Over at the Guardian, Ed Pilkington notes a rather curious silence from a powerful American interest group:

The National Rifle Association is so tied up fighting new gun restrictions in the wake of the Newtown shooting that it has failed so far to mount its expected lobbying blitz against a new international arms control control treaty.

With just a few weeks to go until the world's first Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is put to a final vote at a UN conference in New York campaigners have voiced surprise at the NRA's relative silence on the issue. Until the Newtown tragedy, in which 20 young children died in their classrooms on 14 December, the UN's attempt to contain the loosely regulated international trade in weapons had been one of the gun lobby's biggest targets....

[A]head of the final ATT conference, which opens on 18 March, the NRA has been notable by its absence. Though the organisation continues to vow that it will do all in its power to prevent the arms trade coming into effect – arguing that it is a "ticking time-bomb" and "the most serious threat to American gun owners in decades" – it has not been applying the same strong-arm tactics as it did in 2012.

So what's up? Pilkington suggests that the NRA is so distracted fighting against domestic gun control measures that it's taken its eye off the ball of this treaty -- particlarly since, according to the American Bar Association, there's nothing in the ATT to infringe on Second Amendment rights. 

That might be true, but let me suggest an alternative hypothesis based on LaPierre's own rhetoric. The standard NRA defense against gun control has been concern about a Leviathan stripping citizens of their right to bear arms. Based on LaPierre's recent Daily Caller essay, however, I think they've switched arguments. The concern is no longer about creeping totalitarianism; it's creeping anarchy:

Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face—not just maybe. It’s not paranoia to buy a gun. It’s survival. It’s responsible behavior, and it’s time we encourage law-abiding Americans to do just that....

Responsible Americans realize that the world as we know it has changed. We, the American people, clearly see the daunting forces we will undoubtedly face: terrorists, crime, drug gangs, the possibility of Euro-style debt riots, civil unrest or natural disaster.

Gun owners are not buying firearms because they anticipate a confrontation with the government. Rather, we anticipate confrontations where the government isn’t there—or simply doesn’t show up in time.

To preserve the inalienable, individual human right to keep and bear arms—to withstand the siege that is coming—the NRA is building a four-year communications and resistance movement (emphasis added).

They say "communications and resistance movement," I say "doomsday preppers."   

I'm hardly the only one to notice this kind of doomsday prepper rhetoric from LaPierre. What's interesting is that the NRA's allies in Congress are talking the same way. Gail Collins offers up the following Lindsey Graham quote: 

The senator from South Carolina wanted to know what people were supposed to do with a lousy two-shell shotgun “in an environment where the law and order has broken down, whether it’s a hurricane, national disaster, earthquake, terrorist attack, cyberattack where the power goes down and the dam’s broken and chemicals have been released into the air and law enforcement is really not able to respond and people take advantage of that lawless environment.”

Do you think Graham spends a lot of time watching old episodes of “Doomsday Preppers?” Does he worry about zombies? That definitely would require a lot of firepower (emphasis added).

I don't know if Graham worries about zombies, but I've given this matter some thought, and I do wonder if there's a fusion of various apocalyptic fears going on in some political quarters. 

To get back  to the Arms Trade Treaty, since Newtown the NRA appears to have shifted tactics in its arguments about the necessity to bear arms. But the fear of state collapse is a very different logic from a fear of an overpowering state. If you believe that governments will simply crumble at the first sign of a threat, then you're not gonna bother lobbying against some silly international treaty. It's not like the ATT will make a difference when the s**t hits the fan. Rather, groups like the NRA should be more concerned with declining gun ownership rates in the United States. 

In the argot of international relations theory, a leader or organization that finds itself trapped by its political rhetoric is suffering from "blowback." In an irony of ironies, I wonder if the NRA's shift in rhetoric has hamstrung its lobbying efforts on the Arms Trade Treaty.

Your humble blogger is taking a vacation at an undisclosed zombie-proof redoubt for the next ten days, so blogging will be on the lighter side. 

Speaking of the lighter side, juuuuuust a few friends and colleagues have informed me that zombie preparedness has become a political issue up in Canada. From BuzzFeed's Ellie Hall:

The Canadian government has gone on the record about the zombie apocalypse. In an amazing exchange on the floor of the House of Commons today, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird was asked if he was working to "develop an international zombie strategy so that a zombie invasion does not turn into a zombie apocalypse."

New Democratic Party Parliament Member Pat Martin applauded the United States Center for Disease Control's emergency preparedness measures premised on a zombie outbreak and wanted to know how Canada would act to protect its citizens.

Here's the clip: 

For the entirety of Baird's response, click over to Huffington Post Canada. 

Now, to be honest, I'm a bit disturbed by this exchange. First of all, there were so many better puns that Baird could have uttered. 

Second of all, both the NDP representative and the Foreign Minister were poorly briefed. Sure, Martin knew about the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Quebec government's counter-zombie efforts, but why no mention of British Columbia's aggressive campaign against the living dead?! That seems like rank prejudice against Canada's Western provinces. 

Third, how in the name of all that is reanimated could the Canadians have this debate without discussing Canada's distinguished contributions to the zombie genre? No mention of Pontypool? No mention of Fido?! Come on!!!

Fourth, the claim that zombies could effortlessly cross borders echoes a leading Canadian perspective on this issue ... but where's the expert testimony? Why no international relations perspective? It's not like Theories of International Politics and Zombies isn't available in Canada. 

This is serious business. Winter has come. The White Walkers could be emigrating down from the North at any moment. Until Canada gets its house in order, secures its strategic maple syrup reserve from waffle-eating ghouls, and starts consulting experts on this issue, I for one, am taking my family south. 

In recent weeks there's been a low hum of pretty interesting and not-so-interesting essays asking why there has been so much attention paid in the zombie apocalypse, and what that attention signifies. 

I bring this up because the Discovery Channel will be airing it's Zombie Apocalypse documentary this evening.  The New York Times' Neal Genzlinger reviews it and finds it... pretty wanting: 

Thank goodness we’ll all be wiped out by the Maya doomsday by week’s end. That will spare us the discomfort of having to go through the impending zombie apocalypse....

The National Geographic Channel’s “Doomsday Preppers,” among others, has already introduced viewers to people who go to seemingly extreme lengths to get ready for terrorist attacks, the collapse of the financial system, nuclear power plant disasters and more, so perhaps it’s no surprise that, at least according to this program, there are some among us who are seriously preparing for a zombie attack. What makes this program different is that among clips of the preppers spewing nonsense about how to shoot a zombie, it intercuts interviews with credentialed academics who say that, yes, a virus or some such that attacks the brain could find its way into humans, disseminate rapidly and cause symptoms that would make us resemble all those zombies we know and love from the movies....

The program also gives you the rare experience of hearing a professor (Daniel W. Drezner of Tufts University) described as the “author of ‘Theories of International Politics and Zombies’ ” — on Monday, No. 40 on Amazon’s list of best sellers in its sub-sub-subcategory of international and world politics. And it provides a new entry for the list of you-must-be-joking organizations: apparently there actually is something called theKansas Anti Zombie Militia.

But it’s hard right now to take this program in the pop-culture way it was intended, especially the idiocy that comes out of the mouths of the various preppers. “Some people’s epiphany,” says one, Matthew Oakey, “is when they realize that the guy that lives on their block with all the guns and ammo isn’t crazy.”

I haven't seen the documentary yet, so I can't really comment on it except what I recall from their interview of me three months ago.  Three thoughts, though: 

1)  Given the reported claim that Nancy Lanza was in fact a doomsday prepper, I have to share Mr. Genzlinger's concern about the unfortunate timing of this broadcast.  Some television networks have made alterations to their broadcasts because of the Sandy Hook attack.  I'm not sure this program rises to that level, but the timing makes me wince, which is probably not a good sign. 

2) Damn, I need to update my Fletcher page. Seriously, that thing is at least three years out of date.

3)  Regarding my participation in the documentary, well, I'll just reprint what Newsday's  Verne Gay wrote: 

One of the "experts" quoted here is in fact a respected scholar in foreign policy at Tufts who has written widely on zombies, though largely as metaphors for chaos in world markets and how people adapt. In an email, I asked Dan Drezner about the program, and he responded that a book he had written on the subject was "intended to be funny [but] one of the points I make is that fears about zombie apocalypses are exaggerated because people underestimate the adaptability of humans." He added, "I have no idea if that got in or not."

Sorry, professor -- it did not get in, and the documentary is not funny.

That's unfortunate... and it gives rise to an almost sacrilegious question:  have we hit the law of diminishing marginal returns on the living dead?   On the popular culture front, when Twilight-like books and films are being made about zombies (though I gotta admit I like what I see from the trailer) and the sign of Nick's loserdom in The New Girl is that he's working on a lame zombie novel, I fear we've hit saturation point. 

On the utility-of-the-metaphor front, I will defend the use of fictional analogies as a way of stimulating creative thinking and calling attention  to useful policy measures until my last undying breath.  I wrote Theories of International Politics and Zombies because I thought it would make some people laugh and make some people think; it was a subversive way to get some book-learning into the cerebellum. Since the book has come out, however, I find that the questions I get from reporters and documentarians about the living dead have morphed from seriocomic to just dead serious. 

I share Alyssa Rosenberg's concern that people are focusing way too much on being in the apocalypse as opposed to how we get to the apocalypse and whether it can be stopped.  Analogies free up certain pattens of thought while also constraining others.  Because so many zombie narratives assume that no matter what humans do, we wind  up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, there's a tendency to presume that this must and always be so.  That constraint is starting to become more prominent. 

So to sum up:  I'm in a zombie documentary this evening, it's apparently not that great, I'm quite confident that the zombie apocalypse won't happen, and my Fletcher page is badly in need of updating.  That is all.

Last night your humble blogger went to see Argo, which Ben Affleck directs and stars in. Here's a trailer: 

Now, those readers who care about things like "cinematography" or "editing" will love this film, but let's face it, if you're reading this blog, it means you're really interested in foreign policy and international relations. And let's face it again -- with a few noteworthy exceptions, the film industry has not done world politics proud. So, from that perspective, how does Argo hold up? 

With some mild spoilers below, I'm happy to report that the film is pleasantly savvy in the ways of the wonk, and even the ways in which it's not savvy can be productive. 

First, the film nails both the stakes and the awful policy choices faced by Americans during the hostage crisis. The prologue -- a clever and brief history of U.S. involvement in Iran prior to the 1979 Iranian revolution -- concisely explains exactly why that country might have been juuuuuust a wee bit angry at the U.S. government in 1979. The film starts on Nov. 4, the day the embassy was seized. The entire opening sequence is well done, but the thing it captures perfectly is the stone-cold realization by the embassy staff that once the compound is breached, there's no escape and no cavalry riding to the rescue. At one point, the head of the security staff explains patiently that their job is simply to buy time for the rest of the embassy personnel to burn/shred all the classified documents. The character also states -- correctly -- that if anyone kills any Iranian, there will be a bloodbath. 

Once the hostages are seized -- and six manage to surreptitiously flee to the Canadian ambassador's compound -- Argo is straightforward on both the bureaucratic politics of trying to spirit them out and the bad odds that any exfiltration plan will have in getting them out of Tehran. At one point CIA exfiltration expert Tony Mendez (played by Afflek) and his superior pitch their plan to the Secretary of State. In that scene, they state the obvious, which is rarely stated in films of this kind: there are no good options, and their plan of having the six be part of a film crew scouting a sci-fi movie location in Tehran is simply the "best bad idea" that they have. Welcome to foreign policymaking -- trying to figure out the best bad idea around. Argo doubles down on this sentiment in a quiet but effective scene at Dulles airport, when Mendez and his superior discuss who in his family should be notified if things go south. 

Now, as it turns out, in real life, Mendez was driven to Dulles by his wife. This is just one of many Hollywoodizations that occur, particularly in the second half of the film. Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio take some liberties with what went down in Tehran and Washington as Mendez tries to spirit out the six Americans. 

Oddly enough, this is unintentionally constructive for anyone interested in becoming a true foreign policy wonk. Here's a fun test: 

1)  Go see Argo;

2)  Try to figure out which parts of the narrative's second half are fiction and which are fact;

3)  Go read the Wired story by Joshuah Bearman that partially inspired the movie and the Slate explainer by David Haglund. If you didn't detect at least one of the Really Big Whoppers in the second half of the film, well, then you should probably find a career other than becoming a foreign policy wonk. Because there is some serious fictionalizing going on. If you're buying it as fact, then you either lack the instincts or the strategic chops necessary to operate in the world of statecraft. 

This television season has been a mixed blessing for those of us who like to study how humans behave under anarchy.  On the one hand, in addition to Season Three of The Walking Dead about to start, two new shows have explored that theme at some length.  The first to premier was Revolution.  On the other hand, Revolution really isn't that good. 

What about the other new show?  Here's the extended trailer for Last Resort: 

So, you get the premise:  the nuclear sub USS Colorado gets an order to fire their nuclear weapons at Pakistan.  While the codes check out, the order seems just a bit wonky cause it goes through a secondary alert network.  After the captain and executive officer question the order to their superiors, all hell breaks loose. 

My take?  SPOILERS AHEAD. 

Cards on the table:  I definitely liked this show more than Revolution, although that's an admittedly low bar.  This has a lot to do with the acting.  Andre Braugher knows how to project authority, Robert Patrick is perfect as the grizzled and misogynistic chief of the boat, and I'm surprised to report that Scott Speedman is really compelling as the XO.  Having watched the pilot and second episode, the tensions within the crew of the Colorado play out nicely.  The mystery behind the launch also seems quite interesting.  And the pilot does explain why, after a failed first attempt, the U.S. navy doesn't try to take out the Colorado again -- welcome to network television, MAD!!

So there's some potential here -- but there are also some serious, serious problems with the show as it's played out so far.  In ascending order of importance: 

1)  in the pilot, Captain Chaplin relates to his XO an anecdote about Reagan needing to seem just a bit crazy to convince the Russians he could launch a nuke, while Brezhnev had already done that by invading Afghanistan.  This ia a good setup for Chaplin's own need to seem just a bit crazy.  The problem is that, Steve Saideman points out, it was Nixon and not Reagan who believed this logic. 

2)  I've met some submariners, and, well, let's just say that they're a different breed from the rest of the U.S. Navy.  Any individual willing to be in a small hermetically sealed tube for up to six months has to have a particular mindset, and Last Resort doesn't hint at that.  At a minimum, there would have been a few very religiously devout sailors on the Colorado, but that's not talked about at all.  This is a shame, because the presence of Navy SEALS on the boat suggests the opportunities for some culture clashes that haven't panned out. 

3)  The Washington, DC scenes are not terribly convincing, particularly the super-hot defense contractor Kylie Sinclair, played by Autumn Reeser.  Now let's be very clear here:  I have no prejudice whatsoever against super-hot defense contractors.  I do, however, have a problem with the notion that supposedly whip-smart Kylie is going to spill all the beans about her super-secret system that's on board the Colorado to the guy she's about to sleep with. 

4)  Oh, and about that system that Kylie set up -- essentially, it's a device that renders the Colorado invisible to detection.  Not to put to fine a point on it, but this would not be a system that would make deterrence that stable.  In fact, if memory serves someone made a movie based on this very premise. 

5)  Really, though, 1-4 are small matters compared to the elephant in the room with respect to Last Resort.  The plot gets moving when the USS Colorado is ordered to fire its missiles at Pakistan.  Later in the pilot, we discover that the USS Illinois did obey orders and fire two missiles into Pakistan, "killing millions" as one character later mentions. 

After those missiles are fired, 98% of what we see is how Washington and the crew of the Colorado cope with the Colorado's refusal to obey orders.  Which is pretty important... but maybe, just maybe, not as important as the U.S. NUCLEAR WEAPONS THAT WERE USED AGAINST PAKISTAN!!!!

Seriously, there are one or two mentions of how things in the world are "complicated" because of this, and that's it.  Nothing on Pakistani retaliation, India's reaction, China's reaction, and so forth.  In the Washington scenes, all anyone seems to care about is the Colorado, which is pretty funny, since I'd think the first use of nuclear weapons since 1945 might raise a few hackles. 

Now you might think that since this is a show about the crew of a renegade sub, that's fine -- except it isn't.  The plot in episode two hinges on Russian Spetsnaz forces trying to seize the boat.  At one point the U.S. Secretary of Defense gets pretty indignant at a Russian official for trying to do this.  In the show, the Russian official just looked sheepish.  If this had played out in the real world, the Russian would have said the following: 

"I'm sorry, what was that?  You, the United States military, initiated the use of nuclear weapons in South Asia, killing millions of people, right?  And now you have a rogue sub firing missiles close to Washington.  You're asking what the hell Russia is doing?  With all due respect, f**k off, Mr. Secretary."

I know I'm not going to watch Revolution again.  I'm on the fence with Last Resort... but this whole nuking Pakistan thing going unmentioned might drive me away. 

Your humble blogger will be winging his way back to the East Coast after a few days at Comic-Con.  Now, one of the purposes of this blog is to act as a networked node between the worlds of popular culture and international relations.  So while I could prattle on about what's hip (Wonder Woman) and what's not (surprisingly little Battlestar Galactica cosplay) or all of the ways that Joss Whedon is God -- well, a god --  that would be wrong and uninteresting to readers. 

Instead, here's another angle.  We know that: 

A)  Comic-Con is the convention of America's cultural overlords; and

B)  America remains the world's cultural hegemon; so...

C)  What we learn about Comic-Con attendees will tell us much about the future of global culture.

So, what did I learn:

1)  America was better in the past.  Comic-Con has grown by leaps and bounds in term of attendees in the past few years, and the old-timers are a bit cranky about this fact.  And by "old-timers," I mean people who were here five years ago.  Still, I was told that the lines used to be shorter, the exhibition hall used to have more open space, and "it used to be about the comics, man."  Or, as one person put it, "all these people used to tease me in high school for liking this s**t."  Nostalgia for yhe past, it would seem, is hardly limited to political elites. 

2)  The cultural elite is a hell of a lot more diverse than other elites.  A common lament is the maleness and whiteness of the top one percent of anything.  Well, rest assured this is not the case at Comic-Con.  Based on my own observation, I'd say that while men outnumbered women, it's getting awfully close to gender balance.  Similarly, minority representation was quite robust as well.  Indeed, one group in particular with a powerful presence at Comic-Con is the disabled.  If you ammassed the number of people in wheelchairs at this convention, you'd have a formidable mobile infantry.

3)  Americans are cool with bureaucracy and surveillance -- so long as it's about something they want more than something they need.  The lines for some of the sessions were staggering.  Seriously, Disneyworld employees would have looked at these lines and said, "dude, this is out of control."  I don't want to say that people were thrilled about the lines -- but compared to the DMV or even boarding an airplane, there was a minimum of fussing and feuding.  Why were people cool with having 10,000 individuals in front of them to see a Walking Dead panel but ten people in front of them at the Starbucks caused complaint?  I think it's about want vs. need, but I'll take alternative explanations in the coments.

As for surveillance, it was impossible to walk five feet without passing an interview or a photograph.  A third of the attendees at any large panel were recording everything on their cameras. 

4)  There are tiny pockets of innovation everywhere.  The Blog Son and I went to the panel for a forthcoming video game, The Last of Us (here's a trailer).  I'm not a gamer, but I get the sense the game is easerly anticipated.  What impressed about the panel was the care and craft that the creators had invested into the scenario, the acting, the gameplay, and so forth.  Politicians might pooh-pooh the intended effect of all of this energy, but the innovative talent on display was impressive. 

Now, this was a big panel, but all around the exhibition hall there were pockets of just brilliant stuff littered around the place.  True, there was also a lot of schlock, but even a lot of the schlock was demented and brilliant. 

5)  Zombies still rule.  I mean, c'mon -- they were everywhere at Comic-Con.  Everywhere. 

I take my cues from the front page of the New York Times just like any other effete intellectual member of the Media Elite. And today, Jodi Kantor delves into the latest paroxysm of debate about women trying to "have it all," and, hey, whaddaya know, this time it's an Atlantic cover essay by Anne-Marie Slaughter that's set it off. I've had my friendly disagreements with Slaughter in the past, and I'm afraid I'm going to have another one after reading "Why Women Still Can't Have it All." But in this instance I want to stress the "friendly" part of the "disagreement."

Slaughter's title pretty much sums up her thesis: after spending two years in a hard-charging job as the Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, she discovered that the opportunity costs to her home life were too great:

I realized that I didn’t just need to go home. Deep down, I wanted to go home. I wanted to be able to spend time with my children in the last few years that they are likely to live at home, crucial years for their development into responsible, productive, happy, and caring adults.

The essay is worth reading, if not quite as groundbreaking as others would like it to be. It ceetainly references political minefields issues I've raised here in the past on women pursuing foreign policy careers. Rather than launch a full-blown critique, however, I'd just raise three questions:

1) Is this just about women? As multiple critics have pointed out, the issues Slaughter raises -- balancing work and home life, etc. -- are hardly unique to women. She suggests that women face this challenge more acutely because... well... they're moms:

From years of conversations and observations, however, I’ve come to believe that men and women respond quite differently when problems at home force them to recognize that their absence is hurting a child, or at least that their presence would likely help. I do not believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women seem more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job.

Many factors determine this choice, of course. Men are still socialized to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the breadwinner; women, to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the caregiver. But it may be more than that. When I described the choice between my children and my job to Senator Jeanne Shaheen, she said exactly what I felt: “There’s really no choice.” She wasn’t referring to social expectations, but to a maternal imperative felt so deeply that the “choice” is reflexive.

As someone in a more traditional marriage than Slaughter, I'd tweak this just a bit. First of all, unless someone is inheriting a trust fund, there's also really no choice in providing for a family either. Seriously, there isn't. Second of all, a difference between men and women is that when parenting issues come up, it's totally cool for women to anguish about it -- in print, no less -- while it's happening. For men, it's totally cool to drink Scotch, brood and repress feelings about the costs of careerism for years until it all boils to the surface at some family vacation when the kids are grown up and resentments can be aired. But trust me, men have to cope with this as well.

Third, I wonder if the choice is really that stark. There are hard-charging jobs and hard-charging jobs. There's being an active parent and then there's... American parenting in affluent zip codes. As Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry noted:

YES, you can have it all. You can have a successful career and a good family. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, and there is absolutely no doubt about that.

What you CANNOT have is a successful career AND helicopter parenting. This “it” you cannot have. And if you want the best for your kids, you’ll choose the career and ditch the helicopter. They’ll be better off, and take it from me, they’ll be grateful.

2) Is it the international dimension? Slaughter was trying to write as general an essay as possible, but I was struck by how much of her anecdata consisted of women in foreign affairs/national security careers. I have no doubt that professionals in other sectors face this issue, but one of the biggest challenges with "international" careers is that they tend to spawn international travel.

I know and admire some professionals who go overseas and bring their families with them, but that's not for everyone. The one piece of advice I can proffer here is to cram intense foreign experiences early in one's life. One of the jumpstarts to my own career track was spending significant amounts of time in eastern Ukraine during a time when no Westerners wanted to be there. I was able to do that because at the time I was unattached and childless. There is no way -- no way -- I would have made the same choice if I was married and a father. Plan accordingly.

3) Are the solutions worse than the problem? Finally, I am skeptical that Slaughter's suggested reforms will really work. I like her suggestion that we reconceive our career arcs so that they peak in one's late sixties rather than twenty years earlier -- but that won't happen unless wages get less sticky. Older workers woiuld have to be comfortable with declining rather than rising wages, because otherwise Slaughter's suggestion would act as a massive barrier to hiring younger workers.

Furthermore, some of Slaughter's recommendations would likely have unanticipated consequences that would exacerbate the very problems she wants to solve. For example, one of the issues that she raises is family leave for raising children. Now, this is an innovation that has been cemented into the academy pretty well -- but the effects have been somewhat perverse. That's because after maternity leave, paternity leave got institutionalized. This sounds great, but I know from personal experience that women and men use these leaves differently. Women tend to use it by being moms. Men tend to use it by being more of a dad, but also by using it as a semi-sabbatical to publish more. I should know -- that's what I did. So an innovation that was designed to allow redress gender imbalances actually exacerbated them.

Now is ordinarily the time in the blog post when I offer my own suggestions, but I can't say I have any great ideas. So I'll leave it to the readers: what is to be done?

Over the years, The Daily Show has tackled issues relating to world politics and American foreign policy with a sharp satirical, somewhat left-of-center edge.  I have found most of these takes to be moderately amusing -- and it's pretty hard, sometimes, to make international politics look funny without seeming cruel. 

This month, however, marks the four-year anniversary of "Britain's Fallen Soldiers," which I have reproduced below for your amusement.  I watch this, oh, let's say once a month since it aired.  I have never been able to watch it the entire way through without cracking up.

I will simply note that the crux of NATO's problem, which inspired John Oliver's finest work ever, is, of course, still ongoing.  Because intractable international policy problems, like fine satire, have a timeless quality. 

Your humble blogger has occasionally demonstrated an interest in the Star Wars saga, and, alas, I see over the weekend that a lot of nonsense and some occasional brilliance has been written about this topic.  Let's dive in! 

While Star Wars devotees are a cantankerous, obsessive, socially maladjusted and generally the-worst-parts-of-Kevin-Smith lot, but there is general agreement on two statements: 

1) The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the movies;

2)  None of films in the "prequel" trilogy are better than any of the films in the older trilogy.

Both of these statements might seem so obvious that they can usually be asserted as axioms without justification.  These canonical statements have been challenged this week, however.  Kevin Drum bravely and gamely tries to argue that Return of the Jedi is the best film in the series.  I won't quote him here but urge you to read the whole post.  It's not a bad argument per se, if it wasn't so horribly, horribly wrong. 

Basically, Drum argues that the film's strengths (the opening, the cinematography, the story arcs, the finale) outweigh the weaknesses (the Ewoks).  OK, but Drum elides Jedi's other major weaknesses, which include: 

A)  Leia's transformation from powerful princess to earth mother of Endor (seriously, her hair alone during the scenes in the Endor village knocks Jedi down a peg); 

B)  Luke and Leia having The Conversation, which even by Lucas' standards is badly-written and contains a statement by Leia that gets totally contradicted later in Revenge of The Sith; and 

C)  The Ewok attack on the shield generator.  As a kid, I always wondered why the Storm Troopers would wear what looked like bulky and awkward plastic armor that didn't seem to stop blaster fire.  I figured, "well, it's gotta be effective against more primitive weapons."  Nope, it turns out Ewok arrows can penetrate the stuff too!  WTF?  Did the Emperor get a special deal on the stuff from some Kamino contractors or what?  Even if the $852 quadrillion Death Star itself might have been cost-effective, Storm Trooper uniforms are a classic example of bloated Imperial procurement patterns. 

D)  Lucas f***ing up this movie even more with the special editions.  Oh, yay, now Vader says something in the climactic final sequence with the Emperor!  Thank the heavens, we now see Hayden Christensen's pouty face at the very end of Jedi, which, by the way, makes no f***ing sense whatsoever!!   

Now, all of this said, I think Drum provides a vigorous defense of Jedi's worth -- I think better of it now than before.  It's just that in comparison to Empire, it still falls short.  Why?  First, in contrast to Jedi, there really aren't any Ewoks to apologize for -- Episode V has none of those howlers.  The only weakness I can really think of in Empire is the slightly dodgy Imperial strategy involved in conquering the rebel base at Hoth.  

As for the strengths, there are many.  Beyond the surprising plot twists and climactic duel at Cloud City, Empire has three sequences that are worth watching: 

1)  The pursit of the Millennium Falcon through the asteroid field.  Just a top notch action sequence.  What the Falcon finds in the asteroid field -- and how they escape the Imperial fleet -- are also pleasant and jolting surprises. 

2)  Luke confronting the Dark Side in the Dagobah swamps.  This also contains one of the lovelier pieces of dialogue in the films  (LUKE:  What's in there? YODA:  Only what you take with you.)  It also deftly captures the dangers Luke faces as he learned the ways of the Force. 

3)  Han and Leia deepening their relationship.  Contrast their interactions in Empire with, say, Anakin and Padme in Attack of the Clones.  Wait, no, that's too low a bar.  Here's another way of thinking of it:  with the exception of Harrison Ford and Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark, one would be hard-pressed to find a burgeoning romance handled so deftly in the sci-fi/fantasy genre. 

Now some of these strengths are more, shall we say, grown-up strengths.  As a kid, I recall being frustrated by Empire because of how it left everything at loose ends.  Still, I would argue that the payoffs that come from Return of the Jedi are only as sweet because of The Empire Strikes Back. 

Still, bravo to Kevin for defending Jedi, because apparently there are some who would dare to argue that Revenge of the Sith is better than Return of the Jedi.  Which would be easy to ignore, if it wasn't a friggin' political scientist making this claim: 

I would submit that "Revenge of the Sith" is actually a better film that "Return of the Jedi." I recognize that this view, while probably not as controversial as Drum's, is still not the mainstream one. But the "Sith"story is much more coherent, staying fully focused on Anakin's fall. And the fall is masterfully executed and so complete in its outcome....

And Anakin's final fall is so complete, leaving him a smoldering, limbless pile of hate, screaming impotently at the best friend he'd been manipulating into despising, while the woman he was trying to save lays dying. And Obi Wan's final words to Anakin involve (finally!) something like acting. Ewan MacGregor somehow achieves the impossible, delivering an impassioned performance in a George Lucas film, venting both his disgust in Anakin and his own remorse for having trained him

Mercifully, "Sith" doesn't try to distract us with humorous or furry creatures. Jar Jar is silent. The droids do their jobs. The film is dark and bleak and allowed to remain that way. The few final scenes not focused directly on Anakin -- finding homes for the twins, the remaining Jedi going into hiding, the Death Star under construction -- serve only to set up Episode IV.

If I squint very hard, I can see Masket's arguments.  Several things hold me back from agreeing in any way with his conclusions, however.  First, the script in Revenge of the Sith is just so much worse than Return of the Jedi that I don't know where to begin.  In the last 40 minutes of Sith that almost doesn't matter, because the Obi-Wan/Anakin duel and the Emperor/Yoda clash are pretty good.  The problem is that, again, except for the bit that Masket references, practically every line of dialogue uttered in this film is either hackneyed or just God-awful.  It's not like Return of the Jedi, when you'd cringe at the occasional leaden sentence.  In Sith, it's Every.  Friggin'.  Sentence. 

Second, the character development in the prequel trilogy is so bad that it's tough to even care about Anakin's turn to the dark side.  I'd wager the only reason Masket cares is because he saw Episodes IV-VI first.  Only if you see them first would there be any reason to give a whit about what happens -- which, by the way, is an excellent reason to read this brilliant exposition of how a newcomer should watch the entire series.   

The conundrum that political scientists face is that even though the original trilogy contains the better films, the second trilogy has the better politics.  There are no politics in Episodes IV-VI, unless one counts Vader and the Emperor's wooing of Luke.  In the prequel trilogy, however, there are lots of parliamentary machinations, tussles between the Jedi Council and the Chancellor, Anakin's lust for power, and Darth Sidious' grand strategy for converting the Republic into an Empire. 

To a political scientist, that's good stuff.  To human beings interested in enjoying a film, it's tissue paper without things like strong characters, a good screenplay, and decent plotting. 

So, no, I must take the Very Brave and Contrarian position of defending the conventional wisdom.  The best movie is still The Empire Strikes Back, and while Revenge of the Sith is the best of the prequel trilogy, it doesn't hold a candle to Return of the Jedi. 

Oh, and this time... I don't care what you think.... because you do agree with me.  Move along, now. 

Your humble blogger went to see Contagion over the weekend for two reasons.  First, Slate movie critic Forrest Wickman concluded his review by calling it, "the most believable zombie movie ever made." He's not the only one to make the zombie connection, and well, now I've got some skin in that game.  Second, the FP editors have asked me to review other disaster scenarios, so I figured I'd just pre-empt their request and join the legions of moviegoers who get their ya-yas seeing Gwyneth Paltrow die on film be entertained. 

So, let me provide the MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT klaxon here and get to the assessment.  How well did Steven Soderbergh and company portray what would happen if a lethal pandemic were to break out? 

OK, good news first:  in terms of both accuracy and suspense, Contagion is a far, far better film than, say, either Outbreak or The Andromeda Strain.  The first reason is that Soderbergh does not bother with the anti-government paranoia that those earlier films possessed in their DNA.  Instead, the treatment of the Centers for Disease Control, Department of Homeland Security, and World Health Organization officials is fair.  They are depicted as flawed but well-meaning bureaucrats, getting some decisions right and some wrong.  They also speak in jargon, a surprising amount of which makes its way into the film.  I fully expect to see the term "R-0" bandied about by news anchors the next time a flu bug breaks out.  A CDC official utters the two most chilling words in the entire movie -- "social distancing" -- to describe the necessary freak-out by citizens to avoid human contact with other humans as a way of slowing the spread of the virus.  That's the perfect dash of bureaucratese. 

The second reason is that Soderbergh almost perfectly nails the first stage of the pandemic.  Unlike, say, most zombie or other apocalyptic films, Soderbergh doesn't get to the breakdown of social order in the first reel.  He takes his time, which helps to amp up the pressure and make it seem all the scarier when things do seem to break down (Matt Damon's character is the perfect vessel here; Damon's best work is in his reaction shots to other people behaving badly).  He also deftly demonstrates in the first ten minutes how globalization would abet the spread of any kind of superbug. 

Despite this slow ratcheting up, I haven't seen a director kill off so many Hollywood starlets since Joss Whedon. 

The third reason is that the movie, intriguingly enough, does not end in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  Consistent with the arguments I made in Theories of International Politics and Zombies, humans prove to be just as adaptable as the biological threats to humans. 

That said, here are my beefs: 

1)  Really, the blogger is the Big Bad in the movie?  Really?  The villian of the piece is Jude Law's crudely-named Alan Krumwiede, who detects the spread of the virus early but hawks a homeopathic remedy to enrich himself.  Exactly how he gets rich doing this is not entirely clear -- he has some shady meetings with a hedge fund manager, but it's not entirely clear why, after gaining fame and fortune, he doesn't start acting differently as more attention gets paid to him.  It's also presumed that Krumwiede has the monopoly of blogging on the issue -- I'm pretty sure that as he gained popularity, a few other health bloggers would try to cut him down to size. 

Neither Soderbergh nor his screenwriter Scott Z. Burns like bloggers, like, at all.  At one point the virologist played by Elliott Gould tells Krumwiede, "Blogging is not writing.  It's graffiti with punctuation."  Hah!  That shows what Soderbregh knows -- us bloggers are lucky if we remember to use commas, much less semicolons.  

Look, as a founding member of the International Brotherhood of Policy Bloggers, I can't claim that actors like Krumwiede don't exist.  My skepticism is over whether they'd really wreak as much havoc as Soderbergh thinks.  Myths and rumors can spread on the Internet, but so can the corrections of those myths.  In the end, someone like Krumwiede would affect a very narrow, already paranoid subculture -- the larger effect would be minimal. 

Even if Krumwiede is an absurd villain, I also didn't buy it when the DHS official let him go free once he made bail.  At a minimum, they'd hold this guy for 48 hours without charging.  I'd also wager that they'd try to deport him too. 

One final note:  I'd love to see Lee Siegel hire Sodebergh to direct and Aaron Sorkin to write a movie about the Internet, just to see the final dystopic product. 

2)  Where the hell is the Chinese central government?  The most absurd subplot is when a WHO official gets abducted by her translator as collateral to protect his infected village.  She's held hostage for at least six months -- during which time she goes native -- until the WHO barters some (fake) vaccine for her life. 

Apparently during this entire time, the Chinese central government does not bother to intervene to try to rescue her.  This seems juuuuuuust a bit implausible.  It also leads to the next problem....

3)  Where the hell is the rest of the WHO?  Beyond Marion Cotillard's character, the WHO does not really appear in the film.  It's the CDC's show, and only their show .  They act in Contagion pretty much how they promised they would act if the zombies arrive.  Maybe that's how things would play out, but I suspect other governments and IGOs would still matter more than this film suggests.  Given that the movie virus started in China, and that the head of the WHO is also from China, they might be useful in this kind of situation. 

4)  Few second-order effects.  The virus leads to looting, crime, and other social ills, but I wish they had said something about the total economic devastation that would have occurred.  At one point after a vaccine has been developed, Matt Damon's character walks through a mall to buy his daughter a prom dress -- and 80% of the mall looks to be closed.  Soderbergh suggests a bunch of unions going on strike because they don't want to ge sick.  I'm curious what happens once they find themselves unemployed as well.   

Forget the domestic discord however, there's also...

5)  No international conflict whatsoever.  After the first 15 minutes, almost all of the action takes place in the USA.  Once a vaccine is discovered, there is no discussion of the international wrangling that would take place over scarce supplies.  No diversionary wars happen.  And so forth.  Soderbergh doesn't really address possible problems in world politics.  Because of this, the film implicitly assumes a liberal institutionalis kind of a world.  I hope he's right, but I'm not so sure myself.   

To be fair to Soderbergh and his collaborators, I'm not sure it's possible to get everything right in such a film.  Unless it's a television series I'm not sure it's possible to get all the nuances and complexities right.  Given these limitations, Contagion is a movie worth seeing.  Just bring your own Purell. 

For your weekend amusement, check out my latest Bloggingheads diavlog with Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising and the released-last-month-and-now-a-New-York-Times-bestseller Robopocalypse.  If you're not familiar with Robopocalypse now, you will be when Steven Spielberg turns it into the must-see blockbuster of 2013.  We talk about the challenges of writing a book when you know it will be a movie, the future of self-driving cars, and whether zombies or robots are the perfect 21st-century threat through which to think about international relations (Wilson's answer will surprise Charli Carpenter you!)

Wilson's enthusiasm for the genre is quite infectious, and let me state for the record that a) Robopocalypse is the perfect summer read; and b) despite my strong desire to loathe anyone who stumbles into Spielberg money, Wilson was a great and gracious interview). 

Hey, remember a few months ago, when I wrote that, "the Tea Party's influence on American foreign policy has peaked and will be on the downswing for quite some time."?  How has time treated that statement? 

Well, it's kind of a mixed bag.  On the one hand, as Greg Ip notes over at the Economist's Free Exchange blog, the distrust in government that is the fuel for Tea Party activism has waned considerably: 

My colleague at Democracy in America imputes from Mitt Romney’s surge into the lead among presidential contenders the beginning of the end of the Tea Party’s influence in the GOP. Now, the latest WSJ-NBC opinion poll contains clues that the movement’s broader appeal may also be waning. As my chart shows, after a brief reversal, Americans are once again getting comfortable with more government in their lives....

[T]ime and events have cooled passions. The bail-outs are receding from memory (and turning a profit), Mr Obama has tacked to the centre, and the economy continues to disappoint. Republicans overreached with Paul Ryan’s budget, thinking the population ready for a draconian restructuring of Medicare to deal with a looming debt crisis. Apparently, it isn’t.

I read several lessons into these results. First, political leaders regularly get out over their ski tips when they think the population is shifting rapidly to the left or the right. Ronald Reagan learned that in 1982, Mr Obama did so in 2010, and it may soon be the turn of the Republican far right.

As Ip  also notes, Americans trust in government parallels a disturbing decline in trust in free markets.  Which is kinda consistent with my point on GOP trade policy.

While this suggests that the Tea Party's animating force is waning, it's possible that foreign policy proves to be the remaining policy dimension through which mainstream candidates like Mitt Romney appease the Tea Party wing of the party. 

At a minimum, John McCain ain't pleased: 

US Senator John McCain on Sunday expressed concern about growing isolationism in the Republican party, particularly among those vying for the 2012 presidential nomination.

McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee, said he was alarmed to hear various candidates at a campaign forum last Monday express opposition to US military involvement in the NATO military assault on Libya's Moamer Kadhafi.

"There's always been an isolation strain in the Republican party, that Pat Buchanan (a former Republican presidential contender) wing of our party. But now it seems to have moved more center stage, so to speak," he said.

I'm not entirely sure that this is isolationism talking, but the evolution of GOP foreign policy thinking is likely to move in a realpolitik direction.  Which, coincidentally enough, is a cheap way to satiate the Paulite wing of the Tea Partiers. 

Developing....

UPDATE:  Wow, I might have broken my personal typo record in one sentence.  Fixed now. 

Today was a big American foreign policy news day.  Hamas and Fatah seem to have kissed and made up under the aegis of the Egyptian caretaker government; there's a national defense reshuffle as Leon Panetta is moving from CIA to SecDef and David Petraeus is moving from CENTCOM to the CIA; the FEderal Reserve's Ben Bernanke held the Fed's first-ever press conference. 

These are all big stories, and yet the lead of the day is the fact that Barack Obama showed everyone his long-form birth certificate.  There's something really sad about the fact that this needed to be done, but there it is.  

Today's spectacle prompted Slate's David Weigel, who has followed the varieties of birtherism with an eagle eye, to ask honestly when enough is enough: 

Here's the thing. I've spent a lot of time writing about conspiracy theories. I think they're darkly amusing....And if we're being perfectly honest, conspiracy stories do gangbusters traffic. If I were an advertiser, I wouldn't tell a writer to knock off writing about conspiracy theories.

But this is an honest question: How far can people take this stuff? Is there absolutely no downside to using your celebrity to make the wildest accusation you can and watch reporters fight like the monkeys at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey for the right to cover them first? In the past, rabbit hole chases for stuff that would blow the lid off some conspiracy or another have backfired, wildly. (Google "Dan Rather" and "National Guard documents.") And in the past, things that have caused a lot of amusement for a lot of people have gotten predictable and boring, pointless. This has to happen at some point. Tell me this happens at some point.

I'm fascinated by conspiracy theories too, and I'm afraid I have some bad news for Weigel.  The truly scary thing is that conspiracy theories do even better gangbuster business outside of the United States.  Hear the one about the Mossad being behind the 9/11 attacks?  How the United States caused the earthquake in Haiti?  It's quick, cheap and easy to create a conspiracy, especially when the truth is usually banal and/or mundane. 

As I wrote in The Spectator last year: 

What is clear is that, thanks to the technological and globalising revolutions of the last two decades, modern life has become infinitely more complex. The world has become far less easy to understand in terms of its economic and social organisation. Yet humans remain hard-wired to look for patterns in a chaotic universe. As David Aaronovitch recently observed in Voodoo Histories, conspiracy theories offer the comfort of a narrative, no matter how crazy it sounds....

Will anger and distrust be a permanent fixture in the politics of affluent countries? A global economic rebound should lead to increased trust in both business and political elites. Beyond trying to revive their economies, however, there must be something that governments can do to earn back the trust of some of their people. The most obvious first response would be to offer more information to persuade angry and distrustful people that their worst fears will not be realised. Unfortunately, such a policy might backfire. Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler conducted experiments to see whether correct information could erase misperceptions. They discovered that ‘corrections actually strengthened misperceptions among the most strongly committed subjects’. The very attempt to correct erroneous beliefs simply causes the most extreme adherents to put themselves into a cognitive crouch. This might explain why, even though an image of Barack Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate can be accessed on the web, many ‘birthers’ still believe the President was not born in the USA.

This has nothing to do with intelligence, either -- a few weeks ago I wasted spent 15 minutes explaining to a Fletcher student that, in fact, Julian Assange was not a CIA agent.  This sounds laughable, except that at least one head of government said the same thing.   

As long as trafficking in these questions draws eyeballs, the media will continue to act as an amplifier for these kinds of crazed worldviews. 

There is a downside for those who care about their reputation -- ask Pierre Salinger.  For heads of stare and almost everyone else, however, these costs likely seem negligible compared to the political and psychological gain that comes from belief. 

Think of conspiracy theories like internaional institutions -- they don't actually explain much, but they never go away either.  Even global governance structures that have longed outlived their usefulness do not disappear -- they just persist with fewer adherents.  Popular conspiracy theories work the same way, because there will always be a hard core of believers who can sustain their belief regardless of things like "facts" and evidence."  Indeed, scorn from the mainstream just fuels their conviction that they must be onto something. 

I held out as long as I could on the Charlie Sheen fiasco -- but damn Will Winecoff and the IR-relevant horse he rode in on!!

From yesterday's Global Times, Hao Leifeng provides a peculiarly... Chinese take on the whole brouhaha:

Actor Charlie Sheen is a classic example of the difference in Western and Eastern values and norms.

Ignoring public pleas from his father, Sheen has continued a weeklong media blitz, exhibiting obvious signs of mania. With no firm hand to guide them, Western media has deliberately goaded him into making increasingly delusional statements, more concerned about "winning" higher ratings than Sheen's own sense of pride, or the negative example his brash public admissions about his private sex life and unverifiable international conspiracies could be setting for society.

How many young people have been led astray by Sheen's boasts about his substance abuse and freewheeling sex life? And that was when he was in character on national television, as a randy bachelor in Two and a Half Men.

Sheen attracted 1 million Twitter followers in just 24 hours, yet more evidence that microblogs spread the most unhealthy contagions in society like a disease. Chinese family, coworkers, or the authorities would have taken firm steps to make sure someone like Sheen did not make a public spectacle of himself.

It's true:  the Obama administration has been ridiculously slow on getting a handle on the Charlie Sheen issue.  I mean, you know that if Hillary Clinton got Sheen in a room for an hour, this whole problem would go away.  This just reinforces the administration's slowness on handling matters of serious popular culture.   

OK, seriously, as I understand it, Global Times is not the same kind of official mouthpiece as, say, China Daily or People's Daily, so I wouldn't take this as the official Chinese Communist Party position.  Hell, it might be a parody.  Still, a few revealing things from this.  There's the swipe against Twitter, and the emphasis on familial loyalties. 

I see two other interesting reveals, however.  The first is the proposed "Chinese" solution to this problem:

His employers are unhappy that he was distracted with prostitutes and drugs, and didn't show up to work on time. Why not take a tip from the Chinese business community, and make visits to a KTV parlor part of Sheen's workday?

And instead of epic parties at his home with porn stars, why not keep Sheen occupied with business banquets?

Sheen goes on television and boasts that he has two girlfriends, who both sleep in the same bedroom. Is he too poor to set up his wives and mistresses in different houses?

In Chinese society, these problems are dealt with delicately and privately. Sheen is like a typical Westerner throwing fuel on the fire with each interview and tweet. It is almost as if he feels no shame and is loving the attention.

Racism, spousal abuse, addiction, politics, mental illness, boasting about mistresses, - these are all subjects best dealt with behind closed doors.

Er... as near as I can determine, Sheen's bosses have been using this playbook for the entire run of Two and a Half Men.  It's only when Sheen thoroughly rejected all outaside intervention that everything blew up.  In other words, the Chinese solution to this was exactly the same as the American solution to this -- well, minus the massage parlors.  This continued right up until the moment when Sheen decided that the "Charlie Sheen" drug could defeat all comers.  And then he was suspended and subsequently fired.  Perhaps the fact that the government decided not to send him to the countryside and instead just got his children out of his orbit is peculiarly "western." 

Second -- and this is a genuine question to readers -- is Charlie Sheen actually a folk hero to anyone other than substance abusers at this point?  I see the attention he's getting now as in the category of, "Wow, look at that massive 12-car pileup on the other side of the road!!!  It's horrific, but I can't look away!"   Granted, he's now a prime candidate for his own reality show -- but I'm not really sure that's winning the future. 

This is the only time I will ask this about Charlie Sheen:  what do you think? 

UPDATE:  A commenter suggests that this must be a parody, albeit one that the editors of Global Times can't detect.  But the commenter provides an excellent additional takeaway point: 

[I]t's way easier to slip a humour piece disguised as a bizarre anti-US rant past the Chinese censor than it is to get a serious piece that is even vaguely critical of CCP policy published.

LAST UPDATE:  According to the Shanghaiist, the editors at Global Times were  in on the joke -- in which case your humble blogger will join Al Jazeera and admit to being punk'd.