Your humble blogger has returned from Shanghai, and would like to apologize profusely for the lack of blogging this past week. Conspiracy theorists might be wondering if it was because of The Great Firewall or rising anti-foreigner sentiment in China (which, based on personal experience and media reportage, appears to be vastly exaggerated) or whether I was some top-secret emissary of the U.S. governmment.  The truth is much more banal:  my laptop's power cord died during this trip, so my computer had no juice for blogging. 

I will post something about Sino-American relations in due course, but in the meanwhile I see that over the past week, my departing zombie joke became... a big enough zombie story to require a CDC public response.  The Huffington Post's Andy Campbell reports:   

[O]n Thursday, the agency made it official: Zombies don't exist.

"CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms)," wrote agency spokesman David Daigle in an email to The Huffington Post.

Nevertheless, recent incidents in which humans reportedly ate human flesh have the Internet in a firestorm, with "zombie apocalypse" being Google's third most popular search term by Friday morning (emphasis added).

The incidents in Miami, Maryland and Montreal do seem to have riled up the interwebs a bit.  So, as the author of an important work on the global implications of an undead-created crisis, I feel compelled to respond. 

And my response is:  everyone chill the f**k out. 

As much as the media likes the "take-three-things-and-make-them-a-trend," let's put things into perspective.  We have two straightdforward cases of cannibalism in Maryland and Montreal.  Hannibal Lector-type clones on the prowl can be disturbing, but they're not a serious threat, and such incidents are apparently not on the increase.  Unless the victims of the cannibalism rise up and start hungering for human flesh, there is no pandemic -- and certainly no need to buy one of these units.  Seriously, if you're afraid of these kind of reports, you might as well be worried about zombie gnomes or other such silliness. 

The Miami incident does contain some more disturbing facts, like "the attacker failed to respond after being shot" and the victim of the attack "miraculously survived" and that some people are buying shotguns.  Still, according to all of the reports, the attacker actually did die and did not reanimate.  Unless more cases pop up in southern Florida, I think the republic - and the world -- are safe. 

As for the CDC statement, well, it contains an awful lot of wiggle room.  Still, its overall tone is consistent with what I concluded about the role of domestic politics during a zombie crisis: 

Clearly, the initial policy responses to a zombie attack are crucial.  This is the period when domestic constraints on policy responses are at their weakest.  If governments can fashion clear, coherent, and competent policy actions from the outset, then domestic pressures on policy autonomy should be modest....

If the zombie problem persists, however - through initial policy errors, resistance from zombie relatives, or the logistical difficulties of destroying the undead - then domestic politics will play an increasingly important role in global policy articulation.  Legislatures will slowly exercise more voice, interest groups will constrain policy options, and the public will grow restive towards far-flung operations to eliminate the scourge of the living dead.  If this effect takes place across a broad swath of countries, the bargaining core for meaningful international cooperation to combat the undead would slowly disappear.

So, my recommendation to everyone is still "DON'T PANIC" about zombies. Unless Congress decides to hold hearings.  At that point, feel free to freak out. 

I suspect public and/or media relations is one of those jobs that's way more glamorous in fiction than in fact.  In film, being a master of public relations seems like one of those cool jobs a young hotshot possesses right before meeting Mila Kunis and having the epiphany that Love and Truth and Beauty are the only things worth a damn.  In reality, however, there's the drudgery of sending endless e-mails, faxes, and voicemail messages to market one's clients.  Rarely do the twain meet. 

I bring this up because every once in a while, even a PR flack can scale the heights of greatness.  Today's New York Times story by Julie Creswell, Louise Story and Edward Wyatt -- ostensibly an attempt to find out about the inner workings of Standard & Poor's sovereign debt committee contains one such moment: 

When asked whether the company’s raters were hiding behind the secretive committee, Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for S.& P., said, “We do this to maintain our analytical independence in much the same way that the editorial board of The New York Times does not discuss its deliberations.” Ms. Mathis was a spokeswoman for The Times until two years ago.

To which I must say: 

I mean this seriously and not facetiously.  By implicitly linking S&P's practices to those of  the New York Times, Mathis sells the elite credentials of  her institution.  It's a brilliant gambit because it leaves the Times' reporters with unpalatable options.  Either they try to detail the precise differences between the Gray Lady and S&P, which would have seemed like total hair-splitting -- or they just move on to the rest of the story. 

If Mathis was the S&P person handling the Times reporters, she earned her money's worth with this article.  Despite myriad qualms with S&P's methodology, and despite that whole $2 trillion math error, the story has nary a critical or investigative word to say of Standard & Poor's. 

Instead, first half of the story story consists of anodyne biographic material of the ratings committee leadership.  The second half of the story focuses solely on an IMF report that provides a partial endorsement of S&P's sovereign debt ratings -- including this nugget:

One chapter of the report said that all nations that had defaulted on their sovereign debt since 1975 had been placed in a noninvestment-grade category at least one year before the default.

So, in other words, S&P hasn't missed a single basket case in the past 35 years.  Is it just me, or is that setting the bar pretty low? 

Regardless of how one feels about Standard & Poor's contribution to the decline and fall of western civilization decisions, however, one must step back and respect the yoeman efforts of an outstanding public relations team.  The hard-working staff here at ForeignPolicy.com therefore toasts Catherine Mathis and her team for some quality PR work.  One can only hope that, in the near future, Ms. Mathis stumbles across Justin Timberlake at a New York bar and finds the True Meaning of Life.

The post-mortems on the political journalism and political science APSA panel have been pouring forth like the body count in The Expendables.  There's one thread in particulat that has piqued my interest, however.  It starts with this Rob Farley observation: 

By and large, IR and comparative haven’t had the same impact on the journalist community in either their quantitative or qualitative forms.  I think that several major concepts/grand theories from both comparative and IR have found their way into the general policy conversation (deterrence theory, for example) but it’s more difficult to find uses of clear, sound political science research.  IPE might be an exception to this.  The immense political science literature on ethnic conflict seems utterly detached from the way that ethnic conflict is treated in the popular media.

To which, Matthew Yglesias responds:

I think you find almost no journalistic interest in comparative politics scholarship as just part and parcel of the overall solipsism of American popular political debates which take place in a kind of comparison-free void. The IR scholarship issue is quite different, since there’s tons and tons of journalistic work on subject matter to which scholarly IR research is plainly present. And the issue here, I think, is really primarily one of politics. The kinds of policy approaches that find support in the IR literature or can be usefully illuminated through it are just too far off the center of the American political consensus.

To which, William Winecoff responds with, er, some urgency:

There are all kinds of problems with this. To begin with, [Yglesias] basically starts by admitting that journalists really couldn't care less about educating their readers, at least if the prerequisite of that is having a basic familiarity with the subject they are covering. Instead, all journalists care about are the "bounds of the DC debate", not stupid boring messy things like facts or scientific inquiry. No, those get in the way of "catastrophically misguided" right-wing policies that Democrats supported, dammit! Better to have a purely insult-based foreign policy discussion, completely void of theory or substance....

I would be surprised if Yglesias could outline more than one or two "scholarly controversies" in IR in any detail, much less describe how foreign policy has no interaction with those arguments. Bush 43's entire foreign policy was based on a mutation of democratic peace theory, which is hotly contested in the academy and elsewhere. Clinton's foreign policy was the largest experiment in neoliberal institutionalism that the world has ever seen, and it too was vehemently debated in the scholarly circles, and still is. The whole Cold War was practically a petri dish for IR theory. In all cases American foreign policy was engineered in part or full by IR scholars. What on earth is Yglesias waiting for?

In other words, it's just not true that scholarly debates have nothing to say about political controversies, or that they are "too far off the center of American political consensus". Every foreign policy decision that governments make has been discussed and analyzed, however imperfectly, by IR scholars and has been adopted or denied by politicians and ideologues. Yglesias just hasn't done his homework. Which is sad, because "homework" in this case basically entails e-mailing Drezner. Or even me.

Boys, boys!!  Everyone in a neutral corner please!! 

There are a few things to unpack here.  In essence, I have to take issue with all of these excerpts.  Part of the problem is that the panel that inspired this whole discussion in the first place was dominated by people who blog/write/care a hell of a lot more about American politics than world politics.    Not that there's anything wrong with that -- but it's dangerous to tease out implications from such a group. 

As someone who has consumed and interacted with foreign affairs journalists from time to time, here are my observations: 

1)  The big mismatch between American journalists and IR academics is that when journalists are writing about international relations, they're likely focusing on a single event or episode -- a crisis with China, a disaster in Pakistan, sanctions against Iran, etc.  International relations scholars, on the other hand, tend to think in more abstract terms that involve multiple observations:  great power relations, humanitarian disasters, or sanctions episodes.  Because journalists are far more interested in the particulars of individual narratives, however, the skill set does not always match up.  Journalists writing about a particular case are understandably not fond of stating the average probability of policy success in a generic class of events.  Doing so eliminates the particularities and idiosyncracies of the individual event -- i.e., the very value-added provided by the journalist. 

This doesn't mean that IR scholars are completely ignored -- I find I get calls/queries when journalists are writing their "news analysis" pieces that take stock of a particular policy.  It does mean that our research is not likely to appear in the first wave of stories about an event, however -- and that wave has a way of framing the subsequent narrative.

2)  To be honest, I suspect that this state of affairs bothers IR scholars all that much, for two reasons.  First, as I suggested at the panel (and Yglesias blogged), there are a lot of professional reasons why political scientists don't want their work to break through to the public sphere.  Second, good IR scholars care less about access to journalists because they have better access to the actors they really care about -- the policymakers themselves.  There is a decent amount of interaction between mid-ranking officials and IR academics, and those channels can influence policy a lot more than talking to journalists.  Of course, this contributes to gaps between public opinion and foreign policy elites, but that's been going on for many a decade already. 

3)  To be honest, I'm not sure what Yglesias is talking about with respect to IR scholarship and political partisanship.  It might be that the IR paradigms don't map neatly onto political cleavages.  Realist and liberal approaches can be found in the mainstream of both party's foreign policy communities.  More broadly, rational choice thinking is shot through the foreign policy mainstream.  There are some schools of thought -- constructivism, feminism, etc. -- that might be thought of as outside the mainstream.  On the other hand, these approaches aren't exactly mainstreamed within the scholarly community either. 

Scholars who advocate policy positions out of favor with the current administratio n have opportunities to exercise their voice, through op-eds, congressional testimony, etc.  Once they've done that, political journalists can find them to get critical quotes, etc. 

4)  Drezner to Yglesias:  please call Winecoff before calling me.  My cup, it runneth over right now. 

Am I missing anything? 

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.