Over the break, I see that John Mearsheimer got the glowing Robert D. Kaplan treatment in The Atlantic.  Kaplan is a master of this genre, writing my favorite profile of Samuel Huntington a little more than a decade ago.  In his Atlantic essay, Kaplan smartly observes that John's real intellectual legacy should be his 2001 masterwork The Tragedy of Great Power Politics: 

The best grand theories tend to be written no earlier than middle age, when the writer has life experience and mistakes behind him to draw upon. Morgenthau’s 1948 classic, Politics Among Nations, was published when he was 44, Fukuyama’s The End of History was published as a book when he was 40, and Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations as a book when he was 69. Mearsheimer began writing The Tragedy of Great Power Politics when he was in his mid-40s, after working on it for a decade. Published just before 9/11, the book intimates the need for America to avoid strategic distractions and concentrate on confronting China. A decade later, with the growth of China’s military might vastly more apparent than it was in 2001, and following the debacles of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, its clairvoyance is breathtaking.

Note to self:  start outlining awesome, earth-moving grand theory now. [Note to Drezner:  sorry, but you already dug your own grave when it comes to intellectual legacy--ed.]

It's not surprising that Kaplan, a geopolitics wonk, loves Tragedy, with its emphasis on the "stopping power of water" and all.  The essay is worth reading in full -- but seeing as how I'm quoted without attribution I've done a bit of research on realism, I can't let this casual assertion go by without some pushback: 

[I]n a country that has always been hostile to what realism signifies, [Mearsheimer] wears his “realist” label as a badge of honor. “To realism!” he says as he raises his wineglass to me in a toast at a local restaurant. As Ashley J. Tellis, Mearsheimer’s former student and now, after a stint in the Bush administration, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, later tells me: “Realism is alien to the American tradition. It is consciously amoral, focused as it is on interests rather than on values in a debased world. But realism never dies, because it accurately reflects how states actually behave, behind the façade of their values-based rhetoric.”...

For Mearsheimer, academia’s hostility to realism is evident in the fact that Harvard, which aims to recruit the top scholars in every field, never tried to hire the two most important realist thinkers of the 20th century, Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz. But at Chicago, a realist like Mearsheimer, who loves teaching and never had ambitions for government service, can propound theories and unpopular ideas, and revel in the uproar they cause. Whatever the latest group-think happens to be, Mearsheimer almost always instinctively wants to oppose it—especially if it emanates from Washington.

This notion of realism being alien to the United States has been a recurring theme of realists, since, well, realism asserted itself in the American academy.  It's impossible to have a conversation with John Mearsheimer longer than 15 minutes without him bringing up this point. 

The thing is, it's a sloppy argument lacking in empirical foundation.  Just for starters, even realists acknowledge that Ron Paul's campaign is doing well because it's sympatico with the realist critique of American foreign policy.  More substantively, this canard is why I researched and wrote "The Realist Tradition in American Public Opinion" a few years ago.  My principal conclusion from that essay: 

Americans do hold some liberal aspirations for their conduct across the globe, and believe that morality should play a role in foreign affairs—in the abstract. However, surveys about foreign policy world views and priorities, the use of force, and foreign economic policies all reveal a strong realist bent among the mass American public. The overwhelming majority of Americans possess a Hobbesian world view of international relations. Americans consistently place realist foreign policy objectives— the securing of energy supplies, homeland security—as top foreign policy priorities. Objectives associated with liberal internationalism—strengthening the United Nations, promoting democracy and human rights—rank near the bottom of the list. On the uses of force, experimental surveys reveal that Americans think like intuitive neorealists; they prefer balancing against aggressive and rising powers while remaining leery about liberal-style interventions. On foreign economic policy, Americans think of trade through a relative gains prism, particularly if the trading partner is viewed as a rising economic power. Surveys and polling do suggest that Americans like multilateral institutions, but they appear to like them for realist reasons—they are viewed as mechanisms for burden-sharing.

It is somewhat more accurate to say that America's foreign policy elites are more hostile to realpolitik -- though even here, things can be exaggerated.  The recent TRIP survey, for example, revealed that realism might not be the most popular paradigm among IR scholars, but it still commands a healthy fraction of academics, and commands an even greater fraction of attention in international relations courses.  

This might seem like a small point, but it's an important one -- because to be honest I'm fed up with realists whining that everyone is against them.  If there is one thing that academic realists have in common, it's a strong, cultivated sense of victimhood.  "Our field despises us! Americans don't like us!  The foreign policy community hates us!" 

Cut it out already.  There is a long intellectual lineage in the American academy -- starting with Hans Morgenthau and continuing with Mearsheimer and his students -- that evinces realist principles.  There is an equally strong intellectual lineage of policy principals -- starting with George Kennan and continuing with Brent Scowcroft and his acolytes -- that walk the realist walk.  Realists advocate a doctrine that genuinely resonates with a large swath of the American mass public.  If realists fail to popularize their own ideas, then perhaps they should look in the mirror before invoking the "everyone hates us so we must be right" card.

It's time to admit that I'm getting old.  I feel the aches and pains from workouts a bit more keenly.  I have to Google acronyms I see on Twitter all the time.  No matter how hard I try, I just don't feel comfortable wearing an untucked shirt with a blazer.  Only now am I discovering Alison Brie, which makes me way behind the curve.  Most importantly, however, I find myself reading threat assessments made by junior international relations scholars and shaking my head at these young-security-kids-with-their-having-no-memory-of-the-Cold-War. 

To explain where I'm coming from, here's what I wrote a little more than a year ago: 

Terrorism and piracy are certainly security concerns -- but they don't compare to the Cold War. A nuclear Iran is a major regional headache, but it's not the Cold War. A generation from now, maybe China poses as serious a threat as the Cold War Soviet Union. Maybe. That's a generation away, however.... 

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.

I'll stand by that statement, and I'm not the only one here at FP to believe it.  Over the past week, however, I'm seeing some young whippersnappers junior scholars evince a different estimate of threats to U.S. national security. 

Over at Shadow Government, Paul Miller has a four-part series  -- count 'em, one, two, three, four -- of blog posts arguing that the world is a more dangerous place now than before.  He sums up his argument in this concluding section: 

Essentially, the United States thus faces two great families of threats today:  first, the nuclear-armed authoritarian powers, of which there are at least twice as many as there were during the Cold War; second, the aggregate consequences of state failure and the rise of non-state actors in much of the world, which is a wholly new development since the Cold War.  On both counts, the world is more dangerous than it was before 1989.  Essentially take the Cold War, add in several more players with nukes, and then throw in radicalized Islam, rampant state failure, and the global economic recession, and you have today.

I recognize that the world doesn't feel as dangerous as it did during the Cold War.  During the Cold War we all knew about the threat and lived with a constant awareness-usually shoved to the back of ours minds to preserve our sanity-that we might die an instantaneous firey death at any moment.  We no longer feel that way. 

Our feelings are wrong.  The Cold War engaged our emotions more because it was simple, easily understood, and, as an ideological contest, demanded we take sides and laid claim to our loyalties.  Today's environment is more complex and many-sided and so it is harder to feel the threat the same way we used to.  Nonetheless, the danger is real. 

Meh.  Actually, meh squared. 

To be fair to Miller, I do think he is getting at something that has changed over time during the post-Cold War era.  First, the threat envorinment does seem higher now than twenty years ago, as the Soviet Union was about to collapse.  China is more economically powerful, Russia is more revanchist, North, Korea, Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons, the barriers to entry for non-state actors to wreak havoc has gone up.  The likelihood of a conventional great power war is lower, but the likelihood of a serious attack on American soil seems higher than in late 1991.  So in terms of trend, it does feel like the world is less safe. 

What's also changed, however, is the tight coupling of the Cold War security environment (ironically, just as the security environment has become more loosely coupled, the global political economy has become more tightly coupled).  Because the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were such implacable adversaries and because they knew  it, the possibility of a small dispute -- Berlin, Cuba, a downed Korean airliner -- escalating very quickly was ever-present.  The possibility of an accident triggering all-out nuclear war was also higher than was realized at the time.  The current threat environment is more loosely interconnected, in that a small conflict seems less likely to immediately ramp up into another Cuban Missile Crisis.  Indeed, the events of the past year support that point.  Saudi Arabia essentially invaded Bahrain, and Iran did.... very little about it.  The United States deployed special forces into the heart of Pakistan's military complex.  The aftermath of that is undeniably uglier, but it's not we-are-at-DEFCON-ONE kind of ugly.  Miller might be more accurate in saying that there is a greater chance of a security dust-up in today's complex threat environment, but there's a much lower likelihood of those dust-ups spiraling out of control. 

In Miller's calculations, it seems that any country with a nuclear weapon constitutes an equal level of threat.  But that's dubious on multiple grounds.  First, none of the emerging nuclear states have anywhere close to a second-strike capability.  If they were to use their nukes against the United States, I think they know that there's an excellent chance that they don't survive the counterstrike.  Second, the counter Miller provides is that these authoritarian leaders are extra-super-crazy.  I'm not going to defend either the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or Kim the Younger, but are these leaders more crazy than either Mao or Stalin or Kim Jong Il?  Those are three of the worst leaders in history -- and none of them came close to using nuclear weapons.   Finally, the Pakistan case is instructive -- even after getting nukes, and even after getting very cozy with radical terrorist groups, that country has refrained from escalating hostilities with India to the point of another general war. 

As for the non-state threats, they are disturbing, but I'd posit that on this front the United States really is safer now than it was a decade ago.  The only organization capable of launching a coordinated terrorist strike against the United States is now a husk of its former self.  Indeed, I'd wager that Miller's emotions, or his memory of 9/11, are getting in the way of dispassionate analysis. 

In essence, Miller conflates the number of possible threats with a greater magnitude of threats.  I agree that there are more independent threats to the United States out there at present, but combined, they don't stack up to the Soviet threat.  To put it another way, I prefer avoiding a swarm of mosquitoes to one really ravenous bear. 

In related exaggerated threat analysis, Matthew Kroenig argues in Foreign Affairs that an airstrike on Iran might be the best of a bad set of options in dealing with Iran.  This has set poor Stephen Walt around the bend in response, as op-eds advocating an attack on Iran are wont to do. 

I've generally found both sides of the "attack Iran" debate to be equally dyspeptic, but in this case I do find Kroenig's logic to be a bit odd.  Here's his arguments for why a nuclear Iran is bad and containment is more problematic than a military attack: 

Some states in the region are doubting U.S. resolve to stop the program and are shifting their allegiances to Tehran. Others have begun to discuss launching their own nuclear initiatives to counter a possible Iranian bomb. For those nations and the United States itself, the threat will only continue to grow as Tehran moves closer to its goal. A nuclear-armed Iran would immediately limit U.S. freedom of action in the Middle East. With atomic power behind it, Iran could threaten any U.S. political or military initiative in the Middle East with nuclear war, forcing Washington to think twice before acting in the region. Iran’s regional rivals, such as Saudi Arabia, would likely decide to acquire their own nuclear arsenals, sparking an arms race. To constrain its geopolitical rivals, Iran could choose to spur proliferation by transferring nuclear technology to its allies -- other countries and terrorist groups alike. Having the bomb would give Iran greater cover for conventional aggression and coercive diplomacy, and the battles between its terrorist proxies and Israel, for example, could escalate. And Iran and Israel lack nearly all the safeguards that helped the United States and the Soviet Union avoid a nuclear exchange during the Cold War -- secure second-strike capabilities, clear lines of communication, long flight times for ballistic missiles from one country to the other, and experience managing nuclear arsenals. To be sure, a nuclear-armed Iran would not intentionally launch a suicidal nuclear war. But the volatile nuclear balance between Iran and Israel could easily spiral out of control as a crisis unfolds, resulting in a nuclear exchange between the two countries that could draw the United States in, as well.

These security threats would require Washington to contain Tehran. Yet deterrence would come at a heavy price. To keep the Iranian threat at bay, the United States would need to deploy naval and ground units and potentially nuclear weapons across the Middle East, keeping a large force in the area for decades to come. Alongside those troops, the United States would have to permanently deploy significant intelligence assets to monitor any attempts by Iran to transfer its nuclear technology. And it would also need to devote perhaps billions of dollars to improving its allies’ capability to defend themselves. This might include helping Israel construct submarine-launched ballistic missiles and hardened ballistic missile silos to ensure that it can maintain a secure second-strike capability. Most of all, to make containment credible, the United States would need to extend its nuclear umbrella to its partners in the region, pledging to defend them with military force should Iran launch an attack (emphasis added).

OK, first, exactly who is bandwagoning with Iran?  Seriously, who?  Kroenig provides no evidence, and I'm scratching my head to think of any data points.  The SCAF regime in Egypt has been a bit more friendly, but Turkey's distancing is far more significant and debilitating for Tehran's grand strategy.  Iran's sole Arab ally is in serious trouble, and its own economy is faltering badly.  The notion that time is on Iran 's side seems badly off. 

Second, Kroenig presume that a nuclear Iran would be more aggressive in the region and more likely to have a nuclear exchange with Iran.  I will again point to India/Pakistan.  Despite similar religious divides, and despite the presence of pliable non-state actors, those two countries have successfully kept a nuclear peace.  Kroenig might have an argument that Israel/Iran is different, but it's not in this essay.   Indeed, the bolded section contradicts Kroenig's own argument -- if Iran is not prepared to use its nuclear weapons, it seems unlikely that it will escalate crises to the point where its bluff is called.  If Kroenig's own scholarship suggests that America's nuclear superiority would still be an effective deterrent, then I'm not sure why he portrays the Iran threat in such menacing terms. 

There's more, but this post is long enough anyway.  Both Kroenig and Miller are correct to highlight current threats.  But, to put it gently, until all of these threats, combined, can cause this to happen in under an hour, I'm sleeping soundly. 

Am I missing anything? 

Mary Carmichael has a fascinating story in the Boston Globe on how many American universities, which were so keen to create ocerseas satellite campuses, are now retrenching.  The disturbing part of the story is the "monkey see, monkey do" nature of the international expansions of the past decade: 

Over the last decade, universities spurred by dreams of global cachet - and, sometimes, by foreign governments eager to underwrite them - built or rented whole campuses and offered Western-style education abroad. But now some schools are running out of cash as they struggle to attract enough students and develop a viable business model....

From 2006 to 2009, the roster of international branch campuses grew by 43 percent, according to the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, a British research firm. Qatar drew an all-star list, including Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, and Carnegie Mellon. By 2009, the United Arab Emirates had 40 international branches.

Middle-ranking colleges felt pressure to compete, even though some could not get foreign governments to pay their bills. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, went to Singapore. City University of Seattle went to Switzerland. Troy, a public university in Alabama, founded 14 global branches.

“Some American campuses went into it wanting to make money,’’ said Phillip Altbach, director of the Boston College Center for International Higher Education. “But many of them got into it for prestige, planting the flag overseas, a presidential feeling that they needed to be doing adventurous things.’’

Not everyone shared that vision. Harvard, for instance, has not founded any international branch campuses recently. Neither did MIT nor Tufts University.

“Every time I looked at one of these deals I said, ‘No, I don’t think so,’ ’’ said Lawrence Bacow, who has been a high-ranking administrator at all three schools. “Philosophically, I think there’s an important role for higher ed to play in the developing world, but it’s not to create knockoffs of what we do here.’’

Five things: 

1)  Go, Jumbos!!  In your face, rest of higher education outside of the Boston area!!! 

2)  The logic of expanding overseas because of "prestige, planting the flag overseas, a presidential feeling that they needed to be doing adventurous things" is a depressing data point about the ways in which the academy can be slaves to intellectual and business trends.

3)  To be fair, I'm not sure this story tells the whole, er, story.  There's no mention of the how the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession might have affected the viability of these expansion plans.  There's also nothing on the spread of distance learning.  Fletcher's Global Masters of Arts Program, for example, combines a few intensive weeks of on-location education with a lot of online interaction.  So although the tenor of this story is about the retrenchment of American universities, there are compensating trends that are still pushing American universities into the global marketplace. 

4)  Carmichael notes that one reason for retrenchment has been the difficulty of maintaining the quality of academic standards abroad.  This is encouraging yet still modestly surprising.  Why hasn't an American university gone the "f**k it, let's become a diploma mill" route as a way of making money?  Why hasn't any university done this? 

I suspect this might be one powerful virtue of the university degree functioning as a credential, but I'm curious to hear thoughts about this in the comments. 

5)  I'm thinking that Suffolk University's PR people can't be pleased with this kicker to the story:

At the end of last semester, Suffolk finally abandoned Dakar. It did not, however, abandon its students. Almost all have transferred to Boston under a special deal that charges them $10,000 in tuition, the same they paid when attending the Dakar branch and about one-third what their classmates pay. Suffolk foots the rest.

The students are adapting, though it is not easy. They dread winter and think the city’s buildings all look the same: impersonal. Some of their classmates have asked well-meaning but ignorant questions. Did they grow up living in trees? Isn’t Africa a great country? (emphasis added)

With the passing of APSA and the dawning of Labor Day, it's time for people to go back to school and Think Deep Thoughts.  In the realm of international relations theory, Thanassis Cambanis' essay in the Sunday Boston Globe Ideas section is a great starter course for thinking about the way the world works.  His basic thesis:

Instead of a flurry of new thinking at the highest echelons of the foreign policy establishment, the major decisions of the past two administrations have been generated from the same tool kit of foreign policy ideas that have dominated the world for decades. Washington’s strategic debates - between neoconservatives and liberals, between interventionists and realists - are essentially struggles among ideas and strategies held over from the era when nation-states were the only significant actors on the world stage. As ideas, none of them were designed to deal effectively with a world in which states are grappling with powerful entities that operate beyond their control....

As yet, no major new theory has taken root in the most influential policy circles to explain how America should act in this kind of world, in which Wikileaks has made a mockery of the diplomatic pouch and Silicon Valley rivals Washington for cultural influence. But there are at least some signs that people in power are starting to try in earnest. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has openly integrated the search for a new paradigm into her policy making. In universities, think tanks, and the government, thinkers trying to grapple with this fluid world structure are finally getting attention in the circles where their ideas could shape policy.

Read the whole, provocative thing -- if you agree with Cambanis' arguments, then it certainly represents a data point in favor of Anne-Marie Slauighter's vision of how world politics operates. 

My onlytweak of Cambanis' essay is that he repeatedly stresses the need for a new generation of strategic concepts and international relations theories to guide U.S. grand strategy, and then lists as examples the following: 

Joseph Nye, a Harvard political scientist who served in the Carter and Clinton administrations and has advised Secretary of State Clinton, was one of the pioneers. In the 1990s, he coined the term “soft power,” arguing that sometimes the most effective way for America to promote its interests would be through influencing global health and the environment, or culture and education. His latest book, “The Future of Power,” counsels that America can preserve its influence if it reconceives its institutions and priorities to deal with a world where the energy is shifting from the West to the East, as well as from states to non-state actors. Michael Doyle at Columbia University, a seminal theorist whose idea of a “democratic peace” in the 1990s crucially inflected policy with the belief that democracies don’t fight each other, now talks about the notion of an age of the “empowered individual,” where lone actors can alter the trajectory of states and of history as never before. Stephen Walt, also at Harvard, argues that in the new era America simply needs to start by acknowledging its limits: that with less muscle and less extra money, the first step will be to streamline its goals in a way that so far politicians have been loath to do.

No offense to Joseph Nye, Michael Doyle, and Steve Walt -- these are Great Men of interntional relaions thought.  The notions that Cambanis lists here, however, are not "new" in any sense.  Which leads me to wonder whether Cambanis has defined the problem correctly.  Is it that international relations theory has gone stale... or is it simply that the wrong set of existing theories are in vogue today? 

What do you think? 

Earlier this week Walter Russell Mead blogged about the mortal danger facing a prominent international relations theory:

American fast food continues to worm its way ever deeper into Pakistani affections. Hardee’s recently joined McDonald’s in Islamabad and both are doing well, says the Washington Post.

Since McDonald’s is also thriving in India, an IR theory is about to be put to a test. The “McDonald’s theory” holds that no two countries with McDonald’s in them will ever go to war. Once you have a middle class big enough to support hamburger franchises, the theory runs, war is a thing of the past.

I wish. The 2008 war between Russia and Georgia dealt the theory a blow; an India-Pakistan war would be the end.

Whether or not that happens, the theory is a bust. Countries often become more militaristic as their middle classes rise.

A touch a touch, I do confess it!! It appears that the collective reputation of international relations theory has been tarnished, yet -- wait a second, who came up with that theory in the first place?

As it turns out, it was not some academic IR theorist like me, but rather a Prominent Foreign Affairs Columnist of Some Renown … kinda like Mead (but not really). Yes, it was indeed Tom Friedman who first suggested "The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention."

Mead concludes that the theory is a bust, and Wikipedia appears to back him up:

[T]he NATO bombing of Serbia proved the theory wrong, though in a later edition Friedman argued that this exception proved the rule: the war ended quickly, he argued, partly because the Serbian population did not want to lose their place in a global system "symbolised by McDonald's" (Friedman 2000: 252–253).... In 1998, McDonald's host countries India and Pakistan fought a border war over Kashmir. While not a full scale war, both countries flaunted their nuclear capabilities. At least two wars between McDonald's hosting nations have occurred since the NATO bombing of Serbia: the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon; and the 2008 conflict between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia.

(Actually, Wikipedia is underestimating how many times the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention has been falsified … according to Wikipedia. The Kargil War was in 1999, not 1998, and according to casualty estimates, there were more than 1,000 battle deaths, which meets the standard definition of a war.)

Empirical quibbles aside, this certainly falsifies Friedman's original "strong" hypothesis of "no two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other." The thing is, international relations theories are kinda like … er … zombies. Even if you think you've killed them off, they can be revived.

Let's water down Friedman's strong hypothesis a bit. Is it true that, "two countries that both have a McDonald's are significantly less likely to fight a war against each other?" Mead thinks the answer is no, but my hunch is that it would be yes. A cursory glance at the scholarly literature suggests that no one has actually tested it, so … get to it, aspiring MA thesis writers!!

That said, even if the weaker version was true, would it be useful from either a theoretical or policy perspective? I think the answer here is no, and this is one important way in which academic IR theorists do better than, say, Tom Friedman. The comparative advantage of the Golden Arches Theory is pedagogical -- it's easy to explain to anyone. The problem is that McDonald's is really an intervening variable and not the actual cause of any peace. And while IR scholars sometimes roll their eyes at democratic peace theory, the literature has produced significant progress about the ways in which that hypothesis is constrained (in a world of democratizing states, for example).

Mead is correct to observe that this particular IR theory is in trouble. I'm marginally more sanguine about the state of academic IR theory overall, however.

Your humble blogger has been rather persistent in pointing out the virtues of bridging the gap between international relations scholars and policymakers, and rather adamant in insisting why this hasn't happened: 

[T]he fundamental difference between economic policy and foreign policy is that the former community accepts the idea that economic methodologies and theory-building enterprises have value, and are worth using as a guide to policymaking.  This doesn't mean economists agree on everything, but it does mean they are all speaking a common language and accept the notion of external validity checks on their arguments. 

That consensus simply does not exist within the foreign policy community.... Many members of the foreign policy community explicitly reject the notion that social science methodologies and techniques can explain much in world politics.  They therefore are predisposed to reject the kind of scholarship that political scientists of all stripes generate.   This might be for well-founded reasons, it might be simple innumeracy hostility to the academy, or it might be a combination of the two.  I'd love to have a debate about whether that's a good or bad thing, but my point is that's the reality we face.

Now I see in The Forum that James Lee Ray is also arguing that political science merits a greater role in foreign policymaking. The abstract for his article:

Foreign policy decision makers tend to rely on historical analogies. The “surge” in Afghanistan, for example, was inspired in part by the “surge” in Iraq. Processes for dealing with foreign policy issues involving the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were substantially different from those processes in the Bush and Obama administrations aimed at dealing with economic crises in 2008 and 2009. The latter processes were influenced extensively by economists, especially in the Obama administration. The decisions to send additional troops to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan involved relatively few political scientists. More substantial input from political scientists in the decision making process about the surge in Afghanistan might have produced more knowledgeable and informative analyses of relevant historical and political data in the form of structured focused comparisons of the wars and counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as analyses and interpretations of data on larger numbers of cases pertaining to broader phenomena of which the US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan are examples. Perhaps political scientists deserve a role within foreign policy making processes more similar to that reserved for economists in processes focusing on economic issues.

Within the article itself, Ray is quite explicit in comparing the influence of political scientists to economists:

[I]t is probably safe to say that no President would consider appointing anyone but economists to the Council of Economic Advisers. So perhaps there could be a space for political scientists in foreign policy-making processes analogous to that niche for economists on the Council of Economic Advisers in processes set in place by the U.S. government to deal with economic issues?...

It is true, perhaps, that economics  is a more coherent academic field of inquiry than political science, or than the subfield that deals with international politics. Perhaps for that reason, economists are better placed to offer advice to governmental decision-makers than are political scientists. Nevertheless, the argument here is that the greater deference shown to economists by government officials when economic issues are dealt  with than that accorded to political scientists when foreign policy issues arise is not entirely justified....

If the argument here is valid, then perhaps there should be more space set aside in foreign policy-making processes  in the U.S. government for political scientists. For example, perhaps National Security Advisers should be political scientists, for reasons analogous to those  that have up to this time led to the appointment of nothing but economists to the Council of Economic Advisers. 

I pretty sympathetic with Ray's conclusions, and therefore I really, really want to agree with his causal logic.  It's just that I don't. 

The gist of Ray's evidence is that the Obama administration relied on analogical reasoning in deciding on the Afghan strategy in 2009, and therefore concluding that a "surge" there would work as it did in Iraq.  If more political scientists had been in the room, Ray posits, perhaps this cognitive failure would have been avoided.  In comparison, Ray observes that the Iraq surge decision was lousy with advanced poli sci degrees (including David Petraeus, William Luti, Eliot Cohen, J.D. Crouch, and FP's own Peter Feaver). 

There are a few holes in this analysis.  First, I'm not totally sold on the cases used by Ray.  True, political scientists played a large role in the surge decision in Iraq, which is conventionally viewed as having worked.  The thing is, political scientists (Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol) played an even larger role in the decision to invade Iraq , which is conventionally viewed as having not worked.  Ray's case slection is too circumscribed. 

Second, had Obama consulted more international relations scholars, he would have received perfectly muddled advice.  Ray himself acknowledges this: 

The evidence just reviewed that is potentially relevant to the decision by the Obama Administration about the surge in Afghanistan tends to point in diverse directions. Some of it casts doubt on the prudence of the Obama Administration’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, while other findings could be used to support that decision.

Had Obama or his advisor consulted extensively with academic IR specialists, he still would have needed to exercise political judgment to determine which advice was worth following. 

To be clear, I strongly favor having more Ph.D.s in political science in the loop on foreign policy decisionmaking.  I'm just not sure Ray's case is all that persuasive. 

What do you think? 

Your humble blogger is currently knee-deep in dissertation prospectuses (prospecti?), a rather curious literary form.  Here at the Fletcher School, a dissertation prospectus is a Ph.D. student's attempt to describe his or her dissertation topic, including the central puzzle, the deficiencies in the existing literature, the proposed hypotheses and the testing strategy. 

A prospectus runs about 60-80 pages and, to be blunt, is extremely painful to both authors and readers.  It's painful for the authors because, after having spent most of graduate school ripping what they read to intellectual shreds, they discover that coming up with their own original arguments is actually a pretty challenging experience.  It's painful for the readers because it's the academic equivalent of teenage poetry -- there's a lot of strong feelings and beliefs surging through the text in a thoroughly out-of-control and ungainly manner (and that's the final version of the prospectus -- you can only imagine what the draft versions of these documents look like).  Indeed, the adolescence metaphor works astonishingly well -- I have engaged or witnessed many a conversation like the following: 

Ph.D. ADVISOR:  I think you should stop reading Wendt [or insert other trendy academic name here].  I don't like the way his arguments are shaping your argument.

Ph.D. STUDENT:  But you don't understand!!  I love him -- as much as love can be socially constructed!!  He's let me see the world in a whole new way.  He's the key to everything!!!

Ph.D. ADVISOR:  You're writing a dissertation on cooperation among transnational criminal groups -- I just don't think his argument works here.

PH.D. STUDENT:  How would you know which arguments work and which ones don't?!  When was the last time you read someone who moved you -- the Stone Age?!  I bet you've never read a piece of constructivist scholarship in your life.  You don't understand me at all!!!!!

Ph.D. ADVISOR:  Calm down -- I just think you might be better off if you read other people is all.  This is just an intellectual crush.  It will pass. 

Ph.D. STUDENT!!!  No!! Never!!  I've never read anyone else who can speak to my topic like him.  Wendt and I will stay together forever!!   

Usually, the final dissertations look significantly better -- and thank God for that. 

As you might surmise, this is not an easy literary form to conquer, and in most cases is just a hoop that should be jumped through as quickly as possible.  Reading a bunch of these back-to-back can cause one to start muttering about how grad students ain't what they used to be and what-not.  I am usually able to resist such mutterings by forcefully reminding myself that my own dissertation prospectus was such a bland and vague piece of crap ("I want to write something about sanctions") that I purged it from my hard drive as soon as possible in order to thwart all my future biographers achieve some peace of mind. 

Every once in a while, however, a Ph.D. student hits upon the delicate alchemy of fear and arrogance necessary to write an engaging prospectus that suggests an excellent dissertation.  Maybe not even an excellent prospectus, but just a scintillating paragraph or two that suggests the student's intellectual trajectory is really, really promising. 

This morning I stumbled across one of those paragraphs in a fascinating prospectus on international water boundary disputes (really!), which I now share with you: 

While other water law studies have attempted to analyze the origins of water law, the study of water law in ancient societies tends to be cursory and rife with misnomers and mistakes. For instance, most cite the Hammurabi Code as the oldest water law, when with little effort it is easily discoverable that both the codes of Lipit Ishtar and Ur Nammu both contain water provisions, pre-date Hammurabi by at least 250 years, and clearly provide the normative underpinnings on which the Hammurabi Code was constructed.   This study will therefore seek to build a solid historical foundation on which to ground further analysis of modern transboundary water law.

It's the phrase "easily discoverable" that tickled my intellectual fancy -- and, fortunately, the rest of the prospectus appears to back up the promise of that paragraph. 

It's moments like these that forcefully remind me that, for all of the problems and pathologies with the modern academy, I really, really, really, really love my job. 

Last week I received the following news release from the National Research Council:

A new report from the National Research Council recommends that the U.S. intelligence community adopt methods, theories, and findings from the behavioral and social sciences as a way to improve its analyses.  To that end, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) should lead a new initiative to make these approaches part of the intelligence community’s analytical work, hiring and training, and collaborations.

The report, which was requested by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, urges the intelligence community to routinely evaluate the performance of its analytical methods.  One important step in that direction is to attach whenever possible numeric probabilities with uncertainty estimates for the events that analysts assess and forecast.  Without explicit quantifiers, analysts cannot communicate their conclusions clearly or evaluate the accuracy of their analyses over time. Policymakers need to know how confident analysts are and how well they understand the limits to their knowledge, the report emphasizes.  It recommends many specific steps that DNI can implement as part of analysts’ everyday work. 

"The social and behavioral sciences have long studied topics central to analysts’ work, such as how people evaluate evidence and collaborate on difficult tasks,” said Baruch Fischhoff, chair of the committee that wrote the report and professor of social and decision sciences and of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. “That research has had some impact on that work. Our report shows how the community can take full advantage of that research – and of its dedicated analysts – by adopting an evidence-based approach to its own analytical methods.  We envision a community engaged in continual learning, both absorbing scientific research into the analytical process and evaluating its own performance."

Now, this all sounds good to this social scientist's ears, but there's one little thing nagging at me.  A quick glance at the "Committee on Behavioral and Social Science Research to Improve Intelligence Analysis for National Security" reveals the following membership:  four psychology professors, three political scientists, three business professors, and a public policy professor. 

Now, no offense, but is it really shocking that a group of social and behavioral scientists conclude that their work should be embraced more by the intelligence community? 

None of this is to say that I disagree with the report's findings.  I concur that the intelligence community should “ensure that the intelligence community (IC) applies the principles, evidentiary standards, and findings of the behavioral and social sciences.”  And I wholeheartedly agree that there should be more "exchange of expertise between the IC and academic research environments."  (Based on this survey, by the way, a fair percentage of IR scholars already do paid or unpaid work for the government). 

The tools of social sciences are not magic bullets, but they're actually quite useful, and I want analysts to rely on every tool in their cognitive arsenal.  To use a baseball metaphor, think of this report as suggesting that sabermetrics would be a useful complement to traditional scouting as a way of analyzing talent.. 

The thing is, as much as I might want to be viewed as a thoroughly detached and dispassionate expert on these questions, I fear that the rest of the world will view this an exercise in interest group lobbying.  The report would have been more persuasive if more "old-school" intelligence analysts had signed off on the report (though Thomas Fingar was one of the signatories). 

As Laura Rozen, Michael Peel, Farah Stockman, Jon Wiener, John Sides, Siddhartha Mahanta & David Corn, and various reporters have observed, an awful lot of high-powered academics and academic institutions have some 'splainin to do about their relationship with Libya's Qaddafi family.

The Monitor Group ferried a number of high-profile international studies scholars, including Joseph Nye, Robert Putnam, Michael Porter, Francis Fukuyama, Nicholas Negroponte, and Benjamin Barber to the shores of Tripoli in an effort to burnish the regime's image. The London School of Economics and some of its faculty were deeply involved with Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi, as he earned his Ph.D. there in 2007 with a dissertation on -- wait for it -- liberal democracy and civil society. Even FP's own Steve Walt went for a brief visit in 2010.

As the Qaddafi family has morphed from pragmatic strongmen to bloodthirsty killers, the fallout in the academic world has been uneven. On the one hand, Howard Davies resigned as the head of LSE in the wake of the Libyan revelations. The Monitor Group acknowledged in a statement that, "We … believed that these visits could boost global receptivity for Mr. Gaddafi's stated intention to move the country more towards the West and open up to the rest of the world. Sadly, it is now clear that we, along with many others, misjudged that possibility."

On the other hand, Benjamin Barber sounds totally unapologetic in his interview with FP. His basic message is that "second-guessing the past, I mean, it's just 20/20 hindsight." Then there's this response:

I mean, did LSE take Saif's money -- the Gaddafi Foundation money -- improperly? No, they all took it properly. And promised a scholarly center to study the Middle East and North Africa. And offer scholarships to students from the region. Just the way Harvard and Georgetown and Cambridge and Edinburgh have done -- not with Libyan money, but with Saudi money (look at Prince Alwaleed bin Talal). By the way, not just Monitor, but McKinsey, Exxon, Blackstone, the Carlyle Group -- everybody was in it. The only difference for Monitor was that it actually had a project that was aimed at trying to effect some internal change. Everybody else who went in, which is every major consultancy, every major financial group, went in to do nothing more than make big bucks for themselves. But now people are attacking Monitor because they took consulting fees for actually trying to effect reform and change.

Finally, there is an important background controversy here: It is about whether academics should stay in the ivory tower and do research and write books? Or engage in the world on behalf of the principles and theories their research produces? Do you simply shut your mouth and write? Or do you try to engage? This is an old question that goes back to Machiavelli, back to Plato going to Syracuse: Do you engage with power? Sometimes power is devilish and brutal; sometimes it's simply constitutional and democratic; but in every case, it's power, and to touch it is to risk being tainted by it.

My answer is that each person has to make their own decision. I don't condemn those who prefer the solitude of the academy, though they lose the chance to effect change directly; and I don't condemn those who do try to influence power, risking being tainted by it, even when power doesn't really pay much attention to them, whether its legitimate power like in the United States or illegitimate, as in Libya. The notion that there is something wrong with people who choose to intervene and try to engage the practice of democracy -- that they are somehow more morally culpable than people who prefer not to intervene -- is to me untenable.

Rereading his 2007 Washington Post op-ed, I think it's safe to say that Barber embraced sucking up to power juuuuuuuuust a wee bit more fervently than everyone else.

That said, the man has half a point here. As Ben Wildavsky has chronicled in The Great Brain Race, Western universities have been racing across the globe to set up additional revenue streams satellite campuses in authoritarian countries. Those schools that had no dealings with Libya likely do have dealings with the Gulf emirates, or China, or Russia, or … you get the point.

Furthermore, if you believe what Charles Kupchan writes in How Enemies Become Friends, it's precisely this category of interactions that potentially leads to reduced tensions between rival nations. Bear in mind that by 2006 Libya had renounced its WMD program and did seem somewhat interested in integrating itself into the West. Surely that's a moment when these kinds of interactions could havehad  an appreciable effect on a country's trajectory.

Another ethical question comes down to exactly how a scholar is engaging with a country. Engagement at the elite level, for example, has a greater potential for change, but also a great potential for "capture" by the authoritarian elite. Engagement with the population might have fewer moral quandaries (if there's a choice between teaching Saudi women* and not teaching Saudi women, for example, is not teaching really the morally correct option? ) but fewer opportunities for change.

There's an interesting quote in Farah Stockman's write-up that does stand out, however:

“The really nefarious aspect of [Monitor's parade of academics] is that it reinforced in Khadafy’s mind that he truly was an international intellectual world figure, and that his ideas of democracy were to be taken seriously,’’ said Dirk Vandewalle, associate professor at Dartmouth College and author of “A History of Modern Libya.’’ “It reinforced his reluctance to come to terms with the reality around him, which was that Libya is in many ways an inconsequential country and his ideas are half-baked.’’

In the Libyan case, maybe that is the best criteria for assorting ethical responsibility. For a scholar, engagement with power should not be automatically rejected, particularly if it means altering policies in a fruitful manner. When the exercise morphs into intellectual kabuki theater, however, then disengagement seems like the best course of action.

Those scholars who stopped participating after it was obvious that Qaddafi wasn't really interested in genuine change don't deserve much opprobrium. By that count, Barber really has a lot to answer for, while some of the others seem to have emerged relatively unscathed.

I'm curious what commenters have to say about this because I guarantee you one thing -- the more that autocratic regimes either buckle or crack down, the more this issue is going to come up for both universities and individual scholars.

[Full disclosure:  I taught a short course for Saudi women at Fletcher in the summer of 2009, and have absolutely no regrets about doing so.]

Your humble blogger is media whored out taking a small vacation with the Official Blog Family at an undisclosed location somewhat removed fron the interwebs.  Blogging will happen only if thew Official Blog Wife lets me near a computer be intermittent for the rest of this week.

In the meantime, for your consideration, I give you a link to an article from the February 2011 issue of International Studies Perspectives:  Derek Hall, "Varieties of Zombieism: Approaching Comparative Political Economy through 28 Days Later and Wild Zero." 

The abstract:

 This paper argues that the frequent references to zombies in analyses of the recent global financial crisis can be harnessed as a “teachable moment” for students of Comparative Political Economy. I claim that two zombie movies in particular—Britain’s 28 Days Later and Japan’s Wild Zero—can be viewed as if they were allegories of two different national forms of capitalism that are integrated into, and affect, the global political economy in different ways. While 28 Days Later displays remarkable similarities to Marxist accounts of the origins and dynamics of capitalism in England, Wild Zero can be seen as an account of the post-1985 dynamics of the Japanese political economy and its engagement with Asia. This paper gives concrete suggestions for the use of zombie films in the classroom. It concludes with the argument that these two films help to explain why references to “zombie capitalism” cross ideological lines.

 Enjoy devouring it!

Pundits are clearly scrambling to figure out what the hell is happening in Egypt, and what Egypt means for the rest of the world.  And I'm beginning to notice that some of them are blaming international relations theory for being asleep at the wheel. 

First, over at AEI's Enterprise blog, Apoorva Shah argues that these events suggest the poverty of modern political science:

Did anything in academia foresee the unrest in Egypt, and more importantly, can something explain how Western foreign policy can appropriately react to the events? Of all the “schools” of IR thought—liberal internationalism, realism, isolationism, etc.—did any theory make sense of this and guide us on what to do next?

My amateur opinion is no. Because of an academic world obsessed with increasingly complex empirical analysis where every revolution is a mere data point and every country a pawn in the great game, our political science departments and the scholars they have trained (many of whom serve in and advise our current administration) were caught flat-footed, searching for some logical, rational approach to a particularly unique and country-specific event. While digging for the right IR theory, they instead produced a mishmash of mixed messages and equivocation.

If I’m wrong, please correct me.

OK... you're wrong.  Let me correct you. 

First of all, let's clarify the division of labor in political science a bit.  Crudely put, international relations focuses on the interactions between governments and other transnational and subnational actors.  Comparative politics focuses on the domestic politics within countries. 

To put this in the context of Egypt, it's the job of comparative politics scholars to explain/predict when we should see mass protests and when those protests might cause authoritarian regimes to buckle.  It's the job of international relations scholars to predict what effects the regime change/authoritarian crackdown would have on both Egypt's foreign policy and the situation in the Middle East. 

Calling out IR scholars for not predicting the uprising in Egypt is like calling out a cardiologist for not detecting a cancerous growth.    

But here's the thing -- as Laura Rozen has observed, political scientists and those they've trained did call this one!! From her September 2010 story:   

A bipartisan group of senators and foreign policy analysts is pushing the Obama administration to prepare for the looming end of Hosni Mubarak’s rule in Egypt by putting a new emphasis on Egyptian political reform and human rights....

“The bottom line is that we are moving into a period of guaranteed instability in Egypt,” said Robert Kagan, a foreign policy scholar with the Brookings Institution who co-founded the Egypt Working Group with Michele Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “So the idea [that] we can keep puttering on as if nothing is going to change is a mistake. ... What we need now is to move to deliverables.”

The pressure from the academic and political community comes amid widespread expectation that the 82-year-old Mubarak — who reportedly is seriously ill — may soon cede power to his son, Gamal. 

If that's not enough, consider that Joshua Tucker blogged about the spread of revolutions last week, before Egypt blew up.  Even before that, my fellow political scientist and FP blogger Marc Lynch's January 5th blog post: 

 For years, both Arab and Western analysts and many political activists have warned of the urgent need for reform as such problems built and spread. Most of the Arab governments have learned to talk a good game about the need for such reform, while ruthlessly stripping democratic forms of any actual ability to challenge their grip on power....

Meanwhile, the energy and desperation across disenfranchised but wired youth populations will likely become increasingly potent. It's likely to manifest not in organized politics and elections, but in the kind of outburst of social protest we're seeing now in Tunisia.... and, alarmingly, in the kinds of outburst of social violence which we can see in Jordan and Egypt. Whether that energy is channeled into productive political engagement or into anomic violence would seem to be one of the crucial variables shaping the coming period in Arab politics. Right now, the trends aren't in the right direction.

 Not surprisingly, the Obama administration met with many of these people this week. 

Finally, a small point I made earlier this week regarding Mubarak's options: 

Everyone assumes that the Egyptian leader is a dead man walking, and given his speech on Friday, I can understand that sentiment.  There are, however, remaining options for Mubarak to pursue, ranging from a full-blown 1989 Tiananmen square crackdown to a slow-motion 2009 Tehran-style crackdown. 

Obviously, these aren't remotely good options for anyone involved.  The first rule in political science, however, is that leaders want to stay in power, and Mubarak has given no indication that he wants to leave.  (emphasis added)

Alas, based on this morning's events, it appears that Mubarak has selected the Tehran 2009 option. 

So I think Shah is pretty much wrong.  That said, I agree that there are profound limits on what IR theory can do in a situation like Egypt.  Ross Douthat sorta made this point earlier this week:

[Americans] take refuge in foreign policy systems: liberal internationalism or realpolitik, neoconservatism or noninterventionism. We have theories, and expect the facts to fall into line behind them. Support democracy, and stability will take care of itself. Don’t meddle, and nobody will meddle with you. International institutions will keep the peace. No, balance-of-power politics will do it.

But history makes fools of us all. We make deals with dictators, and reap the whirlwind of terrorism. We promote democracy, and watch Islamists gain power from Iraq to Palestine. We leap into humanitarian interventions, and get bloodied in Somalia. We stay out, and watch genocide engulf Rwanda. We intervene in Afghanistan and then depart, and watch the Taliban take over. We intervene in Afghanistan and stay, and end up trapped there, with no end in sight.

Sooner or later, the theories always fail. The world is too complicated for them, and too tragic.

Douthat is sorta correct -- but it's precisely because the world is so complex that we rely on theories.  While they're often wrong, they're vastly superior to the alternatives.    

Consider that, instead of explicit theories, a lot of commentators are simply asking whether 2011 Egypt parallels 1978/79 Iran.  This is a great question to ask, but the only way to answer it is to rely on explicit or implict theories of how revolutions play out and how the international system reacts to them. 

Of course the theories will fail from time to time.  Unfortunately, this is not rocket science, because rocket science is way easier than the social sciences.   There are too many variables, too many idiosyncratic elements to each case, too much endogeneity, and so forth.  But simply saying "the world is tragic" is a pretty lousy substitute to organizing foreign policy. 

Over at The National Interest, Justin Logan and Paul Pillar are debating whether academics or policymakers are to blame for the gap separating the two groups. 

Shorter Logan:  it's a big deal, and the insularity of policymakers is to blame.

Shorter Pillar:  it's not that big a deal, and the eggheadedness of academics is to blame. 

I have some sympathy to both sides of the argument here.  Pillar is correct to point out the ways in which this gap has been exaggerated, and Logan is correct to point out that there's still a gulf to traverse between the two communities.  Both posts are worth reading in full. 

Then we get to Jacob Heilbrunn's intervention: 

Should policymakers pay attention to academics? Should policy makers actually be academics? No and no. For the most part, policymakers should avoid them like the plague....

I would say that SAIS, the Fletcher School, and other such finishing schools for foreign affairs mavens have supplanted traditional political science departments, which became enamored of game and rational-choice theory. The only truly serious discipline in political science is political theory--Aristotle to Weber to Rawls. Is there much in international relations, by the way, that has not already been discussed by Thucydides--a dip into the Sicilian Expedition might have served George W. Bush well before he headed into Iraq (emphasis added).

Hah!!  Fletcher wins!!  In your face, traditional political science departments!!  Heilbrunn has authoritatively--- no... wait, I can't do it.  I can't gloat over a horses**t argument like this one, even if it advances my home institution. 

I have to assume that the Committee on Social Thought has some of Heilbrunn's family hostage to produce that blog post.  It's so rife with blanket assertions that I'll be warm all winter reading it. 

First, as Pillar noted in his post, and speaking from my own experience, the training involved in getting a political science Ph.D. or other social science doctorate is actually pretty useful when stepping into the policymaking world.  Even if the theoretical models and empirical results of political science might be contested, the mode of analytical thinking usually leads to some useful insights.

Second, I love Thucydides more than most IR scholars, and I teach him on a regular basis.  Having read History of the Peloponnesian War every other year, however, yeah, there's actually a fair amount that's not in Thucydides that is part and parcel of modern-day international relations.  There's very little on international political economy and/or economic interdependence in the text.  The material on the democratic peace is interesting but radically incomplete.  Last I checked neither Athens nor Sparta possessed nuclear weapons, which even realist lovers of Thucydides concede is a game-changer.  I came up with those in less than five minutes, so I'm thinking that there's more if I bothered to ponder about it some more. 

As for what's in Thucydides, there's so much fascinating content that no consensus exists about the key takeaway points.  Ask five people who've read History of the Peloponnesian War about its central theme and you'll get ten answers. 

Thucydides is a great text, and I want everyone to read it, but there's a lot more out there in the world.  As for political theory being the only "discipline" in political science, I'll leave it to other political science bloggers to open up a can of whup-ass and address Heilbrunn's argument. 

Heilbrunn might be correct that institutions like Fletcher have more of an impact on policymaking than standard political science departments.  Whether's that's as good of a thing as Heilbrunn thinks, however, is a seriously dubious proposition. 

Your humble blogger wasted many hours online had some fun with Ngram, Google's new book-searching algorithm. Here are ten interesting discoveries:

1) "Global governance" has become a really popular term of art.

2) For all the talk about free trade being under threat in the real world, it's doing pretty well on the printed page.

3) Balancing is definitely more popular than bandwagoning.

4) Interest in hegemonic stability theory peaked right around the same time as… U.S. hegemony. On the other hand, interest in bipolarity remains robust.

5) Somewhat surprisingly, the rise of China has not translated into the world of books.

6) What's the more popular game theoretic device, the Prisoners Dilemma or the coordination game? Here the answer really did surprise me -- though it should be noted that if you replace PD with Tragedy of the Commons, you get this.

7) For all the complaints lodged by some about rational choice theory dominating the social sciences, constructivist approaches appear to be catching up in popularity -- though only in a relative sense.

8) You say that non-state actors are displacing governments in world politics? I say, "feh." [Ahem, what about this?--ed. Oh you want a piece of me? Then take this!!]

9) Which FP blogger gets the most mentions on the printed page? You'll have to click here to find out. Hint: it ain't me.

10) The biggest non-state threat mentioned in books appears to be terrorism, and it's not close. Of course, there is also jerry-rigged proof that, in assessing threats in world politics, zombies are clearly on the rise.

Readers are strongly encouraged to waste their day develop their own Ngram tests.

Every year I give a talk to Fletcher students entitled, "So you want to get a Ph.D...." in which I do my darnedest to convince them to seek alternative paths -- kinda like how a rabbi responds when someone wants to convert to Judaism. I am all too familiar with the possible downsides and relate these to the Fletcherites as clearly as humanly possible.

I bring this up because it's been impossible to avoid this "So You Want to Get a Ph.D. in Political Science" video over the last 24 hours, as apparently all of my friends/colleagues feel compelled to blog, tweet, or link to this sucker on Facebook. And I'm glad to have finally seen it. See, I was worried that I was becoming the most cynical person in political science. After having seen it, however, I'm now certain that whoever put that together possesses oceans of bitterness that I could never dream of consuming.

Look, pursuing a political science Ph.D. carries all sorts of risks and all kinds of occasionally pernicious socialization effects. That said, I'm not sure that alternative career pathways for someone interested in politics are all that much better at this juncture. The intern route? [Insert your own joke here about interns here -- ed.] It's no less demeaning and far more cutthroat than graduate school. Law school? Supply vastly exceeds demand in that field too, plus it's a vastly more expensive enterprise.  Political journalism and/or publishing?  That sound you hear right now is the collective gallows laughter from the employees orf that industry about its future prospects. 

The key piece of advice I would give someone who is undeterred in getting a political science Ph.D. at this point is to recognize five important facts:

1) The process of getting a Ph.D. can provide you with a set of analytical skills that are of some use in the non-academic job market;

2) 99 percent of Ph.D. programs are geared to make you think that the only job worth having is becoming a political science professor.

3) If you really want to be a political science professor, you might as well know now that the odds are not good, the job market is terrible, and your control over your future professional destiny is extremely circumscribed.

4) Remember how your parents told you that if you really loved something and applied yourself, you would excel at it? Yeah, that's not always true. At the doctoral level, simply wanting something really badly is not sufficient to attaining your goal.

5) If you think you can resist the siren song of the academy, however -- and this is an important if -- then I can think of worse career paths.

Enough of this silliness -- I have a talk about zombies I have t prepare.