Foreign Policy's AfPak channel tweets the following query:

I don't understand why political science, as a discipline, rewards bad, unclear writing. Don't these journals have editors??

To the Blogmobile -- there's some explaining to do!! 

Let's get one thing straight.  The problem isn't just the political science discipline -- it's all academic disciplines.   Open up any academic journal and you're likely to be exposed to an overwhelming number of run-on sentences, obscurantist jargon, and  fancy Latin words displacing of good-old-fashioned, no-BS Anglo-Saxonisms.    

Nor is AfPak the only lamenter of this fact.  Via Rob Neyer, I see that Bill James, the godfather of sabermetrics, doesn't like it when academics talk all jargon-y. 

It modern America it is the accepted practice for experts in each field to develop their own language, their own expressions and reference points, and to write to one another in professional jargon almost indecipherable to the public.

I feel very strongly that this is a mistake. I have felt this way for 40 years; I have argued against this for 40 years, and I've never made any headway, but that's still what I think and that's still what I argue. People complain about anti-intellectuatlism in American life. I live in an academic community; many of my friends are academics. They complain frequently about the lack of respect for intellectuals in the mainstream debate, about the difficulty in getting the public to accept science and to accept the knowledge that experts in the field generate -- yet they insist on speaking and writing in ways that the public cannot understand. Well, duh. If you write in a way that excludes the general public from reading what you are saying, the general public will not accept your conclusions.

To use academic jargon is rude, lazy, elitist, and counter-productive. It diminishes the influence of the academic world; it diminishes the influence of thinking people on the general debate. If you want people to accept your ideas, you have to speak in language that others can understand. This is common sense, and it is common courtesy.

As someone who has a Bill James bobblehead in his home, I take this kind of critique seriously -- far motre seriously than, say, Charles Murray's blatherings about academic elites.  The problem is that I'm not sure it's right. 

First of all, a lot of jargon exists for a good reason.  All disciplines, professions, and careers have their own specialzed argot that's used as a way to economize on communication.  If I use the phrases "two-level game," "credible commitment," "moral hazard," or "beggar-thy-neighbor" to people in my profession, they're going to know what I'm talking/writing about without me having to spend paragraphs explaining the point. 

For example, if I say,

we're approaching a CreditAnstalt moment in the global political economy

to a bunch of international political economy scholars, they get it.  To the rest of the world, I'd have to write: 

In the near future we could face a financial crisis when in which foreign economic policy leaders prioritize nationalism and geopolitics above preservaing the integrity of the global financial system.  Since the CreditAnstalt crisis played a leading role in making the Great Depression the ten-year agony of mass unemployment, poverty, famine and despotism that we remember today, this would really suck.  

Yes, jargon is a time-saver. 

Now, it could be argued that academics should be smart enough to use jargon when speaking with each other and use plain English when speaking to, you know, outworlders anyone outside their field. 

There is a big problem with this solution, however.  Most academics spend most of their time writing, responding and talking to other academics.  They already know the jargon, so there's no reason to drop it.  [Um... what about the students?--ed.  One could argue that an awful lot of instruction is teaching students the concepts behind the jargon, so that doesn't count.] 

If you spend 90% of your day using one kind of language, it's actually pretty hard to switch conversational styles to engage the outworlders rest of the public.  As Paul Krugman wrote some many moons ago: 

I hope you think that I am an acceptable writer, but when it comes to economics I speak English as a second language: I think in equations and diagrams, then translate. The opponents of mainstream economics dislike people like me not so much for our conclusions as for our style: They want economics to be what it once was, a field that was comfortable for the basically literary intellectual.

This goes for most of the social science disciplines. 

I grant that the failure to communicate to the rest of the world is a flaw of many academics.  What it's not, however, is inefficient.  If we're writing for political science journals, then the audience is other political scientists (and these journals, my dear AfPak, are edited by other political scientists as well).  They already know the jargon.  By using professional argot, political scientists -- and academics in general -- are able to write and communicate with each other more quickly and efficiently than by using ordinary plain language. 

My non-academic readers might claim that this is absurd, preposterous, and a particular failing of the academy.  Maybe, but I don't think so.  Bill James' original complaint was levied against baseball stat geeks.  Journalists and editors throw about "lede," "graf" and "TK"  without even thinking about it.  All occupations and organizations have their own forms of shorthand that sounds like jibberish to the outsider.  No one would accuse most members of the military as being obscurantist, but go to an Army staff meeting and try to decipher the glut of acronyms that fly around like so much schrapnel. 

Is that the only reason for bad political science writing?  Probably not.  We get rewarded for coming up with new jargon like "Bradley effect" or "Stackelberg leader" or "bandwagoning" that catches on.  And, yes, there are scholars who write in a deliberately confusing manner because their ideas ain't all that coherent.  As a regular reader of political science journals, however, I'm pretty sure these are the exception rather than the rule.  I'm so inured to the jargon that I can read these papers without conscious translation. 

Some political scientists (ahem, cough) do try to write for a wider audience.  Some political science journals like Perspectives on Politics are intended for a wider audience.  But the bulk of political science publications are intended for other political scientists -- and there's little upside to eliminating jargon if that's how everyone in every field communicates.

So this is my very long-winded answer to AfPak.  Whereas if I was using jargon, all I'd have said was:

The specialization of knowledge leads actors to reduce the transacton costs of communication with each other.  Naturally, this phenomenon creates a barrier to entry for outside consumers, while instilling a common identity among specialists. 

Am I missing anything?

UPDATE:  Yes, I did miss something.  FP editor extraordinaire Blake Hounshell tweets: 

[B]ut jargon is only one aspect of bad academic writing. There's also the passive voice, nominalizations, bland verbs, etc.

Oy. 

There's no way I'm going to be able to offer a single explanation for bad academic writing beyond the jargonese.  That said, I'll suggest that many of the tropes that editors don't like about academic writing are actually an effort at hedging.  The classic academic answer to whether something will happen is, "It depends."  In academic journals, political scientists can articulate all of the qualifications, exceptions, and emendations that come with their central argument. 

This hedging instinct makes it very tricky to convert a scholarly article into something more accessible to the general interest reader.  Editors everywhere want the writer to get to the point with clear, forceful prose.  Academics are a bit leery of the declarative statements that get editors all hot and bothered -- because the simple direct statement is often far more sweeping in scope than the academic's original argument.  This is a natural tension, and one that breeds resentment on both sides. 

I'm just here to play peacekeeper.  [Me too!!--ed.]

One of my favorite passages of fiction comes from Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: 

It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian 'chinanto/mnigs' which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan 'tzjin-anthony-ks' which kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.

What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.

As someone in transition from being a young structural IR theorist to an old one, I've now seen enough to recognize when certain patterns begin to recur. For example, I've now read enough articles about the North Korea's Worker Party Congress to know the following:

1) This was a Very Big Deal

2) Kim Jong Il's family got some promotions

3) It is impossible to write an article about North Korea without quoting either Andrei Lankov or Victor Cha.

And after reading all of this, I can now state with confidence the following: no one knows exactly what the f*** is going to happen in North Korea once Kim Jong Il dies. There are plausible stories that can be spun any which way. But no one really knows.

I hereby encourage all young political scientists to get excited about this Party Congress and convince me that something very important and of profound significance was revealed in the past 48 hours. 

I confess that I haven't yet read all of Robin Marantz Henig's 8,000 word New York Times Magazine essay on the extended adolescence of twentysomethings because I have a life I need to clip my toenails I don't care oh, OK, I care a little but I'm too inured to generational politics to read 8,000 words on it of a variety of reasons. Instead, I've been reading (and enjoying) Peter Beinart's The Icarus Syndrome:  A History of American Hubris [Hey, what the hell happened to your late summer reading list?--ed. I've read some of them, but since I've long ago left my twenties, I've determined that I'm allowed to discard any leisure book that does hold my interest after thirty pages.]

Henig's essay and Beinart's book are linked in that they both are talking about generational cohorts and how their experiences affect their thinking going forward. The Icarus Syndrome follows multiple generations of foreiogn policy thinkers who were seared by formative experiences (mostly wars) and how their initial enthusiasms and/or mistakes colored their foreign policy views going forward. 

I bring this up because I wonder whether the current generation of millennial twentysomethings will develop a worldview about international relations that transcends party and clique. If that happened, it would profoundly shape the contours of American foreign policy starting next decade. 

As I think about it, here are the Millennials' foundational foreign policy experiences: 

1)  An early childhood of peace and prosperity -- a.k.a., the Nineties;

2)  The September 11th attacks;

3)  Two Very Long Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq;

4)  One Financial Panic/Great Recession;

5)  The ascent of China under the shadow of U.S. hegemony. 

From these experiences, I would have to conclude that this generation should be anti-interventionist to the point of isolationism. Then again, I'm looking at this through my own irony-drenched Gen-X eyes. 

I'm curious to hear from twentysomethings in the comments -- what are the foreign policy lessons that you can draw from your upbringing? I'm also curious what lessons twentysomethings in other countries can draw from their own formative experiences.  

We've hit the eighteen-month mark of the Obama presidency, which means that articles like this one are going to start appearing with more and more frequency:

Linda Douglass slept nearly 12 hours the day after she left her job as a communications aide at the White House. And the day after that and the day after that. It took two weeks until she finally felt rested.

“I got to the point where I was almost traumatized by how hard I was working and how much stress I was feeling all the time,” Ms. Douglass recalled.

When she resigned, she said: “I felt like a real burden was lifted from my shoulders. I was really surprised how exhausted I was when I left.”

Eighteen months into President Obama’s term, some of the first-generation team that arrived with him at the White House are moving on. One by one, usually with little fanfare, they have turned in White House badges and BlackBerrys to rejoin the outside world, some eagerly seeking the exit, others unhappily shown the door.

Even in calmer times, the White House is a pressure cooker that can quickly burn out the most idealistic aides, but it may be even more so in an administration that inherited an economic collapse and two wars — and then decided to overhaul the nation’s health care system for good measure. Add to that the nonstop, partisan intensity of the e-mail-Internet-cable era, and it takes a toll.

The article focuses on White House officials in particular, but this problem extends to the cabinet departments as well.  Executive branch burnout is a bipartisan phenomenon (no matter what Victor David Hanson thinks), and as the article notes, the real-time news cycle is only making things worse.  This is particularly true on the foreign policy beat.  Even if it's 3 AM in Washington, it's 6 PM somewhere else, and someone is doing something that will require an American response. 

In my experience, most normal people can survive this kind of policy pressure cooker for 18-24 months before losing it just a little bit.  From selection effects, we know that high-ranking policymakers on either side of the aisle can process greater quantities of coffee more efficiently than the rest of us are mentally and physically prepared for longer terms of service.  Still, after four years, even policy principals will find their brains going to mush (as one professor-turned-policy-principal put it to me, your stock of intellectual capital starts to erode the moment you enter public office). 

On its own, this phenomenon wouldn't be that big of a deal -- indeed, some personnel churn is likely a good thing, prevents groupthink and all that.  The problem is that this trend is intersecting with another one -- the increasing length of time it takes to appoint and confirm high-level personnel (and I'd just like to thank the Senate for making my point today).  With greater fixed costs involved in vetting and sheparding people through the confirmation process, presidents will be exceedingly reluctant to let these people go, which means that many of them will stay on for longer than perhaps they should. 

There's no magic bullet here, but it's a problem that's going to fester until some cabinet official decides that they've had enough and take the emergency exit. 

UPDATE:  James Joyner wonders how much of the burnout problem is self-inflicted, a West Wingization of the West Wing:

Some of this is, I think, a spillover from the “West Wing” television program.  It reinforced the mindset that, if you weren’t killing yourself, you weren’t working hard enough.   And it’s just nonsense.

National Security Advisor Jim Jones was getting sniped at in the press by subordinates annoyed that he clocked out at a reasonable hour most nights and had the temerity to go for a run during his lunch breaks.  His retort, basically, was that anyone working 12 hour days was probably pretty inefficient.

I’m with Jones (disclosure: formerly my boss’ boss).   Sure, there are legitimate crises that require burning the midnight oil.  But, contrary to the mythology of Washington, every damned thing isn’t a crisis.

But, alas, we have a mutually reinforcing arms race where staffers compete with one another to see who can get in earliest and stay latest.  And the culture also dictates that, if the boss is there, no one else can go home.  That, even if the thing the boss is doing doesn’t require additional staff support.

The upshot of all this isn’t just burnout but bad decision-making. 

Joyner might be right, but I'd point out that based on first-hand accounts of pre-West Wing West Wing staffers, this is not a new problem 

 My dear Mr. Schweizer,

Thanks for your response to my note.  You write:

Of course it’s legitimate to ask questions about supporting evidence for stories we post on Big Peace.  But to call Big Peace ”unadulterated horses***t”?   Is that your habit when you believe an opponent lacks evidence?  Why not simply ask some questions?.... 

I do find it curious that you argue since Soros is “at best ambivalent and at worst disappointed” with Obama that means he doesn’t have much influence.   Surely you are politically sophisticated enough to know that there is a difference between the two.  You may be too young to recall (I’m not saying this as a slight) but conservatives were disappointed with Reagan early on in his first term because they felt he didn’t go far enough.  Does that mean conservatives lacked influence on Reagan?   Ditto for the administration of George W. Bush.    Read Kissinger’s memoirs and you will find plenty of examples of his disappointment with Richard Nixon.

You might not be persuaded–that’s fine.  But why condemn an entire website?....

I can’t help but peek at your letter to Mr. Moriarty and note your suggestion that you would welcome a whole new set of critical readers to your blog.  Do you actually mean it?  Or is this wordplay?

To answer your queries: 

1) To be honest, if someone writes a post long on accusations and conspiracies but short on supporting evidence, yeah, I'm pretty much gonna call it unadulterated horses**t.  In neither Moriarty's initial post, nor in his follow-up letter does he provide a scintilla of evidence to back up his factual claims.  If you go by Harry Frankfurt's definition of bulls**t, Moriarty's post appears to fit the bill.  According to Frankfurt, if someone simply doesn't care whether what they are saying is true or false, then they're generating bulls**t.  Based on Moriarty's output to date, it qualifies as bulls**t.  I could debate the fine distinctions between horses**t and bulls**t fr hours, but for these purposes, the two terms are one and the same. 

2)  Am I condemning the entire Big Peace website?  No. if you re-read my original post, I said the entire site would deserve this appellation if Moriarty's writings were characteristic of the rest of Big Peace's output.  Consider this a warning shot across the bow - if your job is to edit Big Peace's output, then I think you erred in not using a firmer editorial hand towards Mr. Moriarty.  

3)  With regard to influence, perhaps we have a problem with terminology.  I think you're confusing "influence" with the Svengali-like properties that Moriarty seems to ascribe to Soros.  He repeatedly used the Kissinger/Nixon parallel, and that simply doesn't hold up.  Kissinger had daily access to Nixon - I hope you'll agree that Soros has had nowhere near that much communication with Obama.  Has Soros influenced Obama?  Probably, but one could argue that conservatives have influenced policy outcomes more.  Without implacable  GOP opposition, for example, I'm quite confident that the February 2009 stimulus package would have topped $1 trillion.  The difference is that Moriarty characterized Soros as Obama's political sherpa - and, again, to repeat, there is zero evidence that this is the case. 

4)  On whether I "would welcome a whole new set of critical readers" -- please, scan through my comments on a garden-variety post.  I have plenty of readers who disagree with me -- in fact, I take great pride in having the most contrarian group of readers in the foreign policy blogosphere.  So yes, criticism is always welcomed. 

I'll be sure to check Big Peace on the site from time to time to see if something link-worthy comes up.  Until then, welcome to the foreign policy blogosphere:

Sincerely,

Daniel W. Drezner 

Mitt Romney wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post earlier this week calling the New START Treaty Obama's "worst foreign policy mistake yet."  This prompted a fair amount of blowback.  The New York Times' Peter Baker and Slate's Fred Kaplan tore Romney a new one dissected the substance of Romney's argument and found it wanting.  Senator John Kerry wrote a WaPo op-ed the next day that had a pretty contemptuous conclusion: 

I have nothing against Massachusetts politicians running for president. But the world's most important elected office carries responsibilities, including the duty to check your facts even if you're in a footrace to the right against Sarah Palin. More than that, you need to understand that when it comes to nuclear danger, the nation's security is more important than scoring cheap political points.

Now reading through all of this, it seems pretty clear that Romney's substantive critique is weak tea.  Objecting to the content of a treaty preamble is pretty silly.  Claiming that the Russians could put ICBMs on their bombers because of the treaty indicates Romney's ghost-writer doesn't know the first thing about the history of nuclear weapons some holes in the research effort. 

Putting the substantive objections aside, there are some interesting implications to draw from this kerfuffle.  First, START will be an easy test of the remaining power of the foreign policy mandarins.  As Time's Michael Crowley points out, START has the support of former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and James Baker, former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, former National Security Advisers Brent Scowcroft and Stephen Hadley, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Senator Richard Lugar. 

If the Obama administration can't get Senate ratification of START despite the bipartisan support of the foreign policy community, well, it suggests that the foreign policy community doesn't have the political capital it once did.  I posited earlier this year that START would pass because it was pretty unobtrusive and wouldn't play a big role in political campaigns.  If GOP senators think differently, however, then you can kiss any foreign policy initiative that requires congressional approval bye-bye. 

This could seriously hamper U.S. foreign policy.  Politically, Romney was wise to pick on START, because its importance is not in the arms control.  Boosters like Kerry will talk about START like its the greatest thing since sliced bread, when in point of fact it's a modest treaty that yields modest gains on the arms control front.  No, START matters because its a signal of better and more stable relations with Moscow (much in the same way that NAFTA was not about trade so much as about ending a century-long contentious relationship with Mexico). 

So even if Romney gets chewed up and spit out by the foreign policy mandarins, there's a way in which he'll win no matter what.  By belittling the treaty, Romney will get its defenders to inflate its positive attributes.  This will force analysts to say that "both sides have exaggerated their claims," putting Romney on par with the foreign policy mandarins. 

Developing... in a bad way for the mandarins. 

UPDATE:  Barron YoungSmith makes a similar point over at TNR.  He's even more pessimistic than I am: 

[T]he responsible Republican foreign policy establishment is not coming back. Mandarins like George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker, who have all testified or written on behalf of the START treaty—calling it an integral, uncontroversial way of repairing the bipartisan arms-control legacy that sustained American foreign policy all the way up until the George W. Bush administration—are going to be dead soon (or they've drifted into the service of Democrats). The people who will take their place will be from a generation of superhawks, like John Bolton, Liz Cheney, and Robert Joseph, who are virulently opposed to the practice of negotiated arms control. Mitt Romney, though a moderate from Michigan, is not going to be the second coming of Gerald Ford.

Well.... this might be true, if you think Mitt Romney has his finger on the pulse of the GOP voter.  Based on past experience, however, Mitt Romney has never been able to find that pulse. 

Still developing....

As Foreign Policy continues to add content, I have two fears.  First, at this rate, I'll have to stop reading off-site material just so I can stay up-to-date with all of Foreign Policy's stuff.  Second, I fear I might be reluctant to criticize FP content -- even though no one at FP has ever whispered such a thing. 

With all that said, I found Peter Beinart's Think Again essay about Reagan to be well worth reading.... well, except for two things. 

First, Beinart is too soft on Reagan when he talks about the latter being soft on terror.  Beinart mentions the withdrawal of U.S. Marines following the 1983 Hezbollah bombing in Beirut.  He then observes: 

In 1985, after a U.S. Navy diver was shot in the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, Reagan once again channeled John Wayne as he vowed, "America will never make any concessions to terrorists." But within months, he was not only making concessions, he was selling anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Iranian "moderates" in the hope that they would use their influence to help free Americans taken hostage by Hezbollah in Beirut.

Beinart fails to mention that the Reagan administration essentially capitulated to the hostage-takers on the TWA flight.  Actually, they got the Israelis to capitulate for them: 

In what was widely perceived as an implicit, never explicit, quid pro quo, the hostages started being released by the hijackers, followed some days after by Israel starting to free some of its hundreds of Shiite prisoners. At the time, U.S. officials denied there was a deal and said Israel had already committed to releasing the prisoners.

The second problem is that Beinart elides the biggest reason why Reagan's actual legacy doesn't quite match Reagan's legacy in the eyes of conservatives:  the extent to which Reagan was constrained by his staff.  Whether true or not, the perception by conservatives at the time was that Ronald Reagan wanted to pursue a more hawkish foreign policy, but those damn moderates James Baker and George Schultz wouldn't let him.  Hence the birth of the phrase "let Reagan be Reagan!" 

Now, how much of this was just Michael Deaver's clever PR and how much of this is true remains an open question.  Nevertheless, this perception allows both neoconservatives and Tea Party activists to believe that their preferred foreign policy represents the "true Reagan." 

Everybody -- and by everybody, I mean FP --  is getting hot and bothered by this section of Peter Baker's New York Times story: 

If there is an Obama doctrine emerging, it is one much more realpolitik than his predecessor’s, focused on relations with traditional great powers and relegating issues like human rights and democracy to second-tier concerns. He has generated much more good will around the world after years of tension with Mr. Bush, and yet he does not seem to have strong personal friendships with many world leaders.

“Everybody always breaks it down between idealist and realist,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. “If you had to put him in a category, he’s probably more realpolitik, like Bush 41,” the first President George Bush, Mr. Emanuel said.

He added, “He knows that personal relationships are important, but you’ve got to be cold-blooded about the self-interests of your nation.”

Stephen G. Rademaker, a former official in the George W. Bush administration, said: “For a president coming out of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, it’s remarkable how much he has pursued a great power strategy. It’s almost Kissingerian. It’s not very sentimental. Issues of human rights do not loom large in his foreign policy, and issues of democracy promotion, he’s been almost dismissive of.”

Well, a couple of thoughts.  First, the idea of George H.W. Bush disdaining personal relationships is somewhat absurd.  Bush 41 was notorious for his thank you cards and supersized Rolodex.  On the margins, personal rapport among leaders does count for something, so this certainly helped Bush advance the national inrest. 

So that makes Bush different from Obama, right?  Well, let's click over to Scott Wilson's story in today's Washington Post now, shall we? 

[I]n convening his first international summit -- the largest on a single issue in Washington history -- [Obama] focused more squarely on his relationship with world leaders. He slapped backs, kissed cheeks and met one on one with more than a dozen heads of state, leavening his appeal to shared security interests with a more personal diplomacy.

The approach marked a shift for Obama as he seeks to translate his popularity abroad into concrete support from fellow leaders for his foreign policy agenda, most urgently now in his push for stricter sanctions against Iran.

"He's in charge, he's chairing the meetings, and this is where his personality plays a big part," said Pierre Vimont, the French ambassador to the United States, who compared Obama's role during the summit to the way he led the bipartisan health-care meeting at Blair House in February....

Obama's attention to his guests began on the summit's opening night, when he spent more than an hour and a half greeting the 46 foreign leaders and three heads of international organizations he invited.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom administration officials describe as high on the list of the European leaders Obama most admires, received a kiss on each cheek at the final bilateral meeting.

Obama bowed formally to Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. He used both hands to shake the hands of some leaders and joked with others.

David Miliband, Britain's foreign secretary, said such personal diplomacy is "quite important" at summits, especially one about an issue he said is "often seen as administrative."

"When Obama stands up and says 'My friend Dmitry Medvedev' or 'My friend Nicolas Sarkozy,' he's right, and that's important," Miliband said. "He's made a number of friends of world leaders, and I think that's a testament to why so many arrived to take part in this."

Wow, so it really is George H.W. Obama, right? 

As someone who thinks George H.W. Bush has been vastly underrated, I'd love to say yes.  But this gets confusing to your humble blogger.  After all, some have argued that Obama is really no different than George W. Bush.  I'm also pretty sure I've read somewhere, way back in early 2010, that Obama is really Jimmy Carter.  So I'm not sure  this comparison can or should stick. 

Moving from personalities to ideas, the realist/idealist divide, you still wind up with a muddle.  Bob Kagan is right to say that Obama's desire for a nuclear-free world is about as idealistic as one can get.  Similarly, Obama's affirmation of multilateralism doesn't seem terribly realist either.  On the other hand, his policies towards great power rivals like Russia and China, and dependent allies like Israel and Afghanistan, seem pretty damn realist.  Much like his Nobel Peace Prize address, the Obama administration's latest foray into the less shallow waters of international relations theory offers a sliver of support to all major IR approaches. 

Which box you put him in, I suspect, depends on which policy dimension you think matters most.  Human rights advocates will use the r-word; fans of nuclear deterrence will use the i-word.  As someone concerned with the management of great power politics, I'd be comfortable calling Obama an realist, but I'm biased  -- I speculated that this was the approach the post-Bush president would be forced to pursue. 

Last week, ABC announced that foreign policy correspondent extraordinaire Christiane Amanpour would leave CNN to take over This Week Sunday morning talk show come August.  Yesterday, Washington Post's Tom Shales wrote a sloppy, badly edited story which closed as follows: 

From many angles, it was a bad choice -- one which could create so much consternation that Westin will be forced to withdraw Amanpour's name and come up with another "nominee" for the job. That would hardly be a tragedy -- considering how many others deserve it more than she does.

A bunch of bloggers and commentators jumped on Shales, accusing him of anti-Iranian bias and poor reporting/framing of the story.   The first charge is a stretch, but the second charge holds up. In a chat, Shales reveals his preference even more blatantly, writing that, "I think Christiane is one of the most over-rated and hyped personalities of our day" and suggesting she's had a bad-hair year. 

Sweeping away the silliness, the question I find interesting is whether a This Week-style Sunday morning talk show can pivot more towards foreign policy and still generate ratings/buzz/interest. That certainly seems to be ABC's intent: 

Amanpour, in an interview, said she intended to increase the focus on foreign affairs on the Sunday-morning program. Previous host George Stephanopoulos made his insider's knowledge of Washington the show's hallmark.

The challenge for Amanpour will be to strike a balance between international and domestic policy debates while continuing to satisfy an audience that has come to expect large doses of inside-the-Beltway skinny and analysis of U.S. politics. If Amanpour can attract new viewers -- those who normally don’t tune in to the Sunday-morning news shows -- it would be a boost for ABC News, which has lost ratings momentum for some of its key programs....

In announcing her hiring, ABC News President David Westin said: “All of us know how much the international and the domestic have come to affect one another – whether it’s global conflict, terrorism, humanitarian crises or the economy. And our international reporting has long been a hallmark of ABC News, part of the legacy Peter Jennings left for us.”

Westin hinted to Washington insiders that, though their importance to the show would not be diminished, “This Week” would attempt to depart from the worn format of left/right political debates.

Christiane will bring the international and the domestic together," Westin said. "Our audience has come to us for years to see differing points of views expressed in intelligent and compelling ways; now the different points of view will be expanded beyond partisan politics alone."

As an world politics wonk, I really, really hope this works. The Sunday morning talk shows started to blur together long ago in my eyes, so anything distinctive is welcome.  Anything distinctive and focusing on foreign affairs/international relations is even more welcome.  Amanpour might have the celebrity to attract the kind of viewers who long to watch as many ADM commercials as possible see a civil discussion of the connections between America and the world.  If everyone else does generic inside-the-Beltway stuff, This Week might find a nice sinecure for itself on the international front. 

That said, I'm skeptical that it will work, for two reasons. First, most Americans just don't care that much about foreign policy -- particularly right now. I'm not saying that's a good thing, I'm just saying that it's true. 

Second, I'm not sure that the number of foreign policy wonks who ordinarily wouldn't watch This Week but might tune in now will compensate for the drop in those uninterested in foreign affairs. Last year, This Week attracted 2.3 million viewers, while Fareed Zakarias's GPS show attracted less than 200,000 viewers. There are numerous reasons for this, but one of them might be that world politics wonks don't watch much television about world politics.  (full disclosure:  I haven't watched This Week since having children David Brinkley left). 

Still, I'll be rooting for Amanpour to succeed, and will even offer one nugget of advice -- put Laura Rozen on the roundtable the moment you take over the show. She's a great bridge between the substance of foreign policy and the machinations of the foreign policy community. 

Andrew Exum has posted a response to my post -- and a bevy of others -- regarding his manifesto for quantitative analysis. 

Shorter Exum:  "the posts on this blog are meant to be light and irreverent.... I am sorry that folks got their proverbial panties in a twist about a post that was meant to be funny."  He then outsourced a more substantive response to Scott Wedman, who said eminently reasonable things.

According to Spencer Ackerman, Exum also pwned me. 

Some are dissatisfied with this response.  As for me... meh.  If Exum's original post really was intended as a humorous lark, then so be it.  I apologize for misinterpreting and overreacting  -- though I gotta say, the bulk of his recent posts aren't exactly overflowing with wit. 

Steve Walt alerts us to a curious post by CNAS' Andrew Exum -- a.k.a., Abu Muqawama -- intended to create a "manifesto... for those using quantitative analysis to study war." 

Steve thinks these are "wise words indeed."  I think... well, let's go through Exum's rules, shall we? 

War is a human endeavor. I recognize that it is a phenomenon that does not conform to neat mathematical equations.

Sure.

I will use quantitative analysis in conjunction with theory and qualitative analysis to describe what I see as phenomena in war and peace. I will be honest about the limits of both my theory and my analysis

Of course.  Good job nailing the compulsories so far. 

In war and peace, the variables are infinite, and not everything can be measured or assigned a numerical value

Um... the variables are infinite on just about every dimension of life.  No operationalization, econometric equation or formal model is going to completely capture reality.  I guarantee you, however, that no qualitiative analysis will perfectly capture reality either (I will further note that qualitative scholars often fool themselves into believing this is not the case, which gets them into all sorts of trouble -- but some quant jockeys commit this sin as well).  This doesn't mean you give up on explanation -- it just means you acknowledge the limitations of your approach. 

I will not use numbers to signify what are fundamentally qualitative assessments without acknowledging to my reader that I have done so in order to satisfy a departmental requirement, gain tenure, or get published in the APSR. Or because I have been in graduate school for so long that I have forgotten how to effectively write in prose.

Yeah, this is where Exum's manifesto departs from the land of common sense and enters the world of unadulterated horses**t.    First, I've  occasionally used this kind of data, and I sure as hell didn't do it to get tenure -- I did it because I thought it was a good way to test my explanation.  Second, whether someone can write clear and crisp prose has nothing to do with whether they use quantitative methods or not.  That Exum seems not to know this is the first sign that we're dealing with some very muddled thinking.  

I recognize there are no mathematical equations in Vom Kriege and that it is nonetheless unlikely that my legacy will transcend that of Clausewitz.

Um... I could provide the undisputed, univerally-hailed-by-all explanation for why the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and  my legacy wouldn't transcend Clausewitz.  Or Thucydides.  But that's a really high bar to set. 

Just to turn things around, there are plenty of mathematical equations in Strategy of Conflict and it is nevertheless likely that Exum's -- or your -- legacy will never transcend that of Thomas Schelling. 

And finally: 

I recognize that very few squad leaders in the 10th Mountain Division have ever taken a course in statistics yet probably know more about the conduct and realities of war than I do.

I think there is some truth to this statement.  It is also a fair statement, however, that very few graduate students in security studies have ever served a day in uniform yet probably know more about the causes of war than those squad leaders do.  

As Drew Conway points out, it takes a special kind of chutzpah for someone who admits that they don't "get" quantitative methods to write something like this.   

Be sure to read the rest of Conway's post, as well as Cato's Justin Logan. 

UPDATE:  Also check out Kindred Winecoff and Henry Farrell on Exum's post as well.  Farrell's concluding point about the value of social science is worth repeating in full:

In my opinion... the most important lesson that the social sciences have to offer to policy makers - be careful about selection bias. Policy debates in Washington DC are rife with selection effects, with advocates highlighting convenient cases for a particular policy argument and hiding inconvenient ones. I’m co-teaching a big MA intro course on IR theory and international affairs practice with a practitioner this semester. If I can get this one single point across to my students, so that they really understand it, I think I’ll have given them good value for money.

Quite true.  Sophisticated qualitiative scholars are quite adept at coping with this issue.  But there's a lot of hackwork that misses this point entirely. 

Starting tomorrow, your humble blogger will be attending the International Studies Association annual meeting in New Orleans.  The theme for this year is "Theory vs. Policy? Connecting Scholars and Practitioners."  I'll be on one of the theme panels. 

In that vein, let me relate a parable fI witnessed a few weeks back.  I was at a small conference devoted to the idea of getting scholars and policymakers in the same room to talk about U.S. policy towards a Great Power That Shall Remain Nameless.  The idea was that policymakers could highlight issues that professors might have overlooked and vice versa.

Everything was going along swimmingly until one of the policymakers in the room complained that some of the academic memos that had been prepared for the conference were too long to be read by policymakers -- which was true, except that wasn't the purpose of these memos.  In response, a Smart and Well Respected Political Scientist went off on a serious and righteous rant.  Why didn't policymakers or staffers in DC actually read what experts thought about a particular issue?  It wasn't just that political scientists were being put on the sidelines -- we were  being completely ignored. 

Well, this provoked a rollicking good debate, and afterwards, many of us gathered around the Smart and Well Respected Political Scientist to applaud those remarks.  We then chatted about how political scientists could enter the policymaking fray with a bit more vim and vigor.  Someone suggested that this might be easier if younger scholars felt that they could engage in public debate without the fear of disapproval from the profession.  At which point the Smart and Well Respected Political Scientist said something to the effect of, "Oh, no.  Once someone has tenure, and has a full publishing pedigree, then they can start making a few public pronouncements."

And that, my friends, is a big reason why there's a gap between policymakers and scholars. 

Academics are creatures of habit.  Political scientists are socialized to focus exclusively on peer-reviewed publications and writing only for fellow academics during their formative years in the profession.  If they're lucky, it will take most political scientists anywhere from 10-15 years to earn a Ph.D. and a tenured position.  It's ridiculous to expect them to suddenly exercise mental muscles that have atrophied for decades.  That's like asking a world-class basketball player to suddenly take up baseball again because they loved the sport as a kid. 

This situation is also counterproductive to the policymaking community.  Senior scholars have obvious advantages in lending an ear to policymakers -- greater experience, a deeper familiarity with the topic, etc.  That said, junior scholars and even graduate students also have advantages.  They're usually hyperaware of recent trends in the literature.  They write and read more quickly.  They have the flexibility of mind to connect seemingly unrelated topics.  They might retain some familiarity with non-jargony words.  Because of their minimal stature, peers will be far more willing -- gleeful, even -- to tell them when they are full of s**t.  This doesn't mean they're going to be better at doing policy-relevant research, but they do possess comparative advantages that harried, administration-burdened senior scholars might lack.

Let's be clear -- political scientists are not the only ones to blame on this issue.  This isn't the only reason for the gap between policymakers and professors.  And there are great and good reasons for academics to avoid excessive coziness with policymakers.  Still, until and unless political science does not frown upon non-tenured scholars offering a voice in public policy debates -- be it through advising policymakers, writing op-eds, or blogging -- then the Smart and Well Respected Political Scientist will continue to be frustrated.

As I've said recently, for reasons beyond our control, policymakers are currently more interested in what political scientists have to say.  It would be nice if my profession knew how to respond. 

Steve Walt effectively vivisects Adam Lawther's op-ed yesterday on the alleged positive externalities that an Iranian nuclear bomb would have on the Middle East and American foreign policy.  Rather than dogpile on, I'm going to go meta again. 

I'm intrigued by what op-ed editor David Shipley is trying to do on the Iran debate.  Lawther's op-ed is hardly the first strange op-ed on Iran to appear in the past few months.  We've also had Alan Kuperman's analysis for why bombing Iran is such a good idea, and the Leverett's pay-no-attention-to-the-protestors-behind-the-curtain argument for enhanced engagement with the current Iranian leadership. 

As the links above suggest, I'm not a fan of any of these arguments.  That said, I am a fan of having these arguments inserted into the public discussion over Iran.  Ever since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a common lament has been that was no public debate about the wisdom of different policy options.  Both foreign policy mooseheads and scholars have highlighted this pre-invasion consensus.  These analyses might be somewhat exaggerated, but I think it would be difficult to deny that in the opinion pages of the major newspapers, the deck was somewhat stacked in favor of military action. 

My hunch is that Shipley is thinking:  "Won't Get Fooled Again"  He wants as heterogeneous an array of views as possible as the Iran situation develops. 

There is something laudable about this if it's true -- it's exactly what the Times op-ed page should be doing as a foreign policy crisis unfolds.  My only concern is the caliber of reasoning in these op-eds.  They are, as Walt put it, "silly arguments."  On the other hand, if these ideas are vetted and then shot down, maybe the foreign policy community actually knows what it's talking about this time around. 

Marc Lynch and Andrew Sullivan both have posts up today that share a similar theme.  Marc looks at Obama's effort to jumpstart the Israel/Palestine peace talks, while Sullivan looks at the efforts to close the Guantanamo prisons.  Both Lynch and Sully make the same points:

1)  These are good ideas;

2)  One year in, these initiatives are completely bogged down;

3)  A key reason they've been bogged down is the fecklessness of the Obama administration.

Well.... maybe.  External circumstanves play a role here as well.  I'm sympathetic to generating forward momentum for Israel/Palestine peace talks, but it strikes me that people who bewail the lack of progress on this issue suffer from the liberal variant of Matt Yglesias' Green Lantern Theory of International Relations.  Given the state of Israeli public opinion and the state of Palestinian political coherence,  a Netanyahu-led Israeli regime was not going to acquiesce to outside pressure.  An Obama administration that tried such pressure and failed would actually be in a weaker position than they are now. 

Similarly, on Gitmo, when Obama seemed to push forward on this issue, he ran up against the political reality that Americans like closing Gitmo down in theory more than in practice.  And Obama then acted... politically. 

What I find striking is that many people who consider themselves part of the "reality-based community" now want the Obama administration to absorb the Bush administration's ontological beliefs and thereby create their own realities. 

In a manner of speaking, the Bush team did have a small point.  What the Bush administration excelled at was making irreversible policy decisions.  You can't uninvade Iraq or Afghanistan -- and, as Obama is finding out, undoing Gitmo is much harder than it souds on the campaign stump.  There are some policy decisions that, once they are made, are so path dependent that they are either impossible or really difficult to reverse. 

The thing is, I don't see a lot on Obama's foreign policy agenda that qualifies (though Gitmo might).   Policy initiatives that require multilateral cooperation are pretty easy to undo.  So unless there's buy-in from other key actors, there's only so much the Obama administration can do on things like Israel/Palestine. 

Which is Reason #451 why Obama won't be turning to foreign policy post-SOTU.