly enough space inside the bags for more than just a few items of clothing. The garment bag sectons are utterly confusing and not terribly effective. The base of the bag is lumpy, which means that the packed clothes come out rumpled. As a rolling bag it seems suboptimal - I've seen way too many travellers tripped up by it. As near as I can determine, the only advantage of a Tumi bag is that other people are impressed that you have a Tumi bag -- kind of a Chivas Regal effect. It is sturdy, but on the whole, compared to its price, the bag is underwhelming.
My next (and last) travel post will look at airlines and airports -- what I liked, what I didn't.
One of the drawbacks of being a foreign policy blogger is that it becomes very awkward to avoid discussing international relations events that make the front page for consecutive days. I am therefore duty-bound to comment on Kim Jong Il's death, Kim Jong Un's ascension to leadership, and what it means for North Korea.
Despite the near total lack of information outside of North Korea about North Korea, the International Brotherhood of Foreign Policy Pundits require I provide at least two predictions per post. So, here's my first prediction, courtesy of Mr. T:
What we do know about the triumvirate of Kim-Jong-Il selected leaders guiding Kim Jong Un into power does not bode well for the North Korean economy. The only bright spot for the DPRK's economy in recent years was a modest step towards private economic activity. The fact that one of them "published articles about the need for the government to curtail market-oriented activity" does not bode well for the per capita income of your average North Korean.
My second prediction is that Kim Jong Un will hold power for longer than any Western analyst expects him to hold power. Most of the pundit chatter has been about the Kim the Youngest's lack of gravitas and the asbsence of sufficient time to groom him as the successor to Kim Jong Il. As I'm hearing this, I keep thinking of Hua Guofeng, Mao's successor. It's an imperfect analogy, but Hua was a relative unknown plucked from obscurity by Mao only a few years before his death. In the end he was outmaneuvered by Deng Xiaoping and his allies, but even Hua managed to stay in power for a few years before that happened, putting down an attempted coup by Mao's wife Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four.
To use more game-theoretic language, I'm not sure there is a first-mover advantage to any ambitious North Korean challenging Kim the Youngest. Because of that, and because the entire DPRK elite likely fears internal division when concerned about natiional survival, the tyranny of the status quo will likely persist for longer than anyone realizes. Which, unfortunately, in this case, happens to be actual tyranny.
[I]t is to the risk of an EMP attack that Mr. Gingrich has repeatedly returned. And while the message may play well to hawkish audiences, who might warm to the candidate’s suggestion that the United States engage in pre-emptive military strikes against Iran and North Korea, many nuclear experts dismiss the threat. America’s current missile defense system would thwart such an attack, these experts say, and the nations in question are at the kindergarten stage of developing nuclear arms.
The Missile Defense Agency, an arm of the Pentagon that maintains an arsenal of ground-based interceptors ready to fly into space and smash enemy warheads, says that defeating such an attack would be as straightforward as any other defense of the continental United States.
“It doesn’t matter if the target is Chicago or 100 miles over Nebraska,” said Richard Lehner, an agency spokesman. “For the interceptor, it’s the same thing.” He called the potential damage from a nuclear electromagnetic pulse attack “pretty theoretical.”
Yousaf M. Butt, a nuclear physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who last year did a lengthyanalysis of EMP for The Space Review, a weekly online journal, said, “If terrorists want to do something serious, they’ll use a weapon of mass destruction — not mass disruption.” He said, “They don’t want to depend on complicated secondary effects in which the physics is not very clear.”
Mr. Gingrich’s spokesman, R. C. Hammond, did not respond to e-mails asking for comment. But the candidate, a former history professor and House speaker, has defended his characterizations as accurate. At a forum in Des Moines on Saturday for military veterans, Mr. Gingrich said an electromagnetic pulse attack was one of several pressing national security threats the United States faced. “In theory, a relatively small device over Omaha would knock out about half the electricity generated in the United States,” he told the veterans.
I'm neither a security expert nor a rocket scientist. After reading Broad's article, the Space Review annalysis, the rebuttal to that analysis, and Sharon Winberger's excellent FP write-up from last year, however, I'm reasonably confident that the threat posed by EMP is remote for the near-to-medium future. The scenarios in which an EMP would affect the United States rely on a) rogue states making serious leaps forward in their ballistic missile technology and nuclear engineering; and b) those same actors deciding that it's in their national interest to launch a first strike against a country with a reliable second-strike nuclear deterrent.
Without adequate preparation, its impact would be so horrifying that we would basically lose our civilization in a matter of seconds.... I think it's very important to get people to understand now, before there is a disaster, how truly grave the threat is.*
Fair enough... let's be generous and say there's a 10% chance of this being a real problem over the next two decades. If that's the case, maybe Gingrich is right to bring it up as an underestimated threat.
Here's my question, however. If we're talking about threats to civilization as we know it, isn't there another possibility that has a much higher probability of occurring -- let's say, better than 50% at least -- and a similarly lax amount of preventive action? Like, say, climate change?
I actually don't know whether global warming is occurring.... The earth's temperatures go up and down over geologic times over and over again. As recently as 11,000 years ago the Gulf Stream quit for 600 years. And for 600 years you had an ice age in Europe because there was no warm water coming up. And then it started up again. Nobody knows why it quit, nobody knows why it started up. I'm agnostic.
I'm not bringing this up to suggest that Gingrich is a buffoon. He could plausibly argue that a lot of people are harping on climate change while only Gingrich can call attention to the EMP possibility. It's possible that the costs of preventive action on climate change are much greater than dealing with EMP (though if that includes preventive attacks on Iran and North Korea, I'm dubious).
What I'm wondering is whether there is a partisan divide in assessing threats, as there is in assessing economic principles. I wonder if conservatives are far more likely to focus on threats in which there is a clear agent with a malevolent intent, whereas liberals are more likely to focus on threats that lack agency and are more systemic in nature (climate change, pandemics, nuclear accidents, etc.)
I could point to full-blown reports, news stories, or portentious weather forecasts, but American residents already know the truth -- Thanksgiving travel is an ordeal. Traffic jams, crowded flights -- it seems everyone is trying to get somewhere in the days before Turkey Day.
With the general mantra of "hurry up and place your hands in a surrender position wait" governing these next 36 hours, I thought it would be worth considering how a better appreciation of the tools of stateraft might help those of you on the road to avoid unnecessary frustrations.
Let's say that another actor -- which we'll call the target -- is pursuing a course of action that conflicts with your interests in world politics. This presumably means that all your attempts to avoid this clash of interests in the first place have failed. What are your options in developing a policy response?
Well, there's always the denial option -- physically preventing the target from doing the thing that is bothering you. Of course, denial often requires the overpowering, sustained use of force, and therefore is massively expensive. Very few actors have this option available to them.
If denial is not possible, another possibility is compellence. In this case, the goal is to punish the target such that it recalculates the costs and benefits of doing what it is doing and acquiesces to you. While less costly than denial, punishing the target will often involve punishing yourself, albeit not as severely. Some actors possess this option, but its success rate is far from guaranteed
Compellence and denial sound very coercive -- what about inducements? Surely the most efficient way to alter the target's behavior is to buy them off! Not so fast -- sometimes the price is extraordinarily steep. Sometimes the target doesn't want to be thought of as for sale. And sometimes the target might con you.
There's always the possibility of persuasion -- using sweet reason to get the target to reconsider their motives and reverse their actions. Of course, what seems eminently reasonable to you might not look so smart to the target, so this is hardly a surefire recipe for success.
Finally, one should always consider acceptance -- allowing that the costs of trying to change the target's behavior far outweigh the costs of adjusting to the target's behavior. Intuitively, this is a very frustrating outcome -- but if you lack the capability or the budget to pursue the other options, then it still might be the best course of action.
What, you might ask, does this have to do with Thanksgiving travel? Quite a lot, actually. Let's say you're stuck in a traffic jam on I-95, or you're on a plane with a crying toddler sitting next to you. The natural instinct is to declare that the situation is "unacceptable" and that "failure is not an option." All well and good, but let's run through our list of generic policy options and see what's feasible if you're, say, stuck in a traffic jam:
1) Denial: If you're on the road, sure, you could use RPGs to blast a hole through the traffic. That would require an awful lot of them, however, and I hear they're expensive and illegal to use. Good luck having enough of them to force your way through the tri-state area.
2) Compellence: Lot of drivers seem to believe that there are forms of punishment that could be pursued: constant horn-honking, hanging right on someone's bumper, and so forth. This can work with a few drivers, but more often than not it simply creates reciprocal bellicose behavior/minor fender-benders/West Coast shootings by the targets.
3) Inducements: The proffering of inducements on clogged interstates is exceptionally rare, for two reasons. First, what can be offered? Snacks? Drinks? A video player? These are all exhaustible resources -- so in a traffic jam, this will only get you a few car lengths ahead.
4) Persuasion: As Tom Vanderbilt so wonderfully explained in Traffic, communication across cars is difficult. There's that horn, and of course gesticulations with one's fingers can also often be used. Neither of these really persuades, however.
Unfortunately, but logically, this leads us to acceptance as the best approach to handling Thanksgiving traffic jams. It's the best of a bad set of policy options -- much like modern-day statecraft.
[What about the crying toddler on the plane?--ed. Oh, then this metaphor works even better -- crying toddlers are the uncontrollable rogue states of travel. The parent could try denial, but suffocating children still carries serious legal penalties in most states. Compellence is popular, except if the idea is to get a screaming child to stop screaming, punishment isn't really going to work well. Inducements -- "here, have some chocolate!" -- can work, but the child quickly figures out the associated moral hazard and has an incentive to act out again to get more inducements later in the flight. Using persuasion on crying children is something that non-parents are convinced will work -- until the moment they become parents themselves and realize their own utter stupidity. No, if a child is bawling uncontrollably during a flight, it's not because the parent is derelict in their parenting -- it's because they've already exhausted the first four policy options and have no recourse but acceptance.]
Walter Russell Mead has not been the biggest fan of the current president, so it's worth quoting at length what he said in a recent blog post about Obama's Pacific Rim trip:
The cascade of statements, deployments, agreements and announcements from the United States and its regional associates in the last week has to be one of the most unpleasant shocks for China’s leadership — ever. The US is moving forces to Australia, Australia is selling uranium to India, Japan is stepping up military actions and coordinating more closely with the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea, Myanmar is slipping out of China’s column and seeking to reintegrate itself into the region, Indonesia and the Philippines are deepening military ties with the the US: and all that in just one week. If that wasn’t enough, a critical mass of the region’s countries have agreed to work out a new trade group that does not include China, while the US, to applause, has proposed that China’s territorial disputes with its neighbors be settled at a forum like the East Asia Summit — rather than in the bilateral talks with its smaller, weaker neighbors that China prefers.
Rarely has a great power been so provoked and affronted. Rarely have so many red lines been crossed. Rarely has so much face been lost, so fast. It was a surprise diplomatic attack, aimed at reversing a decade of chit chat about American decline and disinterest in Asia, aimed also at nipping the myth of “China’s inexorable rise” in the bud....
[I]t was as decisive a diplomatic victory as anyone is likely to see. Congratulations should go to President Obama and his national security team. The State Department, the Department of Defense and the White House have clearly been working effectively together on an intensive and complex strategy. They avoided leaks, they coordinated effectively with half a dozen countries, they deployed a range of instruments of power. In the field of foreign policy, this was a coming of age of the Obama administration and it was conceived and executed about as flawlessly as these things ever can be.
The standard line among the press and expertanalysts is that the combination of speeches and actions represents a dramatic foreign policy "pivot" to East Asia. This elides some prior speeches that suggested this was under way for some time, but still -- what does it mean?
I'd suggest three things. First, it's an interesting moment to highlight some macro trends that are relatively favorable to the United States. In comparison to, say, China or Europe, the United States looks to be in decent shape. Over the longer term, trends in both energy and manufacturing suggest that the United States will continue a time-honored tradition and emerge from a crisis of its own making in a stronger relative position than before. If the administration is smart, it will marry its recent successes to these longer-term trends as a way of constructing a more optimistic strategic narrative.
Second, China is likely to pursue a more accommodating posture in the short run. As Mead notes, the official Chinese reaction has been muted. The unofficial reaction has ranged from the hyperbolic to the inscrutable. Still, as I've pointed outrepeatedly, China's behavior in 2009 and 2010 was a giant honking invitation for the rest of the Pacific Rim to cozy up to the United States. And that's what should worry Beijing. It's not that the United States is interested in maintaining its presence in East Asia -- that interest has not wavered. What has changed is the eagerness with which the countries in the region, ranging from Australia to Myanmar, have reciprocated.
Third, while the Obama administration deserves credit for this foreign policy swing -- and for some fun, compare and contrast coverage of this trip with Obama's Pac Rim swing from two years ago -- the "pivot" language is badly misplaced. A pivot implies that the United States will stop paying attention to Europe or the Middle East and start paying attention to East Asia. While I'm sure that's what the Obama administration wants to do, it can't. Europe is imploding, as are multiple countries in the Middle East. The United States can't afford to ignore these regions, since uncertainty there eventually translates into both global and domestic problems. A European financial meltdown or an Egyptian political meltdown will have ramifications that simply can't be ignored.
Talking about a United States "pivot" in foreign policy is meaningless. The US, like an overstuffed couch, is simply too big to pivot.
Apparently the organizers of tomorrow's GOP foreign policy debate asked David Frum to submit ten questions to ask. For the record, no one asked me... sniff.... really I'll be fine... but that doesn't mean I can't offer some of my own. Here would be my top 10 questions:
2) Many of you on the dias have declared that there should be no daylight between Israel and the United States. Israeli officials have repeatedly and formally requested that Jonathan Pollard's sentence be commuted for spying for Israel. As president, will you accede to this Israeli request?
3) In previous debates, many of you have warned about the dangers of a debased dollar. At the same time, many of you have also complained that China is undervaluing its currency vis-a-vis the dollar to augment its economic growth. Which issue do you believe is more important to America's economic strength?
4) Why should the United States pay any dues to the United Nations? Do you all agree with Governor Perry that the U.S. should reconsider those dues payments?
5) The Doha round of world trade talks has stalled out, and bilateral free-trade agreements have proliferated in recent years. As the president of the world's largest economy, what approach would you favor to promote greater trade liberalization?
6) The United States recently dispatched 100 military advisors to Uganda in an attempt to subdue the Lord's Resistance Army. What criteria would you use, as president, to decide when to use American force for the purpose of humanitarian intervention?
7) Many of you have complained about illegal immigration flows during the campaign, but the harddata suggests that these flows have slowed dramatically over the past few years. What is the appropriate amount of effort to devote to this issue?
8) What steps would you take, as president, to ensure that elements of the Pakistani government cease supporting violent non-state actors in Afghanistan and India?
9) Many of you have criticized the Obama administration for ignoring military advice on troop decisions in Afghanistan and Iraq. During the pre-war debate with respect to Iraq, however, the Bush administration rejected troop estimates from Army Chief of Staff (and now Secretary for Veterans Affairs) Eric Shinseki. When would you be prepared to overrule the advice you receive from the military?
10) Who, in your opinion, was the greatest foreign policy president in American history besides Ronald Reagan, and why?
Commenters are heartily encouraged to offer their foreign policy questions in the comments.
I swear, I wasn't going to watch tonight's CNBC debate on economic policy. I'd had a long day, I was tired, and Wednesday night at the Drezners we watch The Middle and Modern Family. But since neither of those shows were on the air tonight, I switched over to the debate.
While Rick Perry's major league gaffe will command all the headlines, I thought the most reealing answers were given to the first question of the night -- what to do about Italy? Here are the responses of the co-frontrunners:
HERMAN CAIN: "There's not a lot that the United States can directly do for Italy right now, because they have -- they're really way beyond the point of return that we -- we as the United States can save them."
MITT ROMNEY: "Well, Europe is able to take care of their own problems. We don't want to step in and try and bail out their banks and bail out their governments. They have the capacity to deal with that themselves."
The responses by Ron Paul, Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman were similar in tone and content.
Now, philosophically, there's a logic to these answers, avoiding moral hazard and all. But recall how earlier this week conservatives were castigating Barack Obama for giving Western Europe the cold shoulder? I believe Michael Goldfarb phrased it as a problem of Obama "abandoning allies."
I raise this because, if the eurozone actually did need American help, the response by the GOP candidates for president would be to... abandon America's allies.
One of Richard Nixon's saltier lines on foreign economic policy was, "I don't give a f**k about the lira." I think it's safe to say that the current GOP doesn't give a f**k about the euro.
Europe’s problems should absolutely terrify anyone who cares about the American economy; its sovereign debts could infect banks around the world, potentially triggering a new wave of financial crisis, and a European recession would drag on already slow U.S. growth.
But the candidates who assembled at the CNBC debate in Detroit treated those threats as a far-away nuisance, like famine in Africa or an earthquake in Mongolia: very serious, very sad, not our problem....
It’s stunning that a Republican field that includes a former ambassador, a former House speaker and two successful former businessmen – and which, to a candidate, gushed over the virtues of markets throughout the debate – so casually brushed aside the struggles of the world’s largest collective economy (the Eurozone is bigger, economically, than the United States) and America’s largest trading partner.
You don’t have to believe America should bail out Italy, Greece or the entire Eurozone – a straw-man concept that no one in Washington is even floating, but several candidates took pains to denounce on Wednesday night – to recognize that the United States has a role to play in averting another global financial crisis. At the very least, you should expect lawmakers, and presidential candidates, to be making plans for how to respond if the European crisis escalates.
There were no such plans to be found on the debate stage on Wednesday.
I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending.
An interesting hypothesis!! So, there are three possibilities here. The first is that Bachmann was joking -- in which case, wow, that's a really tasteless joke given the loss of life and probably warrants a pretty big apology.
I’m not sure how this computes given the fact that the storm largely spared Washington, D.C. and New York, while hammering a red states like North Carolina and a heavily Republican area like Virginia’s Tidewater region.
Well, socialist-supporting Vermont got hit pretty hard too, but still, this is a fair point, and "Bachmann being wrong" seems like another safe bet.
The third possibility is the one I want to explore, however -- what if Bachmann is right? What if God really is using wrath to coerce humanity into implementing a particular set of policy preferences?
A God-fearing person would naturally decide to obey. However, this kind of coercive demand strikes me as a pretty massive intrusion into human sovereignty. The point of a democracy is for majorities of citizens and their elected representatives to decide matters of policy. Recent history suggests that neither sovereign governments nor their populations take kindly to coercive threats from other men. If we acquiesce to Divine demands now, don't we just let God win?
Bachmann's response suggests an obvious bandwagoning approach to the awesome power of deities: When God says jump, you should say, how high? And, indeed, if the Almighty really is omnipotent, this strategy has much to recommend it. Bandwagoning is generally recommended when the targeted actor is comparatively weak, has few natural allies, and believes that the targeting actor can be appeased with concessions. This seems to fit the Old Testament, monotheistic God to a tee.
On the other hand, however, might a balancing approach yield better long-term results? After all, God has a disturbing track record of making demands like this. We know from Genesis the Old Testament that the Almighty has a tendency to, well, you know, smite humans on a semi-regular basis. There's the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, an awful lot of Egyptians, etc. This doesn't even include the number of times God demanded death (the sacrifice of Isaac, Ninevah) only to relent at the last minute. Sure, God has some good reasons in some of these instances, but from a threat assessment perspective, it's veeeeery disturbing.
Maybe the bandwagoning criteria don't apply. If one operates along the monotheistic assumption*, humans should ask if there is a possible ally out there to help resist God's will [Don't go there --ed.], an entity who is God's enduring rival [You're really going there, aren't you?! --ed.] , one who might have the necessary power to make God think twice about all that smiting?
It's time to wonder … would a temporary alliance with Satan really be that bad? [Yes it world!! --ed.] Winston Churchill once said, "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." Now I'm not sure I would even go that far … the whole selling souls thing sounds like a pretty big demand too. That said, a sober, realpolitik perspective would demand that making a deal with the devil has to be a policy option that stays on the table.
[How about a nice buck-passing strategy instead?--ed. Hey, I'd love to just force other creatures like, say, apes to go toe-to-toe with God, but I just don't see it happening.]
Readers are warmly encouraged to puzzle this out for themselves -- or, instead, to buy the very entertaining Biblical Games by Steven Brams.
*The monotheism assumption is important when thinking about how to cope with a venegeful god. If the universe turns out to be polytheistic, then the question becomes whether us mortals can sow dissension among the gods before someone releases a Kraken.
[WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS AN OPTIMISTIC GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY POST]
Note: in my last blog post, I might have sounded juuuuust a wee bit pessimistic about the state of the global political economy. That was my intent, but it wasn't necessarily how I actually felt. My aim was to assemble as negative a brief as possible about the state of the global political economy. The aim of this post is to argue that, despite all the recent bad news, the fundamentals of the global political economy are surprisingly sound. I'm not actually as optimistic as the rest of this post suggests, either -- but I do lean more in this direction. The fact that I'm blogging this from a zombie-proof vacation redoubt should in no way affect your evaluation of the following few paragraphs.
So, when we last left off this debate, things were looking grim. My concern in the last post was that the persistence of hard times would cause governments to take actions that would lead to a collapse of the open global economy, a spike in general riots and disturbances, and eerie echoes of the Great Depression. Let's assume that the global economy persists in sputtering for a while, because that's what happens after major financial shocks. Why won't these other bad things happen? Why isn't it 1931?
Let's start with the obvious -- it's not gonna be 1931 because there's some passing familiarity with how 1931 played out. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve has devoted much of his academic career to studying the Great Depression. I'm gonna go out on a limb therefore and assert that if the world plunges into a another severe downturn, it's not gonna be because central bank heads replay the same set of mistakes.
The legacy of the Great Depression has also affected public attitudes and institutions that provide much stronger cement for the current system. In terms of publuc attitudes, compare the results of this mid-2007 poll with this mid-2010 poll about which economic system is best. I'll just reproduce the key charts below:
The headline of the 2010 results is that there's eroding U.S. support for the global economy, but a few other things stand out. U.S. support has declined, but it's declined from a very high level. In contrast, support for free markets has increased in other major powers, such as Germany and China. On the whole, despite the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression, public attitudes have not changed all that much. While there might be populist demands to "do something," that something is not a return to autarky or anything so drastc.
Another big difference is that multilateral economic institutions are much more robust now than they were in 1931. On trade matters, even if the Doha round is dead, the rest of the World Trade Organization's corpus of trade-liberalizing measures are still working quite well. Even beyond the WTO, the complaint about trade is not the deficit of free-trade agreements but the surfeit of them. The IMF's resources have been strengthened as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. The Basle Committee on Banking Supervision has already promulgated a plan to strengthen capital requirements for banks. True, it's a slow, weak-assed plan, but it would be an improvement over the status quo.
As for the G-20, I've been prettyskeptical about that group's abilities to collectively address serious macroeconomic problems. That is setting the bar rather high, however. One could argue that the G-20's most useful function is reassurance. Even if there are disagreements, communication can prevent them from growing into anything worse.
Finally, a note about the possibility of riots and other general social unrest. The working paper cited in my previous post noted the links between austerity measures and increases in disturbances. However, that paper contains the following important paragraph on page 19:
[I]n countries with better institutions, the responsiveness of unrest to budget cuts is generally lower. Where constraints on the executive are minimal, the coefficient on expenditure changes is strongly negative -- more spending buys a lot of social peace. In countries with Polity-2 scores above zero, the coefficient is about half in size, and less significant. As we limit the sample to ever more democratic countries, the size of the coefficient declines. For full democracies with a complete range of civil rights, the coefficient is still negative, but no longer significant.
This is good news!! The world has a hell of a lot more democratic governments now than it did in 1931. What happened in London, in other words, might prove to be the exception more than the rule.
So yes, the recent economic news might seem grim. Unless political institutions and public attitudes buckle, however, we're unlikely to repeat the mistakes of the 1930's. And, based on the data we've got, that's not going to happen.
While the debtopocalypse might have been cancelled, I see that the wake for American hegemony is chugging right along.
The interwebs is drowning from variations of the argument that the process by which the debt ceiling deal was reached has dented American power. To sum them up: Sure, the United States government staved off collapse, but the galactically stupid brinkmanship over it has permanently damaged America's brand. Furthermore, the new politics of brinkmanship means that we could potentially see this kind of own-goal as a new permanent fixture of American political economy. Continued political uncertainty over something as obviously necessary as raising the debt ceiling means that actual policy problems like, say, crumbling infrastructure, education, or reassessing grand strategy is a true fool's errand. So, in other words, the USA is screwed.
I don't doubt that the U.S. brand of constitutional democracy has taken a pretty severe hit from this episode. Then again, the parliamentary system of democratic governance has long been more popular, so that's not really a new thing.
There are three factors, however, that make me wary of this kind of eulogy. First, I've come to look at concepts like "soft power" and "standing" with a bit of a jaundiced eye. Even if the U.S. takes a hit in that category, I'm not sure that loss translates anything more tangible than … a bunch of foreign-policy pundits bemoaning its loss.
Seriously, compare the last few years of the Bush administration with the first few years of the Obama administration. Any measurable metric of standing or soft power with the presidential transition. The effect on U.S. foreign policy, however, has been negligible.
Second, power is always a relative term, so the question has to be asked -- who's gaining on the United States? Joshua Keating's survey of global schadenfreude doesn't change the fact that the eurozone remains a basket case, Japan and Russia remain demographic disasters, and China has domestic political problems that make partisanship in the United States look like child's play. Even a cursory glance at military spending reveals no peer competitor to the United States. So yes, the United States will endure a rain of rhetorical horses**t for a while … right up until the next crisis in which the world demands America "do something" because it's still the only superpower still standing.
Or, to put this in bond rating language -- even if US power is downgraded from AAA, who else is even above BBB+?
Third, the thing about democracy is that it has multiple ways to constrain political stupidity and ideological overreach. The first line of defense is that politicians will have an electoral incentive to act in non-crazy ways in order to get re-elected. The second line of defense is that politicians or parties who violate the non-crazy rule fail to get re-elected. So, in some ways, the true test of the American system's ability to stave off failure will be the 2012 election. Politicians from both parties have vastly overinterpreted recent electoral victories as sweeping mandates. I suspect, in 2012, many of them will be penalized for such hubris. If they aren't, well, then the conventional wisdom might have a point.
Smart investors made a ton of money this past month by betting on the full faith and credit of the United States despite the D.C. blood sport. If one could make a similar wager on American power, I'd be inclined to bet against the current market sentiment.
Be afraid. Be very afraid. If, like me, you care about the future of American power–if, like me, you believe the United States has been the greatest force for good in the world during the past 100 years and the U.S. armed forces have been our most effective instrument of power projection–then you should be scared about what is being cooked up among budget negotiators on Capitol Hill.
The so-called Gang of Six–Democratic Senators Kent Conrad, Dick Durbin, and Mark Warner, and Republicans Saxby Chambliss, Mike Crapo, and Tom Coburn—are cooking up what is billed as a bipartisan package that would cut nearly $900 billion from the defense budget during the next decade. That’s more than double the $400 billion in cuts that President Obamaunveiled in April.
Hmm... let me think about this for a second....
It's hard to deny Boot's assertion that, over the past century, U.S. military power has been a necessary and successful tool to advance American national interests. That said, however, if we look only at last decade, the picture darkens considerably. After Afghanistan and Iraq, is it really possible to claim that the U.S. armed forces have been our most effective instrument of power projection? Have we purchased more than $1 trillion worth of increased security since 9/11? No, I don't think that we have.
The striking thing about this chart is that we're spending more on the military now than we did during the peak of Cold War tensions and Reagan's military build-up in the mid-1980's -- especially since military spending by the rest of the world has fallen dramatically since the end of the Cold War.
I'm about to say something that might be controversial for people under the age of 25, but here goes. You know the threats posed to the United States by a rising China, a nuclear Iran, terrorists and piracy? You could put all of them together and they don't equal the perceived threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And until I see another hostile country in the world that poses a military threat in Europe, the Middle East andAsia at the same time, I'm thinking that current defense spendingshouldbe lower than Cold War levels by a fair amount.
AEI's latest "Defending Defense" paper doesn't do it either. Despite numerous claims about the hollowing out of the U.S. military, I didn't see a single instance in the report in which American military capabilities were compared to either extant threats or possible security rivals.
Neoconservatives are going to have to present more reasoned arguments for why defense spending should not be on the chopping block than the scare tactics of Boot -- or, for that matter, this whopper from Robert Kagan:
[The proposed cuts are] utterly irresponsible and dangerous to national security. Also cowardly, since defense has no domestic constituency, while entitlements — the real source of our fiscal crisis — do.
Spit-take!! Look, I'm just as scared of the AARP's political muscle as the next foreign policy wonk, but to claim that there is no domestic interest group support for more defense spending is just as bad as, oh, I don't know.... writing a whole book pretending to discover that there's an interest group lobby that supports Israel without defining it properly.
Question to readers -- what is the best logical, empirically grounded argument you can make for not cutting the defense budget?
UPDATE: For more on this point see Christopher Preble, as well as Shadow Government's Kori Schake. Schake makes a trenchant point -- if there are to be serious cuts, defense experts need to start thinking seriously about the best way to do it, rather than simply lopping a certain percentage off the top.
Over the past week there's been a lot of foreign policy outputs coming from the gut, particularly with respect to the greater Middle East. Newly minted Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has been cursing like a PG-rated sailor as of late, saying about the Iraqis, "dammit, make a decision" with respect to a new defense minister. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has declared that Bashar Assad has "lost legitimacy," which is A) true; and B) not all that helpful a guide for future policy toward Syria. U.S. ambassador to that country Robert Ford took to Facebook to express his ire at the Syrian government. And now we're halting $800 million in military aid to Pakistan, which sounds great but is not necessarily going to make things better.
Do these gestures of frustration accomplish anything? That's hard to say. In terms of concrete outcomes, the likely answer is no -- part of the reason for the venting of frustrations on these issues is that the United States has so little leverage in most of these situations. On the other hand, just the acknowledgment of frustration can be politically useful, a venting of pressure that might otherwise lead to hopelessly misguided or absurdly risky policy options.
For exhibit A, see Reuel Marc Gerecht's latest on Syria in The Weekly Standard, which opens with, "The administration's policy toward Syria is shaping up to be the greatest missed opportunity of Barack Obama's presidency." The essay goes to great length to bash realists detail the myriad policy benefits that would come with regime change in Damascus. This is all well and good (though a bit exaggerated), until we get to what the Obama administration should be doing to foment change:
There are many things that the Obama administration should be doing that it isn’t: using the presidential bully pulpit against the Assad regime, deploying the American ambassador in Damascus as a shield and voice for the opposition (if Ford gets expelled, he gets expelled), organizing the Western diplomatic community in Damascus to do whatever it can to aid the opposition, offering substantial technical support to the Turks to extend a Wi-Fi-ed broadband as far over the Syrian border as possible, and working with Paris to implement energy sanctions that might severely impair the Assad regime. But the most important thing it could do now is encourage Turkey to stand firm against Syria.
Ideally, we should want to see the Turks establish a buffer zone or safe haven on the Syrian side of the border (Ankara sometimes did this in Iraq to counter nefarious Kurdish activity).
Let's be clear: The Obama administration could be doing everything on that list, and it wouldn't make an iota of difference. The only policy that would matter is if the Turks actually wanted to establish a buffer zone -- except in a later paragraph even Gerecht acknowledges that, "neither Erdogan nor Davutoglu would want to do this."
So, to sum up, Gerecht is really enthusiastic about Syrian regime change, and wants the U.S. to beat its breast a little more and ask "pretty pretty please" for the Turks to do something they view as against their self-interest. This will accomplish … nothing.
If you start seeing gut-level foreign policy, it's usually a sign that every other rational option has failed. And although we hope otherwise, frustration alone rarely leads to policy breakthroughs.
The Official Blog Son and I were lucky enough to catch Team USA's thrilling come-from-behind victory over Brazil in the FIFA Women's World Cup. It was a great and controversial game, sure to be replayed on ESPN Classic for years to come. It also got me to thinking about how prominent thinkers and writers about world politics would use the game as a hook for their foreign affairs columns and op-eds this week. Here are their opening paragraphs:
I was quaffing hearty German pilsners with FIFA President Sepp Blatter in a luxury box in Dresden's Glücksgas Stadium (try the bratwurst!!) when he said something that hit me like a thunderbolt: "I can't understand why there's so much demand for video replay in soccer. You know, there is no instant replay in the real world." And really, that's what the global economy is like -- a fast-speed, arcing bullet of a free kick with no time to press the pause button. You have to use every part of your being -- your legs, your head, though admittedly not your arms -- just to keep pace.
Watching the thrilling run of the Americans leading up to Abby Wambach's header, I was struck by the complex, free-flowing sequence of passes that got the ball from the American end to Megan Rapinoe's left foot. It was such a seamless, interlaced network of exchanges -- dare I call it a web of them? -- that moved the ball forward. As the passes moved from one player to another, I bet social networking technologies moved even faster, alerting Americans that a Big Moment was about to happen. In winning, the United States showed the power of webbed networks -- or is it networked webs? -- yet again.
All of the Western media will focus on the "theatrics" of the USA-Brazil game, but it doesn't matter. This was an intramural match between Western Hemisphere teams, which means it was irrelevant. Japan's stunning upset of host Germany in the quarterfinals is the real story of this World Cup, yet another signal of how the one remaining Asian team will leave the three "Western" teams still alive in the dust.
This was an example of American exceptionalism and American will to power at its finest. Battling a set of rules and referees that were clearly anti-American in their effect, the noble U.S. side displayed dogged determination and grit, vanquishing their Brazilian counterparts. The only black mark on the U.S. side was the timidity of the U.S. coach Pia Sundhage in obeying FIFA's absurd and corrupt rules. Sundhage, from that socialist bastion of meek multilateralism that is Sweden, adhered to the letter of FIFA law in pulling Rachel Buehler after she was "red-carded." A true American coach would have instead followed the spirit of the law and sent an 11th player onto the pitch in place of the unjustly accused Buehler.
Americans will thump their chests, display their brassy jingoism, and bray to the heavens about how the refereeing in this game was "unfair" or "ridiculous." They'll claim that the referee's red card of Buehler and mandated do-over of the penalty kick during regular time was "anti-American." They'll overlook the fact that the Australian ref could have midfielder Carli Lloyd off the field for a flagrant, deliberate handball but didn't. They'll overlook the granting of a re-kick for U.S. player Shannon Boxx during the penalty kick phase. They'll overlook the aesthetic beauty of Brazilian star Marta's soccer artistry. They'll overlook the arrogance of U.S. goalkeeper Hope Solo -- a perfect American name if there ever was one -- as she had the audacity to question the ref (if the officials weren't so obviously in Corporate America's back pocket, Solo would have been red-carded). They'll overlook the fact that the extra half-hour of play insidiously stacked the deck for the Americans, rewarding their better conditioning against the poorer and put-upon Brazilians. They'll overlook the 158 other things that I will now lay out in excruciating detail. Only when WikiLeaks focuses its might on FIFA will the soccer world be more just.
The sweltering heat in Dresden clearly began to affect the crowd. They booed the Brazilian star Marta with all of her touches. You could sense a growing danger as the boos grew louder. The German fans, upset at seeing their own team get knocked out, had clearly decided to side with their tribal allies. It is likely that only Wambach's header prevented what would have been an unruly German/American riot, breaking down the tenuous social fabric. The riot would have started in the heart of Europe, but I have every confidence that, before long, the unrest would have spread to Halford MacKinder's heartland in the middle of Eurasia.
This match crystallized both the promise and the peril of the rising BRIC powers as they assume more responsibilities in global governance. The game put FIFA's many problems -- bad decision-making, a lack of transparency about the bad decision-making -- on full display. Even after the match, FIFA never explained why Brazil was awarded a re-kick following Solo's block of Christina's penalty kick. Instead of constructively seeking reform, however, the Brazilian side tried to free-ride off of FIFA's flaws. Marta constantly whined to the refs about the lack of Brazilian free kicks. Defender Erkia flopped onto the pitch in a transparent effort to stall play. Unless and until the BRIC countries learn to play cooperatively with the fading West, global governance will look as effective as FIFA's efforts to block corruption. Which is to say, not effective at all.
Readers are warmly encouraged to offer their own suggestions in the comments.
Your humble blogger has been relatively lazy circumspect in blogging about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair. The latest turn of events, however, has rousted me from my vacation torpor to ask just one simple question: are you friggin' kidding me??!!!
Both the New York Times and New York Post carry stories containing more prosecutor leaks than the Titanic suggesting that the woman DSK allegedly attacked was "a con artist." according to one blind quote. From the Times account:
Although forensic tests found unambiguous evidence of a sexual encounter between Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a French politician, and the woman, prosecutors now do not believe much of what the accuser has told them about the circumstances or about herself....
Among the discoveries, one of the officials said, are issues involving the asylum application of the 32-year-old housekeeper, who is Guinean, and possible links to people involved in criminal activities, including drug dealing and money laundering....
According to the two officials, the woman had a phone conversation with an incarcerated man within a day of her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in which she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing the charges against him. The conversation was recorded.
That man, the investigators learned, had been arrested on charges of possessing 400 pounds of marijuana. He is among a number of individuals who made multiple cash deposits, totaling around $100,000, into the woman’s bank account over the last two years. The deposits were made in Arizona, Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania.
The investigators also learned that she was paying hundreds of dollars every month in phone charges to five companies. The woman had insisted she had only one phone and said she knew nothing about the deposits except that they were made by a man she described as her fiancé and his friends.
Well, this is pretty simple -- if the prosecutors are leaking this stuff, then the charges are going to be dropped. Dominique Strauss-Kahn will be a free man, thereby re-convulsing the French political scene. I'm also expecting a super-fun flurry of discussion about the dangers of immigration from tis latest turn of events.
The story can't end here, however. Readers are therefore warmly encouraged to suggest how Act III of l'affaire-DSK will play itself out in the comments section.
Here's my suggestion: DSK and his wife Anne Sinclair will proft handsomely from a wrongful prosecution settlement with the city of New York. After that, they decamp to the island of Tahiti. At which point, Neve Campbell turns out not to be dead and, in league with Sinclair, eliminates DSK so they can enjoy their riches with the help of Bill Murray.
[Implausible, I say!!--ed. I say, not implausible enough!!!]
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