A. Iain Johnston has the lead article in the latest issue of International Security.  It's available for free right now, and it's quite the doozy.  Entitled "How New and Assertive is China's New Assertiveness?", Johnston picks apart the claim made by many (including your humble blogger) that China's post-2008 foreign policy represented anything all that much out of the ordinary.  From the abstract: 

There has been a rapidly spreading meme in U.S. pundit and academic circles since 2010 that describes China's recent diplomacy as “newly assertive.” This “new assertiveness” meme suffers from two problems. First, it underestimates the complexity of key episodes in Chinese diplomacy in 2010 and overestimates the amount of change. Second, the explanations for the new assertiveness claim suffer from unclear causal mechanisms and lack comparative rigor that would better contextualize China's diplomacy in 2010. An examination of seven cases in Chinese diplomacy at the heart of the new assertiveness meme finds that, in some instances, China's policy has not changed; in others, it is actually more moderate; and in still others, it is a predictable reaction to changed external conditions. In only one case—maritime disputes—does one see more assertive Chinese rhetoric and behavior.

Johnston has forgotten more about Chinese foreign policy than I will ever learn, so I'd encourage you to give the whole piece a read.  My take is that I'm actually not that far apart from Johnston.  As he notes, China's foreign policy had its share of belligerent episodes prior to 2008.  He also acknowledges that there has been some movement by China on a couple of issues, including the maritime disputes. He also omits any discussion of some of the cases that I've highlighted on the blog, including the reaction to Liu Xiaobo's Nobel Peace Prize, as well as the kerfuffle with Google. 

What's really interesting, however, is the second part of that abstract: 

The speed and extent with which the newly assertive meme has emerged point to an understudied issue in international relations—namely, the role that online media and the blogosphere play in the creation of conventional wisdoms that might, in turn, constrain policy debates. The assertive China discourse may be a harbinger of this effect as a Sino-U.S. security dilemma emerges (emphasis added).

Whoa there!!  Bloggers are constraining policy debates? 

Here's the relevant passage from the article itself (p. 46-47): 

The conventional description of Chinese diplomacy in 2010 seems to point to a new, but poorly understood, factor in international relations—namely, the speed with which new conventional wisdoms are created, at least within the public sphere, by the interaction of the internet-based traditional media and the blogosphere. One study has found, for instance, that on some U.S. public policy issues, the blogosphere and the traditional media interact in setting the agenda for coverage for each other. Moreover, on issues where this interaction occurs, much of the effect happens within four days. Other research suggests that political bloggers, for the most part, do not engage in original reporting and instead rely heavily on the mainstream media for the reproduction of alleged facts. The media, meanwhile, increasingly refers to blogs as source material. The result is, as one study put it, “a news source cycle, in which news content can be passed back and forth from media to media.” Additional research suggests that the thematic agendas for political campaigns and politicians themselves are increasingly influenced by blogosphere-media interaction.

Together, this research suggests that the prevailing framework for characterizing Chinese foreign policy in recent years may be relevant for the further development (and possible narrowing) of the policy discourse among media, think tank, and policy elites. As the agenda-setting literature suggests, this is not a new phenomenon. What is new, however, is the speed with which these narratives are created and spread—a discursive tidal wave, if you will. This gives first movers with strong policy preferences advantages in producing and circulating memes and narratives in the electronic media or in high-profile blogs, or both. This, in turn, further reduces the time and incentives for participants in policy debates to conduct rigorous comparative analysis prior to participation.

And here I'm going to have to disagree with Johnston a bit.   On a day in which the mainstream media demonstrated a truly excellent ability to spread its own misinformation -- and, in response, said mainstream media blamed Twitter -- I'm highly dubious that the blogs play that much of a causal role.  To be sure, I do think blogs can sometimes perpetuate falsehoods.  That said, most of Johnston's evidence for blog effects comes from domestic policy, and methinks the foreign policy media ecosystem functions a wee bit differently. 

If I had to wager why the misperceptions about China that Johnston enumerates have emerged, I'd hypothesize, in descending order of importance, the following reasons: 

1)  Foreign affairs columnists and international relations analysts who hadn't paid that much attention to China prior to 2008 had no choice but to pay a lot of attention to Beijing after the financial crisis;

2)  Interest groups in the United States that were traditionally predisposed towards a more dovish view of China started feeling burned by Beijing on matters unrelated to security. 

3)  The media likes a trend, and a lot of the incidents that Johnston chronicles took place in rapid-fire fashion from the end of 2009 to the middle of 2010. 

4)  The Obama administration's rebalancing strategy validated the perception that China was doing something different. 

5)  Blogs acted as an amplifier for all of these other trends.

What's ironic about this is that in the article, Johnston properly takes a lot of the conventional wisdom to task for ahistoricism and problematic causal arguments in assessing Chinese behavior after 2008.  I'd wager, however, that Johnston has done the exact same thing with respect to the foreign policy blogosphere. 

What do you think?   

Margaret Thatcher has passed away. I could try to talk about Thatcher's place as a world historical figure, but let's face it, there's going to be an orgy of columns on that very point over the next week or so -- anything I write on the topic would be second rate at best. I could write about my own memories of living in London during the late Thatcher era, but to be honest, that's not terribly interesting -- it's a tale of fading political popularity and really strident left-wing art. 

So, instead, consider the following two ways in which Thatcher has left a legacy in international relations theory:  

1) Diversionary war. There's a large literature in international relations on the notion of using war against a foreign adversary as a way to distract domestic opposition and/or bolster domestic support for a leader (see Chiozza and Goemans for the latest iteration of this literature). It's a little-known fact, but International Studies Association rules prohibit any paper on this topic from being published without a Thatcher reference.  

I kid, but only barely. The Falklands War represents the paradigmatic case of diversionary war theory for two reasons. First, almost every analysis of the conflicts attributes the Argentine junta's growing domestic unpopularity as a key cause of their decision to launch the conflict (though, of course, it's a bit more complicated than that). Second and more importantly, absent the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher would be remembered as a failed one-term prime minister. Victory over the Argentines in the South Atlantic enabled Thatcher to win re-election.  

In truth, it's far from clear that diversionary war is all that common a practice (if it was, we'd be drowning in conflicts since 2008). The Falklands War, however, does provide the paradigmatic case.

2) The spread of ideas. It's fitting that the New York Times ran a story over the weekend about the boomlet in history about studying the growth of capitalism. Thatcher's role in advancing the spread of free-market ideas to other policymakers was crucial. To explain why free-market capitalism became the pre-eminent idea in economic policymaking over the past few decades, you have to look at Thatcher. She preceded Reagan, becoming the first leader in the developed world to try to change her country's variety of capitalism. Even after Reagan came to power, one could persuasively argue that Thatcher mattered more. As some international political economy scholars have noted, ideas and policies spread much faster when "supporter states" embrace them vigorously rather than reluctantly. Thatcher embraced capitalism with a near-religious fervor, acting as a vanguard for the rest of Europe on this front. For more on the role that Thatcher and her advisors played, see Yergin and Stanislaw's The Commanding Heights, or Jeffry Frieden's Global Capitalism. 

OK, readers, in what other areas of international relations and comparative politics did Margaret Thatcher leave her mark? 

Blogging will be light for the rest of the week, as I'll be attending the International Studies Association annual meeting in San Francisco. 

If you're also attending but new to these things and therefore unsure of what the informal norms are about such events, check out Megan MacKenzie's indispensable ISA Guide to Newbie Graduate Students. Oh, and come attend the First Ever Official ISA Blogging Reception. I'll be there too, and I'm bringing my #TFC12 finalist flask with me!! 

My other piece of advice would be to read Rob Farley's provocative new PS: Political Science and Politics essay, "Complicating the Political Scientist as Blogger." Farley is responding to a 2011 essay by John Sides at the Monkey Cage, which offers what I would label the "standard" narrative about how blogging can be a help rather than a hindrance to good political science -- hell, I wrote something similar to it in 2008. 

Farley considers this standard narrative, ponders it for a second, and then puts all his chips into the middle and raises the stakes: 

Although I appreciate the effort to “just add blogging” to the discipline of political science, I worry that in making blogging safe, Sides gives away too much of what makes it interesting, influential, and fun. Specifically, I have two major objections to Sides’ characterization of blogging in political science. First, the article heralds an effort to discipline the political science blogosphere, establishing metrics for differentiating between “good” blogs that can contribute to (or at least should not be held against) a political science career, and “bad” blogs that do no one any good. In short, Sides’s article served both prescriptive and proscriptive purposes. Second, by emphasizing the “safe” elements of blogging, Sides has left winnings on the table; blogging could play a larger role in political science than he suggests.

Read the whole thing. I have, and I'm still sorting out how I think about it. On the one hand, I think Farley makes a really good point. There are ways in which the "standard" narrative leaves some things out. Let a thousand IR blogs bloom!

On the other hand ... well, I'm leery of advising junior faculty and grad students to throw caution into the wind and blog outside the box, as it were. Blogs are becoming more mainstream in international relations scholarship and political science, but I wouldn't describe them as truly mainstream just yet. So I have some residual caution. 

There's something else, however. If blogs are going to occupy a more central role in the field of political science, then they're inevitably going to be measured, assessed, evaluated, and quantified in any kind of professional assessment. That's what happens when people are hired or promoted in the academy. But for blogging, this is problematic, because the distribution of traffic and linkage in blogs is highly asymmetric. I worry that any kind of assessment will skew against the majority of blogs. More generally, I'm kinda dubious about the metrics we do have to measure blogs. This doesn't mean we shouldn't do it -- but I think we need to be aware of the risks going forward, and I think I'm less sanguine about them than Farley.   

Clearly, technology is changing the way we in IR scholarship do business. We're going to need to figure out what that means in the years ahead. 

Developing...

By now, readers have a pretty good idea of the thesis of my latest book topic: Contra the arguments of many, the system of global economic governance worked pretty well during the 2008 financial crisis, and it's continued to work "well enough" since 2008. 

Furthermore, American leadership is at least partly rsponsible for the system working. Despite bouts of partisan gridlock, the United States government still enacted a plethora of emergency rescue packages (via the 2008 Troubled Assets Relief Program), expansionary fiscal policies (via the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the payroll tax cut, and the extension of the Bush tax cuts), stress tests of large financial institutions, expansionary monetary policy (via interest rate cuts, three rounds of quantitative easing and Operation Twist), and financial regulatory reform (via Dodd-Frank). 

Another area where the U.S. has led the way is reforming IMF governance. Since 2006, the IMF has engaged in two rounds of quota reform so the distribution of power within the institution better reflects the actual distribution of power. A third round is planned for completion in 2014. As Ted Truman explains in this Peterson Institute of International Economics policy brief, U.S. leadership played a crucial role in these negotiations. 

So far, so good for my hypothesis. There's just one problem -- Congress has yet to ratify the last round of quota revisions. Since the reforms can't be enacted without U.S. approvial, this is a thing. According to Truman:

The United States bears substantial responsibility for the current situation. After 15 years in which US administrations of both political parties have pushed aggressively and imaginatively for governance changes in the IMF culminating with the central
US role in shaping the 2010 Seoul package, the United States has failed to implement that package. The rest of the world has been remarkably tolerant of the US delay in acting on the 2010 Seoul IMF reform package, but that patience is running out. US leadership and influence in the IMF is weakening, and thereby the influence of the institution itself. This is the principal reason why it is urgent to enact the pending IMF legislation.

From a US and global perspective there is only downside and no upside in further delay. Doing so would support the IMF as the central institution promoting global economic growth and financial stability, involve no true financial cost to the US taxpayer, and reinforce US leadership and influence in this crucial institution, positioning the United States to continue to lead in negotiating further IMF governance reforms.

Don't take Truman's word on this alone, however. As the Financial Times' Robin Harding reports, a lot of experts are starting to get antsy about the lack of congressional action: 

Almost 100 policy makers and academics have written to the US Congress urging the ratification of crucial reforms of the International Monetary Fund that international leaders agreed more than two years ago.

The signatories argue in an open letter, sent to House of Representatives and Senate leaders on Monday and seen by the Financial Times, that if the US does not sign up it will undermine its authority in negotiations at the G20 and other institutions that govern the world economy.

“Failure to act would diminish the role of the United States in international economic policy making and undermine US efforts to promote growth and financial stability,” the letter says.

Signatories include holders of the top international economic job at the US Treasury under Republican and Democratic administrations. They include Tim Adams, who worked for former president George W. Bush, and Jeffrey Shafer, who was part of the Clinton administration.

I'd say that it's a cruel irony that the United States is the brake on reforms spearheaded by ... the United States, except that by now, savvy readers know that this sort of thing is disturbingly common. 

Does it matter? Well, as much as I love to pooh-pooh the BRICS, they do share one genuine area of consensus -- they want more influence over global governance structures. If they don't get it, there will come a time when they will be both willing and able to set up institutions on their own -- like this one. Which would be a shame for two reasons. First, as a general rule of global economic governance, it's better to have great powers on the inside pissing out rather than the reverse. Second, the IMF has had some good mojo as of late, demonstrating renewed independence from Eurocrats and proposing some nifty policy ideas. 

If Congress stalls this quota reform measure that the executive branches from both parties have negotiated , they will be weakening a U.S.-friendly international institution and inviting potential rivals to set up or bolster alternatives. Which, if you think about, is a really stupid way to run U.S. foreign economic policy. 

More importantly to me, however, it would really f**k up one of my book's hypotheses. Congressional gridlock hasn't sabotaged too much in the way of American global leadership for the past give years. Blocking quota reform would be a pretty big deal, though. It would force me to revise a book chapter, and I really don't want to do that. 

So, in the name of political science, I humbly beseech Congress to pass the damn quota reform bill. 

[Uh, you really think that an appeal to political sciece is gonna work with this crew?!--ed.]  Uh ... in the name of preventing China and its allies from creating a New Anti-American World Order and threatening a global governance gap, I humbly beseech Congress to pass the damn quota reform bill.  [Much better!!--ed.]

A little more than two years ago I wrote a blog post entitled "The End of Power?" After riffing on the subject for a spell, I closed with:

So... we live in a world in which more actors have vetoes over systemic change but no actor has the ability to truly compel change. This leads to lots of talk about "G-zero worlds" and so forth. 

Just to be provocative, however, I wonder if what's truly changed is the extinction of compellence power as we know it. The primary, ne plus ultra tools of compellence require a willingness to kill, jail, or starve a lot of people. Recent flare-ups like Iran in 2009 and Egypt right now suggest that such actions are possible at the domestic level but pretty damn costly; even authoritarian countries flinch at using brute force on a domestic population. Cross-border efforts are even more expensive in terms of both material and reputational costs. 

This isn't the end of power, but it might be the end of one particular dimension of power. I'm not entirely convinced that this supposition is true and am willing/eager to hear counterarguments. That said, I still hereby claim The End of Power as my title, so everyone else just back off, OK?

Well, so much for my claim. Former FP head honcho Moisés Naim has a new book out called... The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be. His argument: 

Power is shifting -- from large, stable armies to loose bands of insurgents, from corporate leviathans to nimble start-ups, and from presidential palaces to public squares. But power is also changing, becoming harder to use and easier to lose. As a result, argues award-winning columnist and former Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím, all leaders have less power than their predecessors, and the potential for upheaval is unprecedented. In The End of Power, Naím illuminates the struggle between once-dominant megaplayers and the new micropowers challenging them in every field of human endeavor. The antiestablishment drive of micropowers can topple tyrants, dislodge monopolies, and open remarkable new opportunities, but it can also lead to chaos and paralysis. Drawing on provocative, original research and a lifetime of experience in global affairs, Naím explains how the end of power is reconfiguring our world.

The originality of the argument -- along with the subtitle -- saves Moisés from some serious legal retribution!! Well, that and he asked me to moderate a panel on the topic with him and Fareed Zakaria at the Council on Foreign Relations. Here's the video.  Enjoy! 

My Twitter feed has been abuzz with a 2009 Justin Logan blog post about the puzzling disconnect between the international relations academy and the foreign policy community in Washington:

[T]he two groups have been wildly at variance in terms of their views on important public policy issues.  Take the Iraq war, for example.  As anyone who was in Washington at the time knows, the FPC was extremely fond of the idea of invading Iraq.  To oppose it was to marginalize oneself for years....

In the academy, meanwhile, there was hardly any debate over Iraq almost 80 percent of IR academics opposed the war. [.pdf] To the extent academics did enter the public debate on the issue, it was to pay for an advertisement in the New York Timeswarning against the war. [.pdf] The only academics who spoke out in favor of the war (to my knowledge, anyway) were IR liberals like Anne-Marie Slaughter, who sought policy positions in Washington....

My sense is that the giant national-security bureaucracy in Washington that has emerged over the last 65 years has shaped incentives in a manner such that it is next-to-impossible to “get ahead” by advocating for restraint.  Put differently, restraint isn’t in anybody’s interest except the country’s, and there’s nobody in Washington representing broad national interests as opposed to their own parochial ones.  Every neoconservative or liberal imperialist in DC has someone’s interests behind them.

Read the whole thing. 

My take:  I'm one of the 20% of academics who (regretfully) supported the Iraq War, so feel free to discount my take.  First of all, I've always been dubious of that 80% figure -- it's based on a survey conducted in 2005 asking what their attitudes were in 2003.  Maybe everyone was honest about this, but I recall a fair number of colleagues voicing some sympathy for Operation Iraqi Freedom in early 2003.  Logan is right to point out the divergence -- I'm just not sure it was as stark as he makes it. 

More generally, methinks Logan is trying to fit a structural explanation onto a more transient divergence.  My explanations for the divergence are based on a more prosaic three-step explanation:

1)  All politicians want to be president;

2)  All members of the foreign policy community want to be a foreign policy principal;

3)  In 2002, what haunted the memory of politicians were the presidential candidates who self-destructed in 1991 for voting against Gulf War I.  Immediately after 9/11, no politician who had a future wanted to be seen as soft on war. 

On the other hand, if Logan is right, then the foreign policy community should be united in dispatching military force at every opportunity since Iraq.  That's not how it's played out, however.  A lot of think-tankers opposed the surge in Iraq, as well as operations in Libya.  I don't see overwhelming support for action in Syria either. 

Logan says he has a longer paper, which I look forward to reading.  But I hope he's able to demonstrate that the gap between the foreign policy community and international relations academy has been long-lasting, and is not merely an artifact of 2002. 

Dan Nexon has sparked some online debate among political scientists about whether our hiring process makes any kind of rational sense.  Dan expresses particular disdain towards the centerpiece of any campus interview, the job talk --  a format in which a job candidate speaks for 30-45 minutes and then fields questions from faculty and grad students in the audience for 30-60 minutes. 

Dan thinks the whole exercise is stupid:

In fact, the job talk is most useful for… assessing the ability of a candidate to give a job talk. The reason we place so much weight on it is that most academics (and I include myself in this category) are too damn lazy pressed for time to skim carefully read candidates’ portfolios. And why should we? It isn’t like there’s a good chance that the person we hire will become lifetime colleagues… Doh!

I’ve heard rumors of other, more rationale systems. Some say that the University of Chicago conducts an intensive proseminar in which the candidate provides introductory remarks and then everyone discusses an article-length piece of research. This strikes me as a plausible alternative to the modal job talk.  But I ask our readers: are there others? And does anyone want to defend the status quo?

OK, first off, for the record, in my experience that's not how the University of Chicago did job talks.  Their process involved some criticism of rational choice theory,  a lot more hot wax and-- but I can't say anything more because of that darn oath of secrecy.

Seriously, though, Dan's post triggered a whole passel of responses.  Tom Pepinsky defended the institution, as did Jeremy Wallace.  Nate Jensen wants to know what's the replacement system.  Nexon responded by sticking to his guns, and Tom Oatley went so far as to declare that technological change had rendered the original motivation for the job talk obsolete. 

I think I have to side with the defenders of the job talk -- or, rather the job talk and Q&A, because the latter part is way more important in my own evaluation of a candidate. 

Dan's claim that it serves no purpose other than giving a job talk seems short-sighted to me.  In part, a job talk is an act of editing.  No one -- well, no one but political theorists -- simply reads their paper verbatim.  They have to organize and select what they believe are the most compelling and crucial parts of their argument.  They also have to pitch it to a level that's wider than their subfield.  An Americanist will know little about Adorno or Agamben; a comparativist is likely to be unfamiliar with work on state legislatures, and a political theorist would have no reason to know much about the Basel Core Principles.  This holds with even more force at an interdisciplinary public policy school like Fletcher or SAIS.  A job talk lets me see whether this candidate will be able to talk to anyone outside of the five other people on the planet who know this specific topic cold. 

If I've read the paper, I'm always curious to see how a candidate crafts his or her presentation.  And if the presenter can't hold my attention, that's a bad sign, because if they can't make their own work compelling, good luck keeping the attention of less interested students with work that's not their own. 

Truthfully, however, the most important part of a job talk to me is not the talk, it's the question and answer session aferwards.  How well can a candidate respond to tough questions?  Stupid questions?  What are the reservoirs of expertise that lie below the surface?  In my professional experience, I can only think of a handful of candidates that blew their chances with the actual job talk.  I can think of a LOT of them, however, that deep-sixed their chances because they couldn't handle good questions.  I'd also add that while I often have questions after reading the paper, I wind up with different questions when I hear the talk -- in no small part because the presentation reveals what the candidate thinks is mportant. 

Good political scientists have to give a LOT of talks in their career -- large lectures to undergraduates, draft paper presentations to graduate students, invited talks at other universities, APSA panels, smaller field conferences, symposium conferences, workshop talks, think tank presentations, and even the occasional public lecture.  In my experience, the job talk is the format that best covers all of these other types of presentations. 

Am I missing anything, fellow political scientists? 

December 25th is a time of love, gifts, prayers... and thinking long and hard about Santa Claus as an actor in world politics.  Sure, one could just compose awesome poems in the holiday spirit -- or one could think seriously about the implications of the jolly fat man for the international system. 

I emailed a few of our gravitas-oozing foreign affairs pundits about the true meaning of Santa in our hyperconnected, globalized world.  Here's what I got in response: 

Ian Bremmer:

Santa is the most damning piece of evidence yet that we live in a G-Zero world.  This stateless actor commands a vast intelligence apparatus, an apparent slave army of little people, and is not above working animals long past their breaking point.  By any stretch of the imagination, he's a rogue actor.  And yet, despite these flagrant violations of international norms, there isn't even a nascent effort to combat, contain or regulate his activities.  The G-20 continues to dither, revealing itself yet again as toothless and pointless.  This would never have happened back when the U.S. was the hegemon!!

Niall Ferguson: 

On this day of Christ's birth, I will tell you something that the New York Times, which is so in the bag for this administration that one of their columnists kept predicting an Obama victory despite overwhelming mispeception to the contrary, will not:  Santa Claus is a force for good in the world.  Developing countries will cling to their indigenous Christmas heroes, foolishly hoping that these local legends can guide their country towards peace and prosperity.  Wake up, rest of the world!!  Yes, Santa can seem a bit domineering with his black-and-white dichotomy of naughty and nice.  Let's face it, however -- those countries that have embraced St. Nick are better off.  If anything, Santa's problem is that he's not being mean enough to the naughtys of the world.  Only when he is prepared to deploy the elves to places like Syria and the Congo will Santa be able to honestly wish all a good night.  I hope ole Saint Nick acts in this expansionist manner -- but I worry that the Obama administration, to distract from the fiscal cliff, will declare some kind of "war" on Christmas.  Food for thought....

Donald Rumsfeld: 

Beltway pundits, serenely sipping their eggnog at those Georgetown Christmas cocktail parties, will offer soothing patter about the merits of a white Christmas and the inherent goodness of Santa Claus.  And other powerful interest groups, like retailers and the Catholic Church, will argue in favor of celebrating the birth of Christ on December 25th.  Some clever liberal pundits will go so far as to point out that it was an American corporation created the modern-day Santa.  Don't let these lobbies fool you -- celebrating Christmas on December 25th and welcoming Santa Claus onto our soil is a breach of American sovereignty that can no longer be tolerated.  Why should Americans celebrate this most American of holidays the same time as everyone else in the world?  Is it American for our government offices to be closed on this day because of some unelected bureaucrat based in that oldest of old Europe cities, Rome??!!  Is it American to have some foreign actor -- a.k.a. Kris Kringle -- make decisions about whether our children have been good or bad?!   Americans don't need some foreign list to determine who's naught and nice.  I believe that there's a document that already takes care of everything we need, and it's called the United States Constitution.  Our elected oficials must take action to protect the Constitution of the United States from these global efforts to affect our daily lives.  We're an exceptional country with exceptional children -- we don't need Santa to tell us what they deserve. 

Jennifer Rubin: 

It is on Christmas more than any other day that we can appreciate how wrong Chuck Hagel would be for the Secretary of Defense position.  The former Senator from Nebraska seems all too willing to compromise in the War on Christmas, suggesting that perhaps "some" public spaces should be free of mangers.  This is fully consistent with Hagel's past waffling on various threats to the American way of life, as evidenced by [MINIONS-- PLEASE INSERT LAZY, INACCURATE HYPERLINK HERE--JR].  I've heard exclusively from a top GOP source whose last name rhymes with "Fristol" that Senate Republicans have a master file of statements Hagel made at a Senate Christmas party years ago where he raged against the "rank commercialism" of the holiday.  It's this type of anti-free enterprise statements that clearly demonstrate that Hagel is out of the American mainstream in his views on Christmas -- and America's place in the world. 

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

There are many things to admire about Christmas -- and yet I'm left wondering why, on this most nurturing, this most feminine of holidays, it's a fat, aging, affluent white man who traipses around the world offering gifts to children.  It could be that Mrs. Claus simply doesn't want to leave the North Pole -- or it could be that she's trapped there by the hidebound traditions of this holiday.  Clearly, the current model of delivering everyone's presents on one night makes it impossible for women to have it all.  Perhaps we should rework how Christmas operates to make it a more family-friendly model for the Clauses.  Instead of everyone getting their presents on one night, it should be staggered throughout the year.  This would allow both Santa and Mrs. Claus to participate in the making of the list, the checking it twice, and the bestowing of presents to the world's children.  Let's face it -- the more that women take an active part in the management of this holiday, the better for everyone involved. 

Merry Christmas, foreign policy wonks!! 

Your humble blogger has been pretty quiet about this week's Israeli/Hamas conflict.  That's for a bunch of reasons:

1)  I've had a few day job papers to bang out;

2)  Foreign Policy has not suffered a deficit of content on this topic;

3)  My bar to blogging about Israel and Palestine is whether I can offer anything more insightful than The Onion.  It's a disturbingly high bar.

That said, I do think there are a few interesting political science questions that are worth asking after the past week.  After all, we've just had an election in this country where it turns out that political science explained an awful goddamned lot.  I wonder if some of that knowledge is being imbibed -- in uneven amounts -- in the Middle East.

In particular, I have three questions: 

1)  Has Bibi Netanyahu been reading Romer and Rosenthal?  One of the landmark articles in political science is Thomas Romer and Howard Rosenthal's paper on the effect of the status quo on political positioning.  One of the key takeaways is that in a two candidate race, if Candidate A takes an extreme position on the central policy issue, it allows Candidate B to adopt a policy position that is further away from the median voter and still win. 

After reading Ethan Bronner's story in the New York Times on how the Gaza conflict is radicalizing the West Bank away from Fatah and towards Hamas (see also Haaretz), I wonder if Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu has figured out the following political jujitsu:

STEP 1:  Take actions that radicalize the Palestinian population -- particularly in the West Bank;

STEP 2:  Have Fatah look less and less like a credible negotiating partner, have the world acknowledge that Hamas now represents the median Palestinian preference on peace talks;

STEP 3:  Have Likus win Israeli election without changing its policy position, which suddenly doesn't look so bad to Israeli voters. 

Actually, I'd posit that there's an element of this in the Israeli's right's strategy of the past decade, but it seems to be particularly blatant this time around. 

2)  Has Hamas been reading Stephen Walt?  And if so, which Stephen Walt?  No, I don't mean that Stephen Walt.  I mean the author of The Origins of Alliances and Revolution and War.  I bring this up cause those books would offer contrasting takes on what Hamas would expect the rest of the Middle East to do.  It seems pretty clear from the press reportage that Hamas believed that This Time Was Different:  the Arab Spring had eliminated authoritarian despots who had used the Palestinian issue as a useful vent for domestic unrest.  Newly democratic regimes would -- according to Walt's Revolution and War -- be more likely to identify with Hamas' cause, thereby taking more aggressive action to undermine and isolate Israel.  And, indeed, at the rhetorical and symbolic level, this has happened.  Libya is sending a "solidarity delegation" to Gaza, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has labeled Israel a "terrorist state," and Egypt's Morsi governmment has been pretty plain in blaming Israel for the latest hostilities.   

The thing is, my bet would be on Walt's Origins of Alliances playing the larger role here.  What's interesting about Arab government's reactions to this Operation Pillar of Defense is that they seem.... an awful lot like how Mubarak et al would have reacted.  It would seem that once Islamic movements are charged with running a government, they suddenly start to care about things other than the occupied territories (this appears to be Dennis Ross' take as well, by the way).  For example, I'd argue that these negotiations matter far more to the Morsi government than brokering a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. 

3)  Does the Israeli right really want to make U.S. Middle East policy a partisan football?  CNN polled Americans on the conflict in Gaza, and just like every other poll on this question, Americans backed Israel pretty strongly.  57% of American sympathize with the Israelis; only 13% side with the Palestinians.  But as The Weekly Standard's Daniel Halper notes, there's a catch: 

CNN's poll director, Keating Holland, finds that there is a great discrepancy in which Americans think the action is justified, however. Of particular note is that only about 40 percent of Democrats believe the self-defense measures are "justified."

"Although most Americans think the Israeli actions are justified, there are key segments of the public who don't necessarily feel that way," Holland tells CNN. "Only four in ten Democrats think the Israeli actions in Gaza are justified, compared to 74% of Republicans and 59% of independents. Support for Israel's military action is 13 points higher among men than among women, and 15 points higher among older Americans than among younger Americans."

Now, you can speculate all you want about the source of this partisan divergence --  *COUGH* Netanyahu gambled on Obama being a one-termer and lost *COUGH* -- but friends of Israel should be disturbed by this growing split.  If Israel becomes a partisan issue, it's not really going to help Republicans all that much, because all it will do is mobilize the evangelical vote -- which they've already pocketed.  And eventually, Israel will have to face a Democratic president with a base that no longer cares about Israel's security.  That's not going to be a good day for Israel. 

[Yeah, we still liked the Onion story better--ed.  Yeah, me too.]

In my experience, American realists just love the heck out of Russia.  Go scan The National Interest and inevitably you'll see the most charitable of interpretations about Russian behavior.  As near as I can determine, they reflexively sympathize with Moscow for a few reasons:

1)  The Russians tend to be wonderfully blunt in explaining their motivations

2)  Russia rarely, if ever, dresses up their foreign policy actions in anything other than national interest motivations

3)  In the eyes of most realists, Russia is the status quo power justly defending its sphere of influence in the wake of revisionist American demands that have everything to do with ideology and nothing to do with American national interests. 

I raise all of this because a few days ago Charles Clover in the Financial Times wrote an interesting story about Russia's foreign policy in Syria:

A respected Moscow-based military think tank has published a report that is likely to fuel more questions about the wisdom of Russia’s uncompromising support for the Syrian regime. It concludes that Russia really has few – if any – fundamental national interests to defend in Syria....

Russian support for Syria appears to be more emotional than rational, according to the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a consultancy with strong links to Russia’s defence community. It characterised the Kremlin’s Syria policy as a consensus of elites who “have rallied around the demand ‘not to allow the loss of Syria’ ”, which would cause “the final disappearance of the last ghostly traces of Soviet might” in the Middle East.

“The Syrian situation focuses all the fundamental foreign policy fears, phobias and complexes of Russian politicians and the Russian elite” said CAST.

Russia’s actual stake in Syria is not massive, according to CAST. It described Russia’s arms exports to Damascus as a “significant, but far from key” 5 per cent of total arms exports last year, and characterised Tartus, Moscow’s last foreign military base outside the former USSR, as little more than a pier and a floating repair shop on loan from the Black Sea fleet.

Now, it sounds an awful lot like CAST is arguing that Russian foreign policy leaders are wildly inflating their interests and acting in a -- dare I say it -- neoconservative fashion towards Syria. 

I'd be very curious to hear from realists if they concur with this assessment.  If it turns out that Russia is not acting in its national interests, it would be a body blow to both realism as policymaking advice and as an objective paradigm to explain world politics.  Realists would no longer be able to say that the United States was the only great power not acting in its national interest.  More significantly, if lots of great powers act to advance their emotional, historical, or ideollogical interests, then the world doesn't look very realpolitik at all. 

[WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD]

I enjoyed the first season of Game of Thrones but was somewhat underwhelmed with efforts to use it as a window to understanding world politics today. The second season, which concluded this past Sunday, however, did much better on this score. I think this is because in season one the primary narrative dealt with one ruler of Westeros coping with stupendously naive staff contending factions, whereas this season dealt with a more variegated set of leaders, which worked far better for the show. Two signs of this: First, whereas the Daenerys Targaryen plot in the first season was fun and diverting, I found season two's Dany sections distracting and deadening. Part of this might have been because Dany was whining more, but it was also because she was largely operating in a political vacuum and therefore less interesting. Second, whereas Cersei Lannister seemed like a master Machiavellian in season one, in season two she appeared to be just a little out of her depth. It's not because she got dumber, but because the protagonists who interacted with her were wiser or more powerful than Ned Stark.

Season two's War of the Five Kings allowed for greater contrast between different styles of political leadership and political culture -- and was therefore all the richer for it. Leadership ranged from Stannis Baratheon's humorless determination to Tywin Lannister's stolid competence to Joffrey's sadism to Robb Stark's efforts to preserve humanitarian norms to Balon Greyjoy's sheer bloody-mindedness. The staffers were great too. I'm sorry that Tyrion Lannister and Davos Seaworth never got to share a scene together -- that would have been a hoot. Similarly, the interactions between Tyrion and Varys -- especially this one -- were delicious.

Indeed, the final episode alone is so rich in its contemplation of political leadership alone that it made up for the less comprehensible parts of the plot (why the hell did Bran, Hodor, and company need to abandon Winterfell?) Tyrion's explanation for why he wanted to stay in King's Landing was one of those rare moments in television in which a character was honest about his enjoyment of politics. As Alyssa Rosenberg shrewdly observes, the Throne Room scene in which much political kabuki theater transpired was a powerful reminder of how the victors write the history. And the Varys-Ros alliance bodes well for political machinations in season three.

For all of this -- and zombies too! -- the finale was great. What put it over the top, however, might be the best rejoinder to the Great Speech Theory of Politics that I have ever seen -- Theon Greyjoy's efforts to rally his troops in the face of overwhelming odds during the siege of Winterfell:

Anyone who calls for better political "leadership" should watch this again and again and again. Yes, leadership matters on the margins -- but power and purpose matter one whole hell of a lot more.

The end of the episode promises an even wider array of political actors -- Mance Rayder, the White Walkers, a returning Dany -- influencing activities in Westeros. This bodes very, very well for season three.

What do you think?

Your humble blogger is busy going into carbohydrate withdrawal celebrating Passover this week.  I blogged about the international relations implications of this holiday a few years ago -- but that was pre-Arab Spring.  This (and a few glasses of kosher wine) got me to thinking:  what would happen if the event that inspires the Passover holiday -- the Exodus -- were to happen today? 

With apologies to Colum Lynch, I suspect the reportage would be something like this: 

U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL MEETING ON JEWISH EXODUS ENDS IN CHAOS:  Permanent Five split on who to sanction for loss of life

Colum Lynch, Foreign Policy

NEW YORK:  Attempts by the U.N. Security Council to reach consensus on an approach to the situation in Egypt came to naught earlier today, as different members of the Security Council blamed different actors in the region for the growing human rights and humanitarian disaster. 

U.S. Ambassdor to the United Natuons Susan Rice, addressing the Council, blasted China and Russia for their "addiction to obduracy."  She concluded, "Over the past decade we have continually raised the repeated human rights abuses and acts of genocide committed by the Phaaroh's regime against the Jewish population in Egypt.  Each time, China and Russia have vetoed even the mildest of condemnations, arguing that it was a matter of Egyptian sovereignty.  Only now, with the desperate escape of that minority from the Phaaroh's clutches, do the governments of Russia and China take such an acute interest in the welfare of the Egyptian people. "

The United States, France, and United Kingdom have indeed introduced thirteen separate resolutions on human rights abuses in Egypt since the advent of the Phaaroh who knew not Joseph. 

Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin delivered a blistering response, arguing that it was the radical Jewsish leaders who had escalated the situation by resorting to weapons of mass destruction and demanding that Moses be indicted by the International Criminal Court as a war criminal:  "It was not the Phaaroh who imposed unspeakable sanctions against the Egyptian people.  It was not the Phaaroh who slaughtered every first-born male child in Egypt -- except the Jews -- in a flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions.  Surely, not a house in Egypt was spared from this , this plague.  It was not the Phaaroh who resorted to trickery in the Red Sea, luring innocent Egyptian troops into the kill zone before massacring them.  Both sides are equally guilty in the bloodshed, and until both sides renounce violence, a peaceful solution will be nothing but a mirage of the desert." 

No agreement on any resolutions were reached.  British Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant flatly rejected many of the Russian assertions, arguing that only soldiers were afffected by the Red Sea disaster, and that it was not immediately obvious whether the Jews were actually responsible for the harsh sanctions that befell Egypt prior to the Jewish Exodus.

Doctors Without Borders upped the number of Egyptian dead into the five figures, but those figures could not be independently confirmed.  The Phaaroh's government again rejected the entry of the U.N. Secretary-General's fact-finding mission on the grounds that it represented an intrusion of sovereignty.  Russian and Chinese officials blamed this inflexible position on the civil society campaign to label the Egyptian Pyramids the "Slavery Pyramids." 

Humanitarian officials are not sure about the current status of the Jewish refugees.  According to unconfirmed reports from Egypt, the Jews left in such a hurry that they lacked basic provisions like bread or yeast, carrying only crude rations into the desert.  The disputed status of the Sinai makes drone overflights impossible in that area.  The "final status" of the Jews is also unclear, as the Assyrians, Moabites, and Philistines all declared the refugees to be persona non grata in their jurisdictions. 

Outside the UN building, the NGO Inside Children annnounced that they planned to release a video entitled "LetMyPeopleGo2012," demanding that the Phaaroh release all Egyptian Jews immediately.  The group rebuffed criticisms that this problem had been overtaken by events, saying that calling attention to the cruel despotism in Egypt was still "a worthwhile and noble cause."    

Erik Voeten reminds us that now is the time "when undergraduates interested in a career in political science have to choose between PhD programs."  Erik offers some very useful pointers on how to choose, but there is a deeper question to ask -- is it worth it to get a Ph.D. in political science?  As one graduate student blogging at Duck of Minerva puts it: 

I'm loving graduate school; it's been on balance the best time of my life; and nevertheless there have been times when (to quote a colleague) I've wished I'd taken the blue pill and kept my job.

Or, as Steve Saideman phrases it: 

[A] PhD in Political Science should only be for those who are passionate and curious and do not care where they end up living.  And that they need to be aware that the job market can be pretty challenging and stressful.

Checking my blog archives, I see that I've mused on this topic before -- so, rather than repeat myself, here are some links.  If you're wondering about the virtues of getting a Ph.D. vs. a policy degree like SAIS or Fletcher, click here and here.  If you're really interested in politics and are debating between a Ph.D., a law degree, or going the apprentice route, click here. 

But I want to blog about a question related to something buzzing about the foreign policy blogosphere:  what if you're female?  Micah Zenko at CFR and Diana Wueger at Gunpowder & Lead have blogged about the underrepresentation of women in foreign policy positions in the government, think tanks or the academy.  Wueger asks readers to "spend 10 minutes thinking about what you can do to help your female staff or friends or Twitterbuddies to advance in their careers." 

After ten minutes, I have some positive words and some cautionary, bordeline controversial pieces of advice.  Here goes. 

My hunch is that, all else equal, the value-added of getting a Ph.D. might be greater for women than men.  Wueger blogs about a big problem:  the difficulty/trepidation that women have when seeking mentors, particularly if their field is dominated by men.  The advantage of getting a Ph.D. is that it pretty much forces the person to work hard at collecting mentors and advisors.  Furthermore, these relationships are forged through years of TAing, RAing, and pleading for dissertation advice.  So, even if women are shyer about seeking mentors/male advisors are warier about advising female students, these barriers can be broken down with time. 

That's the good news.  The bad news is two-fold.  First, Wueger argues that the assignments women get at the outset have a powerful effect on their later careers: 

There’s a gap in the types of tasks women and men are assigned early in their careers. Intentionally or not, women tend to given more administrative or support work rather than policy or research work; path dependence takes over from there. I recall a prominent scholar regularly asking his female research assistant (RA) to pick up his dry cleaning and take his car to the shop—things he didn’t ask of male RAs.

OK, for the record, my male RAs were too forgetful to request as little starch as possible this is a problem, but I suspect it's decreasing.  The more serious problem operates through a subtler channel -- women might get shunted into research areas that are seen as more female-friendly.  For example, I believe that more women study international political economy or international organizations than international security.  Even within security studies, I suspect that there are more women studying "human security" than more standard guns & bombs kind of security.  This might be due to interest, but there are path-dependent effects at work, and so successive waves of women go into those fields in greater numbers.  So, that's a thing. 

The second problem is, I suspect, even greater and trickier to discuss, but here goes.  Unlike the apprentice or professional degree paths, the Ph.D. route to a foreign policy career has a few BIG decision-making nodes that have profound effects on a person's career choice.  For the Ph.D., the first job after getting one's doctorate matters a lot, particularly if said Ph.D. is pursuing the academic career track.  The first job can define whether you want to be thought of as a researcher first, a teacher first, a policy wonk first, and so forth.  Also, it usually requires moving -- with the exception of Ph.D. granting institutions in-Boston-well-not-in-Boston-but-nearby-no-not-Tufts, universities do not hire their own. 

The thing is, most people are between 27-32 years of age when they complete their Ph.D..  This also happens to be the peak demographic of the whole getting married/having children phase of life.  And, women tend to marry men a few years older than them.  The professional difference between 50 and 53 is negligible, but those few years can make a HUGE difference in one's late twenties/early thirties.  It means that, on average and regardless of career choice, the man in the relationship is more firmly embedded down his career path. 

For newly-minted women Ph.D.s, this can impose profound constraints on career choices.  Their best job offer might be inconvenient for their spouse's career, and so they pass on it.  I saw this very dynamic play out multiple times with female colleagues when I was in graduate school.  There are a lot of good reasons to subordinate one's first job choice to family considerations, but it has a negative impact on one's long-term career trajectory.

[What about you?--ed.  As a man, the age effect was reversed.  My fiancee was younger and therefore at a more embryonic stage of her career, which meant she was more portable.  For the record, I accepted a post-doc that I otherwise wouldn't have taken for her career, but this was a minimal sacrifice.  It only delayed my first job by a year and I got a ton of writing done during those twelve  months.]

This problem is not unique to those earning doctorates.  Those with non-Ph.D. career tracks , however, have more career-decision nodes at later and earlier ages.  I suspect this problem is magnified for Ph.D.s in a way that it isn't for those who pursue more apprentice-oriented or shorter-degree tracks.  But I'd be interested in hearing differing opinions on this in the comments below. 

So, to sum up:  if you're a woman and you're trying to pursue a foreign policy career, there are some advantages by getting the Ph.D., but there are big pitfalls at the beginning and end of getting the doctorate.  I urge you to have a good sense of what you want to study before someone shapes that decision for you.  And have some good, long conversations with any potential spouse about what you want to do with your career. 

Am I missing anything?  Seriously, am I? 

This has been an exceedingly weird week with respect to the escalating dispute between Iran and countries not thrilled with Iran's nuclear program.  On the one hand, you have the United States going to great lengths to widen and deepen the sanctions regime against Iran and deter Iran from trying to close the Straits of Hormuz.  On the other hand, you have U.S. officials contradicting themselves and backtracking from statements made to the Washington Post over the precise purpose of the sanctions.  On the third hand, you have signals that Turkey is brokering another round of negotiations between Iran and the P5 + 1. 

And then, in the last hand, you have... Israel.  Some weird s**t has been going down.  Following the apparent assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took great pains to "categorically deny" U.S. involvment.  In a New York Times front-pager, U.S. officials were even more explicit:

The assassination drew an unusually strong condemnation from the White House and the State Department, which disavowed any American complicity. The statements by the United States appeared to reflect serious concern about the growing number of lethal attacks, which some experts believe could backfire by undercutting future negotiations and prompting Iran to redouble what the West suspects is a quest for a nuclear capacity.

“The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this,” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared to expand the denial beyond Wednesday’s killing, “categorically” denying “any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.”

“We believe that there has to be an understanding between Iran, its neighbors and the international community that finds a way forward for it to end its provocative behavior, end its search for nuclear weapons and rejoin the international community,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Also this week, FP ran a story by Mark Perry describing Israel's "false flag" operation to recruit Pakistani terrorists.  In the essay, Perry gets the following quotes from retired U.S. intelligence officials: 

There's no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we're not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians....

We don't do bang and boom... and we don't do political assassinations.

Contrast this with the Israeli quotes in the NYT story:

The Israeli military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, writing on Facebook about the attack, said, “I don’t know who took revenge on the Iranian scientist, but I am definitely not shedding a tear,” Israeli news media reported....

A former senior Israeli security official, who would speak of the covert campaign only in general terms and on the condition of anonymity, said the uncertainty about who was responsible was useful. “It’s not enough to guess,” he said. “You can’t prove it, so you can’t retaliate. When it’s very, very clear who’s behind an attack, the world behaves differently.” (emphasis added)

I think the bolded section in the last paragraph suggests some intuition about what is happening.  If it's true that ambiguity about who is responsible for covert action is useful, and the United States is categorically denying its role in the assassination part of the covert action, then the Obama administration is openly and clearly signaling to Israel to cut it out. 

As to why the United States is doing this, I'd posit one or a combination of the following reasons: 

1)  Washington might have moral or legal qualms with the assassination dimension of these covert actions;  

2)  Such assasinations give the Iranian government cover to conduct its own assassinations campaign, which winnows the number of scientists the United States  can recruit for its own intelligence;

3)  The Obama administration thinks it can topple the regime, but these assassinations will be counterproductive;

4)  The Obama administration has been trying to get Iran back to the bargaining table, and this kind of covert action stops that from happening;

5)  The Obama administration is fragmented and therefore not entirely certain what it's aims are in Iran, but the policy principals know that what Israel is doing ain't helping. 

I'm leaning towards (5) at this point, but I'd entertain other explanations in the comments below.

Developing... in some very bizarre ways. 

UPDATE:  The Wall Street Journal has some further reporting that reveals a bit of the current uncertainty and the bureaucratic wrangling that appears to be going on.  Some key parts:

U.S. defense leaders are increasingly concerned that Israel is preparing to take military action against Iran, over U.S. objections, and have stepped up contingency planning to safeguard U.S. facilities in the region in case of a conflict.

President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other top officials have delivered a string of private messages to Israeli leaders warning about the dire consequences of a strike. The U.S. wants Israel to give more time for the effects of sanctions and other measures intended to force Iran to abandon its perceived efforts to build nuclear weapons.

Stepping up the pressure, Mr. Obama spoke by telephone on Thursday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and U.S. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will meet with Israeli military officials in Tel Aviv next week....

Mr. Panetta and other top officials have privately sought assurances from Israeli leaders in recent weeks that they won't take military action against Iran. But the Israeli response has been noncommittal, U.S. officials said.

U.S. officials briefed on the military's planning said concern has mounted over the past two years that Israel may strike Iran. But rising tensions with Iran and recent changes at Iranian nuclear sites have ratcheted up the level of U.S. alarm.

"Our concern is heightened," a senior U.S. military official said of the probability of an Israeli strike over U.S. objections.

Tehran crossed at least one of Israel's "red lines" earlier this month when it announced it had begun enriching uranium at the Fordow underground nuclear facility near the holy city of Qom.

The planned closing of Israel's nuclear plant near Dimona this month, which was reported in Israeli media, sounded alarms in Washington, where officials feared it meant Israel was repositioning its own nuclear assets to safeguard them against a potential Iranian counterstrike.

Despite the close relationship between the U.S. and Israel, U.S. officials have consistently puzzled over Israeli intentions. "It's hard to know what's bluster and what's not with the Israelis," said a former U.S. official.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  Well, this is just peachy:

The IRNA state news agency said Saturday that Iran's Foreign Ministry has sent a diplomatic letter to the U.S. saying that it has "evidence and reliable information" that the CIA provided "guidance, support and planning" to assassins "directly involved" in Roshan's killing.

The U.S. has denied any role in the assassination....

In the clearest sign yet that Iran is preparing to strike back for Roshan's killing, Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, the spokesman for Iran's Joint Armed Forces Staff, was quoted by the semiofficial ISNA news agency Saturday as saying that Tehran was "reviewing the punishment" of "behind-the-scene elements" involved in the assassination.

"Iran's response will be a tormenting one for supporters of state terrorism," he said, without elaborating. "The enemies of the Iranian nation, especially the United States, Britain and the Zionist regime, or Israel, have to be held responsible for their activities."