Roger Cohen has a column modestly titled "Diplomacy Is Dead."  Let's see what he's talking about:

Diplomacy is dead.

Effective diplomacy — the kind that produced Nixon’s breakthrough with China, an end to the Cold War on American terms, or the Dayton peace accord in Bosnia — requires patience, persistence, empathy, discretion, boldness and a willingness to talk to the enemy.

This is an age of impatience, changeableness, palaver, small-mindedness and an unwillingness to talk to bad guys. Human rights are in fashion, a good thing of course, but the space for realist statesmanship of the kind that produced the Bosnian peace in 1995 has diminished. The late Richard Holbrooke’s realpolitik was not for the squeamish.

There are other reasons for diplomacy’s demise. The United States has lost its dominant position without any other nation rising to take its place. The result is nobody’s world. It is a place where America acts as a cautious boss, alternately encouraging others to take the lead and worrying about loss of authority. Syria has been an unedifying lesson in the course of crisis when diplomacy is dead. Algeria shows how the dead pile up when talking is dismissed as a waste of time....

Indeed the very word “diplomacy” has become unfashionable on Capitol Hill, where its wimpy associations — trade-offs, compromise, pliancy, concessions and the like — are shunned by representatives who these days prefer beating the post-9/11 drums of confrontation, toughness and inflexibility: All of which may sound good but often get you nowhere (or into long, intractable wars) at great cost.

Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, wrote in an e-mail that, “When domestic politics devolve into polarization and paralysis the impact on diplomatic possibility becomes inordinately constraining.” He cited Cuba and Iran as examples of this; I would add Israel-Palestine. These critical foreign policy issues are viewed less as diplomatic challenges than potential sources of domestic political capital....

Obama has not had a big breakthrough. America’s diplomatic doldrums are approaching their 20th year.

Narrow-minded domestic politics.... check... Web 2.0 short-termism... check... yes, this is indeed the exemplar of the Grumpy Old Diplomatic Hand column.  So as a Grumpy Middle-Aged Academic, I'd like to grouse a bit on these alleged truisms. 

Now on the one hand, Cohen has a point that the optics of patient diplomacy can be more politically challenging than military statecraft.  The use of force tends to arouse domestic suipport; diplomacy can be painted as an act of weakness or appeasement.  And one can certainly think of Cuba, Iran or even Israel/Palestine as places where diplomacy has not achieved liftoff capacity.   And, yes, Web 2.0 technologies do make things like "backchannel diplomacy" that much more difficult to keep under wraps.

All that said.... give me a f**king break. 

First of all, there's a logical tension hidden within Cohen's narrative.  He laments the disappearance of patient diplomacy in one breath and then observes the relative decline in U.S. power in the next.  Maybe it's not that U.S. patience has withered, but that a hegemon with less weight to throw around requires even greater levels of patience to achieve the same tasks.  In the case of Syria, for example, it's kinda hard to see how more realpolitik would have gotten states with fundamentally divergent national interests to agree on a manageable solution.  Indeed, one could argue that the tropuble with America's Syria diplomacy has been too much realpolitik, not too little. 

Second of all, Cohen is glossing over some examples of patient diplomatic successes.  Even in Syria, there have been examples of successful "concert" diplomacy.  The U.S. opening to Myanmar would be another example [UPDATE:  Cohen tweets in response that he did in fact mention Myanmar.  He's right, and I apologize for not noting that fact.].  This is a case where the Burmese themselves have done a lot of the heavy lifting, but it's to the Obama administration's credit that it nimbly seized on the opportunity.  Indeed, this has been part of an overall Asia/Pacific strategy that would appear to epitomize the kind of hard-headed diplomacy that Cohen does.  Even the Sino-American handling of the Chen Guangcheng case represents an example of deft diplomacy in response to Web 2.0 technology.

Third -- and most important -- diplomacy is a two-player game.  There have been cases where the Obama administration has reached out to leaders with a different worldview in an effort to normalize relations -- think about the "reset" with Russia.  It would be safe to describe that effort as "fraught with complications."  Most of the friction in the Russia reset has nothing to do with the domestic American causess Cohen highlights, however, and everything to do with Russian policymakers feeling their relative power wane being extremely wary of the outreach effort.  Similarly, Iran's domestic politics during the Obama years have been... complicated.  It's not clear whether the most generous U.S. offer would actually be accepted by Iran's current political establishment. 

One could argue that Cohen's logic, extended globally, does have some heft.  It's not just the rise of domestic impediments in the United States -- it's the increased importance of domestic politics in diplomacy in other countries that makes realpolitik statecraft so hard to execute in the 21st century.  But let's be clear -- this phenomenon has little to do with the Internet age, the decline in American power, or even the rise of single-issue interest groups.  Ironically, it has more to do with the effect a successful American grand strategy -- the promotion of open polyarchic politics in the rest of the world.  Even authoritarian countries like China, or quasi-authoritarian countries like Russia have domestic interests and bases to sate.  The domestic politics in these countries is far more open than it was during the heyday of realpolitik diplomacy.

As International Relations 101 will say, adding domestic constraints narrows the possibility of any international agreement.  I agree with Cohen that this is happening.  I disagree with Cohen as to the reasons why.  It has very little to do with the United States, and an awful lot to do with the rest of the world. 

So, to sum up:  diplomacy's death has been greatly exaggerated, and a lot of what ails it has very little to do with the United States. 

Am I missing anything?

As the Barack Obama gears up his re-election campaign, plenty of political commentators have proffered their advice for which past American election should guide his strategy.  Why not look overseas, however?  After all, in North Korea, paramount leader  Kim Jong Un visited some newly-built apartments that his father Kim Jong Il " paid deep attention from sites to designing and building."  Apparently, the residents were crying at the opportunity to meet Kim and his wife.  That's leadership. 

On the other hand, Kim's visit smacks a bit of standard Western politicking.  Maybe Obama should be thinking on a more grandiose level. 

In the New York Times, Andrew Kramer provides an excellent template, recounting the heroic exploits of Russian President Vladimir Putin: 

Russia’s president piloted a motorized hang glider over an Arctic wilderness while leading six endangered Siberian cranes toward their winter habitat, as part of an operation called “The Flight of Hope,” his press office confirmed Wednesday.

While Mr. Putin recently has found some resistance to his stewardship at home, he found a more receptive crowd among his feathered followers. Experts say that when raised in captivity, these cranes quickly form bonds with figures they perceive as parents. That is a role, apparently, that Mr. Putin has been training for....

Mr. Putin on past expeditions has tranquilized a tiger, used a crossbow to extract tissue from a whale and put a tracking collar on a polar bear. News of his latest plan rippled over the Internet all day Wednesday, to great merriment. Some wondered just how far he would go. Would he try to imitate the gasping-shrieking cry of the cranes, to instill more faith in his leadership?

He has also appeared shirtless riding a horse in Siberia and flown on a fighter jet, a bomber and an amphibious firefighting airplane. Last summer, he dived into the Kerch Strait in the Black Sea and, remarkably, quickly discovered fragments of two ancient Greek urns.

Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, however, was later compelled to admit that the discovery was staged.

Oh, man, now I want Putin to be my president, but only after he strangles three enemies of the United States with his bare hands!!  I don't care if the enemies are already dead when he does it -- this is a real leader!!

Sure, skeptics might point out that the last time a president of the United States got all macho and donned a flight suit, it didn't end well.  And maybe, just maybe, a political leader trying to act like a superhero is harkening back to the outdated and ephemeral notion of Weberian charismatic leadership.  Or, perhaps, this kind of derring-do realy masks personal  insecurities and... inadequacies that don't need to be discussed on a family blog.  But dammit, in this world of the new normal, we need heroes!! 

I hereby challenge my readers to devise new heroic exploits for Barack Obama to accomplish as a way of exercising raw, pure, unfiltered leadership.  Here are a few suggestions: 

1)  Obama teams up with fellow superhero Cory Booker to fight crime in Newark -- Incredibles-style.

2)  Inspired by Man on Fire, Barack Obama goes to Mexico and takes care of the drug cartel problem -- single-handedly. 

3)  After three years, Barack Obama has laid the groundwork for collecting an assemblage of fellow crusaders for truth, justice and the American Way.  With a superteam of Michelle Obama, Bill Gates, Seal Team Six, Tom Cruise, the cast of The Expendables, Michael Phelps, Kerri Walsh, Misty-May Treanor, the 1992 and 2012 Dream Teams, and -- of course -- Bill and Hillary Clinton, this elite group of avengers reverse-Red Dawns the Russian Federation, defeating Putin and vanquishing, once and for all, America's number one geopolitical foe.

Any other suggestions?   

So it turned out that this was the week that both the Romney campaign and the Obama campaign decided that foreign policy was an important thing to talk about during election season.  Speaking personally, this is great!! I seem to have moved up in the Rolodex of those covering the campaign.  Expect lots of juicy quotes in the months to come, and readers are warmly encouraged to proffer useful metaphors that I can provide in soundbite fashion  over the next six months.

Unfortunately for the Romney campaign, this was not a great week to ramp up attacks along this line.  The reasons is that, all told, the Obama administration had a pretty good foreign policy week.  Not all, or even most of this, was of its own doing, but consider the following: 

1)  Iran has signaled a genuine willingness to talk compromise on its nuclear program in order to avoid the EU oil embargo kicking in.  That might just be rhetoric, but it's interesting to note that even senior Israeli officials are starting to talk down the Iranian threat.  The less Iran becomes a thing, the lower gas prices can fall better for the administration. 

2)  The United States has maybe, just maybe, eliminated a major thorn in bilateral relations with Japan by finally reaching agreement on moving U.S. troops from Okinawa.  We'll see if this holds -- everyone assumed that a 2006 agreement had put this problem to rest before successive Japanese governments shot themselves in the foot raised it again,  but this is the thing on this list for which the administration deserves the most credit.  As an added bonus, the administration  actually got some nice words from John McCain on comity with the Senate.

3)  For some reason China seems to be in a more productive mood in their dealings with the United States, and Mark Landsler and Steven Lee Myers have taken notice in the New York Times: 

For years, China  stymied efforts to pressure Iran. Now, in addition to  throwing its weight behind the sanctions effort, officials say,  Beijing is also playing a more active role in the recently revived nuclear talks between Iran and six world powers — the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany. While in past negotiations, Beijing has followed in lockstep the positions taken by Russia, this time Chinese diplomats are offering their own proposals.

“One of the key elements of making this work is unity among the major powers,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic exchanges. “The Chinese have been very good partners in this regard.”

There are also signs of new cooperation on Syria. Only weeks after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called China’s veto of a United Nations Security Council resolution “despicable,” China is supporting Kofi Annan’s peace plan for the strife-torn country and is deploying monitors to help oversee it. Even on North Korea, which China has long sheltered from tougher international action, the Chinese government quickly signed on to a United Nations statement condemning the North’s recent attempt to launch a satellite.

And there is progress on the economic front: American officials said China recently loosened trading on its currency, the remninbi, which could help close a valuation gap with the dollar that has stoked trade tensions between China and the United States during an election year.

To some seasoned observers of China, these developments are less a harbinger of a new era of cooperation between Beijing and Washington than evidence that, at least for now, the interests of the two countries coincide in some important areas.

The administration will nevertheless be happy to pocket the policy dividends.

4)  Staying in Northeast Asia, it turns out that the big bad North Korean ICBMs are little more than a pipe dream -- and western analysts are starting to say that Kim Jong Un is naked in the public square:

North Korea tried to flex its military might with an extravagant parade on April 15, just three days after it admitted that its missile test had been a failure, but analysts now say that the new intercontinental ballistic missiles on display in the meticulously choreographed parade were nothing more than props.

The analysts studied photos of the six missiles and came to their conclusion for three primary reasons: 1. The missiles did not fit the launchers that carried them. 2. The missiles appear to be made out of both liquid-fuel and solid-fuel components that are unable to fly together. 3. The casings on the missiles undulate which suggests the metal is not thick enough to hold up during flight.

"There is no doubt that these missiles were mock-ups," Markus Schiller and Robert Schmucker, of Germany's Schmucker Technologie , wrote in a paper recently posted on Armscontrolwonk.com. "It remains unknown if they were designed this way to confuse foreign analysts, or if the designers simply did some sloppy work."

If the U.S. government can claim progress on Iran, China, North Korea, and Japan in one week, that's a good foreign policy week.  Of course, for a lot of these issues, the administration is the beneficieary of circumstances rather that pro-active policies.  Still, the administration deserves some credit for some of these development.

It's just one week, though.  And I fear the most memorable statement about American foreign policy is this rather unfortunate choice of words: 

NOTE TO WHITE HOUSE/CAMPAIGN SPEECHWRITERS:   In the future, avoid having Biden utter any of the following:  "big stick", "hard power", "pounding the enemy",  "won't take no for an answer", and "smooth-talking his adversaries".

Am I missing anything?

Your humble blogger is currently knee-deep in a pedagogical project on the foundations of economic prosperity.  You can imagine my delight, then, that Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have a new book coming out on that very topic:  Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.  There's an excerpt in the Montreal Review -- let's see how it opens, shall we?

To understand what these institutions are and what they do, take another society divided by a border. South and North Korea. The people of South Korea have living standards similar to those of Portugal and Spain. To the north, in the so-called Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or North Korea, living standards are akin to those of a sub-Saharan African country, about one tenth of average living standards in South Korea. The health of North Koreans is in an even worse state; the average North Korean can expect to live ten years less than their cousins to the south of the 38th parallel.

These striking differences are not ancient. In fact they did not exist prior to the end of the Second World War. But after 1945 the different governments in the north and the south adopted very different ways of organizing their economies....

It should be no surprise that the economic fortunes of South and North Korea diverged sharply. Kim Il-Sung's command economy soon proved to be a disaster. Detailed statistics are not available from North Korea, which is a secretive state to say the least. Nonetheless, available evidence confirms what we know from the all too often recurring famines: not only did industrial production fail to take off but North Korea in fact experienced a collapse in agricultural productivity. Lack of private property meant that few had incentives to invest or exert effort to increase or even maintain productivity. The stifling repressive regime was inimical to innovation and adoption of new technologies. But Kim Il-Sung, his son and successor, the "dear leader" Kim Jong-Il, and their cronies had no intention to reform the system, or to introduce private property, markets, private contracts, and economic and political freedoms. North Korea continues to stagnate economically, and there is no sign that anything will be different under the new "dear leader" Kim Jong-un.

Meanwhile in the south economic institutions encouraged investment and trade. South Korean politicians invested in education, achieving high rates of literacy and schooling. South Korean companies were quick to take advantage of the relatively educated population, the policies encouraging investment and industrialization, the export markets, and the transfer of technology. South Korea became one of East Asia's `Miracle Economies,' one of the most rapidly growing nations in the world. By the late 1990s, in just about half a century, South Korean growth and North Korean stagnation led to a tenfold gap between the two halves of this once-united country---imagine what a difference a couple centuries could make. The economic disaster of North Korea, which not only prevented growth but led to the starvation of millions, when placed against the South Korean economic success, is striking: neither culture nor geography nor ignorance can explain the divergent paths of North and South Korea....

The contrast of South and North Korea illustrates a general principle: inclusive economic institutions foster economic activity, productivity growth and economic prosperity, while extractive economic institutions generally fail to do so. Property rights are central, since only those who have secure property rights will be willing to invest and increase productivity. A farmer, for example, who expects his output to be stolen, expropriated or entirely taxed away would have little incentive to work, let alone any incentive to undertake investments and innovations. But extractive economic institutions do exactly that and fail to uphold property rights of workers, farmers, traders and businessmen.

It will not shock you, my dear readers, to learn that I agree with Acemoglu and Robinson.  Indeed, as Ezra Klein showed with the following chart, the divergent paths of North and South Korea represents ironclad evidence about the power of instituions to determine prosperity: 

Well, that's pretty damn persuasive, isn't it?  It seems pretty friggin' obvious which institutions work and which ones don't! 

Actually, to be more accurate, it seems pretty friggin' obvious now.  Here's another chart that extends that graph back another two decades: 

Things look sightly different in this chart.  That massive divergence is still there, but what's stunning is that for the 25 years before that, the DPRK and ROK looked exactly the same in terms of per capital income.  Indeed, as Nicholas Eberstadt notes: 

Around the time of Mao Zedong's death (1976), North Korea was more educated, more productive and (by the measure of international trade per capita) much more open than China. Around that same time, in fact, per capita output in North Korea and South Korea may have been quite similar. Today, North Korea has the awful distinction of being the only literate and urbanized society in human history to suffer mass famine in peacetime. 

My point here is not to defend Kim Il Sung or suggest that the DPRK's economic institutions are underrated.  Rather, my point is that as data analysts, we're all prisoners of time.  Had Acemoglu and Robinson written Why Nations Fail in the mid-1970s, it would have either made a different argument or it would have had a much tougher case to make about the merits of inclusive vs. extractive institutions (during the 1970s, commodity extracting states were looking pretty good). 

Keep these charts in mind whenever anyone confidently asserts the obvious superiority of a particular model of political economy.  Because, I assure you, there was a point in time when such superiority was far from obvious.  And there might be another such point in the future. 

Earlier this week I speculated as to why North Korea did not respond to a series of South Korean military drills.  In the list of possibilities I provided, I was somewhat skeptical that Chinese pressure was the answer.

In today's New York Times, however, Mark Landler quotes some Obama administration sources suggesting that Chinese (and Russian) pressure was a determining factor:

after a tense week, when the threat of war hung over the Korean Peninsula, the Obama administration and Beijing seem finally to be on the same page.

Administration officials said the Chinese government had embraced an American plan to press the North to reconcile with the South after its deadly attacks on a South Korean island and a warship. The United States believes the Chinese also worked successfully to curb North Korea’s belligerent behavior.

China’s pressure, several senior officials said this week, might help explain why North Korea did not respond militarily to live-fire drills conducted this week by the South Korean military, when a previous drill drew an artillery barrage from the North that killed two South Korean civilians and two soldiers.

As evidence of the policy shift, officials pointed to recent remarks by China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, in which he urged the North and South “to carry out dialogue and contact.” Previously, Beijing’s response had been to propose an emergency meeting of the six-party group that negotiates with North Korea over its nuclear program, a step the United States opposed as rewarding the North’s aggression....

China swiftly dispatched a senior diplomat to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, and officials said he conveyed a strong message about “the unacceptability of attacks and killings of South Koreans,” said a senior American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.

“The idea that there could be these one-off provocations without expectation of a military response, as the North had behaved in the past, the Chinese now understand that this is no longer the reality, no longer acceptable,” he said.

John Pomfret hits similar notes in his Washington Post story.  Actually, it's an even more optimistic assessment : 

The United States and China  are closing out the year on a positive note on many fronts - including trade, military ties, climate change and global security - as both sides prepare for their presidents' second summit, set for next month.

After a tense year during which U.S. officials, including President Obama, openly criticized China, and their Chinese counterparts returned the favor, there is a sudden switch in tone from the Commerce Department to the National Security Council. Instead of portraying China as protectionist or as an "enabler" of North Korea's provocations, administration officials are praising China, referring to it again as a responsible partner....

The most remarkable about-face has occurred in the administration's attitude toward China over the Korean Peninsula. Two weeks ago, a senior administration official accused China of creating the conditions that allowed North Korea to start a uranium-enrichment program and launch two deadly attacks on South Korea. The tensions on the peninsula threatened to dominate the summit.

But in recent days, senior administration officials have praised China for pressing North Korea not to react to a South Korean military drill Monday. Officials referred specifically to a visit by China's top diplomat, Dai Bingguo, to North Korea on Dec. 9. After the meeting, China's state-run Xinhua News Agency reported that China and North Korea had reached a "consensus" on the situation on the peninsula - which many analysts interpreted as meaning North Korea had agreed not to provoke South Korea in the short term.

Administration officials also commended China for soft-pedaling a proposal to hold emergency talks between South and North Korea, China, Russia, Japan and the United States as part of a way to calm the situation. Instead, the officials said that China had accepted a U.S. plan that put improving ties between the South and the North ahead of any multilateral talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

Administration officials portrayed the United States and China as working in lockstep in dealing with the crisis, which many thought had reached the brink of war last weekend. China continued to urge restraint on North Korea, they said, while the United States worked with Seoul to ensure that its exercises were "firm" but also "non-confrontational and non-escalatory," a senior administration said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.

Nonetheless, it is not clear whether China's pressure has worked. On Thursday, North Korea threatened to launch a "sacred" nuclear war that would "wipe out" South Korea and the United States if they started a conflict.

Chinese President Hu Jintao is scheduled to make a state visit to Washington on Jan. 19. Obama visited China in November 2009.

China's approach on the Korean peninsula is certainly interesting, but what I find really interesting is the Obama administration's conscious decision to talk about this to the Times and Post.  Part of this might be the warming up of relations that traditionally precedes a great power summit.  Part of it, however, might be the administration's effort to signal to their Chinese counterparts that they understand that Beijing has engaged in a policy shift -- and the Obama administraion genuinely appreciates that shift. 

This point is likely banal obvious to longtime foreign policy hands, but I bring it up in the context of the Wikileaks cables.  The attention paid to these diplomatic cables can lead to the impression that all diplomacy that matters is conducted in secret corridors.  This kind of coordinated official leaking, however, is the bread and butter of 20th and 21st century statecraft -- and it's not going away anytime soon. 

There's going to be a lot of scholars, policy analysts and enthused amateurs who are going to drink up the Wikileaks documents as a great new empirical resource. So they should -- they did nothing to cause their release, and these are documents that ordinarily would have taken 25 years minimum to be declassified.

That said, there's going to be a natural inclination to think that any Wikileaks document will endow it with the totemic value of Absolute Truth. "If it was secret, then it must be true," goes this logic. That's a more serious problem. For Exhibit A, let's go to Simon Tisdall of The Guardian's interpreting what the Wikileaks documents reveal about how China views North Korea:

China has signaled its readiness to accept Korean reunification and is privately distancing itself from the North Korean regime, according to leaked US embassy cables that reveal senior Beijing figures regard their official ally as a "spoiled child"....

The leaked North Korea dispatches detail how:

•  
  •  
    • South Korea's vice-foreign minister said he was told by two named senior Chinese officials that they believed Korea should be reunified under Seoul's control, and that this view was gaining ground with the leadership in Beijing.
    • China's vice-foreign minister told US officials that Pyongyang was behaving like a "spoiled child" to get Washington's attention in April 2009 by carrying out missile tests.
    • A Chinese ambassador warned that North Korean nuclear activity was "a threat to the whole world's security".
    • Chinese officials assessed that it could cope with an influx of 300,000 North Koreans in the event of serious instability, according to a representative of an international agency, but might need to use the military to seal the border.

In highly sensitive discussions in February this year, the-then South Korean vice-foreign minister, Chun Yung-woo, told a US ambassador, Kathleen Stephens, that younger generation Chinese Communist party leaders no longer regarded North Korea as a useful or reliable ally and would not risk renewed armed conflict on the peninsula, according to a secret cable to Washington.

Ah, OK, this explains why China has slowly distanced itself from North Korea's recent actions. Oh, wait, I'm sorry, China has done nothing of the sort.

I don't doubt that Chinese officials said everything reported in the documents. I do doubt that those statements mean that China is willing to walk away from North Korea. It means that Chinese diplomats are... er.... diplomatic. They will tell U.S. and South Korean officials some of what they want to hear. I'm sure that they will say somewhat different things to their North Korean counterparts.

The key is to determine whether China's actions reflect their words. And over the past six months, China has not acted in a manner consistent with Tisdall's claims.

This is not to imply that China is acting in a particularly perfidious or underhanded manner, by the way. They're acting like any great power would -- stall for time while trying to figure out the best way to handle a troublesome ally. The point is, just because someone says something in a Wikileaks memo doesn't make it so.

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. 

One of the glib jokes I like to make is that one country in the world needs to maintain a communist, centrally-planned economic structure.  This would serve as a public service warning to future generations of policymakers.   Some of them would inevitably romanticize prior communist efforts as noble in their aspirations and unfairly maligned by the capitalist writers of history.  At that point, you get on a plane and fly them to the Last Remaining Communist Country in the World to show them just how bad real life can be. 

My nominee for this country was always North Korea.  China's economy doesn't really fit Stalinist dicta anymore; neither does Vietnam.  And keeping Cuba as a communist country is just a fabulous waste of culture and resources.  No, North Korea seemed to be the ideal museum of blinkered economic thinking. 

After reading Sharon LaFraniere's heartbreaking front-page story in the New York Times about North Korea today, however, such jokes ring a little hollow: 

North Koreans are used to struggle and heartbreak. But the Nov. 30 currency devaluation, apparently an attempt to prop up a foundering state-run economy, was for some the worst disaster since a famine that killed hundreds of thousands in the mid-1990s.

Interviews in the past month with eight North Koreans who recently left their country — a prison escapee, illegal traders, people in temporary exile to find work in China, the traveling wife of an official in the ruling Workers’ Party — paint a haunting portrait of desperation inside North Korea, a nation of 24 million people, and of growing resentment toward its erratic leader, Kim Jong-Il.

What seems missing — for now, at least — is social instability. Widespread hardship, popular anger over the currency revaluation and growing political uncertainty as Mr. Kim seeks to install his third son as his successor have not hardened into noticeable resistance against the government. At least two of those interviewed in China hewed to the official propaganda line that North Korea was a victim of die-hard enemies, its impoverishment a Western plot, its survival threatened by the United States, South Korea, and Japan.

South Korea’s charge that North Korea sank one of its warships, the Cheonan, in March was just part of the plot, the party official’s wife said.

“That’s why we have weapons to protect ourselves,” she said while visiting relatives in northern China — and earning spare cash as a waitress. “Our enemies are trying to hit us from all sides, and that’s why we lack electricity and good infrastructure. North Korea must keep its doors locked.”  (emphasis added)

The emphasized part is what gets me.  The party official's wife -- presumably, one of the DPRK's elite -- has to work as a waitress to earn extra income. 

None of this is news.  Marcus Noland wrote about this here at FP.com back in March.  For a more detailed analysis, see his Peterson Institute for International Economics' brief with Stephan Haggard.  The highlights from that brief: 

Respondents portray a judicial and penal system characterized by high rates of arbitrary detention and release. Horrific abuses are characteristic not only of the camps for political prisoners, but are found at all levels of the penal system. In the survey of more than 1,300 refugees conducted in China between August 2004 and September 2005, nearly 10 percent reported incarceration in political and correctional detention facilities. Among this group, 90 percent reported witnessing forced starvation, 60 percent deaths due to beating or torture, and 27 percent executions. These findings are broadly confirmed by a second survey of 300 refugees conducted in South Korea in November 2008, which also included more detailed questions about initial arrest and detention, the types of facilities in which respondents were held, and the conditions they witnessed while incarcerated.

The emerging portrait of the North Korean penal system suggests a vast machine that processes large numbers of people engaged in illicit activities for relatively short periods, but which exposes them to terrible abuses while incarcerated. This pattern serves to effectively intimidate; our surveys reveal an atomized society in which barriers to collective action are high and overt political opposition minimal. However, repression has not served to eliminate market-oriented activity, in part because of the continuing poor economic performance of the regime. Rather, our surveys suggest a changing political economy in which corrupt officials extract bribes from those in the market, exploiting their ability to limit entanglement with a brutal penal system.

There is another simple reason why a social revolution is unlikely to topple the North Korean regime -- starving people might lack the energy to do anything other than search for something to eat. 

Developing... in the most depressing manner possible. 

Ben Smith reports that China is facing mounting pressure because of its refusal to condemn North Korea for its sinking of the Cheonan: 

For while much about the incident remains unclear, a day of carefully parsed statements from Zhongnanhai and the Foreign Ministry left at least one irrefutable aftershock: With much of the world expressing fury over the attack, the contrast with Beijing's muted response could not have been more striking. 

 

“The situation is that they’re so isolated right now that it’s not only that we’re the only ones who will stick up for them,” said an Chinese official. “We’re the only ones who believe them – and what they’re saying is true.”

Oh, wait, you know what?  I might have mixed up some of the words in that cut and paste.  Here's the original:

For while much about the incident remains unclear, a day of carefully parsed statements from the White House and State Department left at least one irrefutable aftershock: With much of the world expressing fury over the raid, the contrast with Washington’s muted response could not have been more striking. 

 

“The situation is that they’re so isolated right now that it’s not only that we’re the only ones who will stick up for them,” said an American official. “We’re the only ones who believe them – and what they’re saying is true.”

Whoops, my bad.  It's a good thing there are no similarities whatsoever between the two situations, or readers could have been confused. 

Look this is bad for Israel, and it's going to get worse.  Stratfor's George Friedman makes a trenchant point here:

With roughly the population of Houston, Texas, Israel is just not large enough to withstand extended isolation, meaning this event has profound geopolitical implications.

Public opinion matters where issues are not of fundamental interest to a nation. Israel is not a fundamental interest to other nations. The ability to generate public antipathy to Israel can therefore reshape Israeli relations with countries critical to Israel. For example, a redefinition of U.S.-Israeli relations will have much less effect on the United States than on Israel. The Obama administration, already irritated by the Israelis, might now see a shift in U.S. public opinion that will open the way to a new U.S.-Israeli relationship disadvantageous to Israel.

The Israelis will argue that this is all unfair, as they were provoked... they seem to think that the issue is whose logic is correct. But the issue actually is, whose logic will be heard? As with a tank battle or an airstrike, this sort of warfare has nothing to do with fairness. It has to do with controlling public perception and using that public perception to shape foreign policy around the world. In this case, the issue will be whether the deaths were necessary. The Israeli argument of provocation will have limited traction.

Internationally, there is little doubt that the incident will generate a firestorm. Certainly, Turkey will break cooperation with Israel. Opinion in Europe will likely harden. And public opinion in the United States — by far the most important in the equation — might shift to a “plague-on-both-your-houses” position.

This is serious, because you have people like Jim Henley minimizing the threat to Israel: 

Israel not only no longer faces any enemies who pose an existential threat, it doesn’t even have enemies who can thwart any strongly held Israeli policy aim.  No state is going to go to war to “destroy Israel.” I doubt any state particularly wants to. Certainly no state that might want to can do so. But beyond that, no state is going to go to war on behalf of the Palestinians and the Palestinians lack the power to launch an effective war on their own behalf.

Henley is  correct about the current military balance of power, but the notion that Israel has no existential threats to worry about is absurd.  The people who control Gaza don't recognize Israel's right to exist, and there's a government in the region that keeps talking about wanting to wipe the country off the face of the map.  They're not powerful enough at present to take action -- but that hardly means that they won't take such action in the future should they acquire greater capabilities. 

All of this is taking place at a moment when Turkey is pivoting against Israel and IDF tactics are exposed as counterproductive.  As Judah Grunstein notes:

This creates a vicious circle with regard to the emphasis on liberty of action, since the IDF's deterrence is no longer based on its Entebbe-era veneer of Mission Impossible-like efficiency, but rather on the knowledge that the Israeli government is willing to use overwhelming and disproportionate force against all provocations, regardless of their threat level.

In conclusion, I agree with an awful lot of what Max Boot says on this: 

Israel cannot afford to become another South Africa, Burma, or North Korea. Come to think of it, even South Africa couldn’t afford to become South Africa: an international pariah regime. It was too democratic and too Western to bear such isolation indefinitely in the way that absolute dictatorships like Burma or North Korea can. The international embargo ultimately led to a crisis of confidence within Afrikaner leadership circles and to the negotiated end to the racist regime. Israel, I stress, is no South Africa: it is not an apartheid regime. It is in fact the most liberal and democratic regime in the region, offering Arabs more rights than they are offered in any of its immediate neighbors. And Israel is, mercifully, not yet subject to the kind of international opprobrium that South Africa (rightly) received. Unfortunately, it is heading in that direction....

That doesn’t mean [Israel] should refrain from legitimate acts of self-defense (such as killing Hamas big shots or retaliating for Hamas rocket strikes), but it should be ultra careful to manage public perceptions of its actions. Unfortunately, the Israeli Defense Forces have always shown more competence at tactical kinetic operations than at information operations. That deficiency was revealed during the 2006 war with Hezbollah and now more recently in the botched raid on the Gaza ships. Granted, Israel is getting better about managing the consequences of its actions; the IDF gets kudos for posting video of the raid online quickly and making some naval commandos available for interviews. But if Israel were strategically smarter, it would have avoided the raid altogether, with all the possibilities of something going wrong, and used more stealthy means to prevent the Hamas activists from reaching their objective. The IDF should be mindful of the French experience in Algeria and the American experience in Vietnam: it is possible to win every battle and still lose the war.

Developing.... in a precipitously bad way for Israel. 

There are two ways to understand the current dynamics playing out on the Korean peninsula.   

First, everything you need to know about the standoff on the Korean peninsula is encapsulated in this James Blitz analysis in the Financial Times: 

[O]n one point there is broad agreement: military conflict between North and South would have unimaginable consequences, in terms of fatalities and economic devastation.

A range of factors have long convinced military strategists that war is pretty much unthinkable, however unpleasant the rhetoric may get.

For North Korea, the fundamental risk of any conflict is that it would almost certainly lose, given its conventional military weakness. For South Korea, the risk is that while it might ultimately win, it would suffer immense casualties.

Second, in an expert display of connecting any international relations crisis to Kevin Bacon in less than six steps [I'm pretty sure that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon covers something different?!--ed.  Well, it works for IR flashpoints too!!] you can learn the fine art of playing Chicken by watching the tractor fight sequence from Footloose: 

This has been North Korea's bargaining advantage for decades -- everyone else in the world thinks they're crazy enough to stay on the tractor.  This means that the rational thing to do is to get off the tractor, which translates into granting them concessions.

Alas, Kevin Bacon doesn't explain everything under the sun in international relations.  As Christian Oliver explains in the FT, there are many possible explanations for the Cheonan incident, and some of them involve internal discord in the Hermit Kingdom.  Paradoxically, as Thomas Schelling explained oh so many decades ago, sometimes domestic weaknesses can be parlayed into international strength. 

This puts South Korea in a big bind.  So long as China is reluctant to sanction North Korea -- and they're very reluctant to do this  -- Seoul either needs to out-crazy Pyongyang or come up with a punishment that hurts North Korea without escalating military tensions. 

So my suggestion, based on this Reuters backgrounder, would be to either ban broadcasts of the 2010 World Cup tournament in North Korea, or even better, ban North Korea's side from participation in the tournament due to start  next month.  There is precedent for this:  Yugoslavia was barred from participating in the 1994 World Cup because of ongoing United Nations sanctions.  It's also a sanction that would not benefit any internal hardliners responsible for the Cheonan. 

I confess I'm grasping at straws here -- I'm holding out for a hero who can solve this policy conundrum.  Readers are encouraged to offer their own policy suggestions in the comments. 

Mom!!  Dad!!  Kids!!  Want to go somewhere fun for the winter, but tired of the same old vacation destinations? 

Have I got the place for you!!  Try.... Pyongyang!!

North Korea will allow more tourists from its arch-foe the US to visit this year, seeking alternative sources of hard currency as sanctions bite deeper.

North Korea at present allows US groups to visit only for the Arirang mass games, when tens of thousands of impeccably choreographed gymnasts and performers create colourful mosaics and slogans with painted cards. This year, the shows are scheduled to begin in August.

However, Pyongyang has said that it will also allow visits throughout the rest of the year, according to Simon Cockerell of Beijing-based Koryo Tours. Koryo, which says it escorts about 80 per cent of US travellers, was informed of the decision by its local partner in North Korea, he said. Koryo took about 280 US visitors into the country last year.

Somewhat more seriously, this appears to be one of several small signs that the regime in Pyongyang is not quite as secure as it used to be:

Further denting Pyongyang’s dollar income, Thai authorities last month detained an aircraft packed with arms being smuggled from Pyongyang. Diplomats saw this as a severe threat to the cash flow of Kim Jong-il, the country’s leader. Reports from defectors also suggest a recent currency redenomination has caused economic chaos during a bitter winter.

In a very rare admission that the country needed to improve its economic record, Mr Kim this month confessed that the nation had failed to deliver “rice and meat soup” to the people. He vowed to improve people's lives.

Just so I'm clear on this, in the past two months there have been protests in North Korea, and the country's leader has publicly admitted being unable to feed the country. 

This is still the DPRK we're talking about, right? 

Developing....

As my boss U.S. envoy Stephen Bosworth arrives in Pyongyang, I think it's worth noting that the North Korean government has not been endearing itself to its citizenry.  Hmmm... let me rephrase that -- the DPRK government has been acting with even more disregard fo its citizens than usual. 

The nub of the problem has been a currency revaluation/reform in which North Korean citizens will be forced to trade in their old notes for new ones -- and each citizen is limited in the amount they can exchange.  This move was designed to do two things:  lopping off a few zeroes of the North Korean won, and flushing out private traders along the Chinese border who are sitting on currency notes that will soon be worthless. 

It appears, according to AFP, that the DPRK regime has finally come up with a move that actually roils their population: 

Amid reports that some frustrated residents have been torching old bills, South Korean aid group Good Friends said authorities have threatened severe punishment for such an action.

Many residents would burn worthless old bills rather than surrender them to authorities, in order to avoid arousing suspicions about how they made the money, Good Friends said.

The banknotes carry portraits of founding president Kim Il-Sung and his successor and son Kim Jong-Il. Defacing their images is treated as a felony.

With nascent private markets for food collapsing because of the currency reform, citizens are finding it difficult to obtain basic staples. The U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization is already projecting another grain shortage for the country. 

Over at the U.S. Institute for Peace, John S. Park does a nice job of explaining the political economy effects of this currency move: 

As North Korean people in key market-active regions benefited from growing commercial interactions, low- to high-level DPRK officials figured out ways to get a cut of the money made. These officials used most of these bribes (viewed by traders as a "cost of doing business") to line their own pockets, but also used a portion of these for their respective organization's operating budget. With less to skim from the markets due to this revaluation, these officials will have funding gaps to fill. Given that these officials also enjoyed a higher standard of living, the discontent of the North Korean people will be aligned with these "skimming" officials. New groups of losers from this revaluation may be more advanced and better organized than protesters during previous periods of government-initiated economic and currency reforms....

If the DPRK government had improved and restored the inconsistent Public Distribution System and other public services on a national basis (a massive undertaking), a revaluation may have triggered greater state control by minimizing the benefits from the non-formal market system and making the North Korean people dependent on the state again. It does not appear that the DPRK government has improved these national systems. In an apparent effort to restore discipline through this revaluation, the DPRK government may have initiated a period of economic, social, and political destabilization by undermining a widely used coping mechanism for the people, as well as a growing number of officials.

[So a buckling DPRK regime is a good thing, right?--ed.]  From a nonproliferation perspective, not so much, no.   

Any domestic instability in North Korea is bad for Bosworth, the Six-Party Talks, and nonproliferation efforts in general.   The June uprisings in Iran have led the Iranian regime to adopt a more hardline position on the nuclear issue, both to bolster the conservative base and engage in "rally round the flag" efforts.  I see no reason why this logic would not apply to North Korea as well -- indeed, domestic instability is the likely explanation for Pyongyang's bellicose behavior earlier this year.

Developing.... in a very disturbing way.    

UPDATE:  My FP colleague Tom Ricks has more. 

My latest bloggingheads diavlog is with David Frum.  We discuss the situations in Iran and North Korea, and whether John Bolton is the Glenn Beck of U.S. foreign policy. 

Well, Glenn Kessler's rundown on what's happeing in Phuket is rich with blog-worthy goodness: 

The war of words between North Korea and the United States escalated Thursday, with North Korea's Foreign Ministry lashing out at Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in unusually personal terms for "vulgar remarks" that it said demonstrated "she is by no means intelligent."

Clinton, who earlier this week likened North Korea to an unruly child, has rallied international isolation of North Korea at a 27-member regional security forum here. She met with her Russian, Chinese, South Korean and Japanese counterparts -- the other key partners in suspended six-nation disarmament talks--and won strong statements of support from many delegations....

The Foreign Ministry statement attacking Clinton also amply demonstrated the North Korean mood. "We cannot but regard Mrs. Clinton as a funny lady as she likes to utter such rhetoric, unaware of the elementary etiquette in the international community," a Foreign Ministry spokesman said, according to North Korean media. "Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping."

The fit of pique was apparently inspired by an interview Clinton gave ABC News while visiting New Delhi.

"What we've seen is this constant demand for attention [from North Korea]," Clinton said. "And maybe it's the mother in me or the experience that I've had with small children and unruly teenagers and people who are demanding attention -- don't give it to them, they don't deserve it, they are acting out."  (emphases added)

Some random thoughts:

1.  If I'm Chelsea Clinton, I'd be pretty cheesed off right now.  I never thought of her as particularly "unruly," but what other teenagers has Hillary spent time with?  [Cough, cough!!--ed.  Oh... right.]

2.  You have to give the North Koreans major chutzpah points for accusing other countries of being "unaware of the elementary etiquette in the international community."  [UPDATE:  As Rob Farley puts it, "the Nork rhetoric vaguely reminds me of Daily Kos threads from the early days of the 2008 Democratic primary."] 

3.  It's worth pointing out that we're now in a place where the Bush administration look positively dovish on North Korea compared to the Obama administration.  Here's another way of looking at it:  Both Dick Cheney and John Bolton are more comfortable with the Obama administration's Nort Korea policy than Bush administration's.  Think about that for a second. 

4.  A related point -- remember how the Bush administration got pilloried for refusing to talk with Iran, arguing that doing so would confer a reward on the regime?  Kessler quotes Clinton as saying, with regard to the Six-Party Talks:  "We are open to talks with North Korea. But we are not interested in half measures.  We do not intend to reward the North just for returning to the table."   Now there is a difference between this position and that of the Bush administration vis-à-vis Iran -- but it's not nearly as big a difference as Obama defenders are likely to claim. 

5.  What's the end game in all of this?  I think maybe, just maybe, the international community has found a status quo that makes the North Koreans less comfortable than everyone else.  Assuming that the interdiction and sanctions regime works well -- which is a robust but not entirely unreasonable assumption -- then North Korea gets nothing for thumbing its nose at the world except some more weapons-grade fissile material. 

That's not nothing, but it's not all that much either.  Pyongyang already has a deterrent to prevent invasion.  It can't threaten nuclear blackmail all that persuasively, because it's a pretty hollow threat on their part.  And if they can't sell their technology to other countries, then there's no profit in it for them either.  Which means they're stuck, wallowing in their own barren dirt, feeling very, very lonely. 

Am I missing anything?