I'm at a stage in my career when reporters will occasionally call or e-mail me for an "expert" opinion on something.  I've gotten better at refusing those requests when I'm not really an expert but just a snarky blogger.  Still, even when I can claim expertise, I don't always do that great of a job. 

To see what I mean, consider this New York Times front-pager by Mark Landler and Annie Lowrey on President Obama's proposed reorganization of foreign economic policy agencies.  I'm quoted accurately in this story -- but I'm not quoted fully.

To explain, here's the key bits of the article:

Mr. Obama called on lawmakers to grant him broad new powers to propose mergers of agencies, which Congress would then have to approve or reject in an up-or-down vote.  If granted the authority, he said, he would begin pruning by folding the Small Business Administration and five other trade and business agencies into a single agency that would replace the Commerce Department....

Despite regular vows by presidents to overhaul government — Mr. Obama made one in his State of the Union address last January — few have followed through. Those who did, like Richard M. Nixon, often met with failure. Scholars have mixed feelings about such reorganizations, with some arguing that they rarely lead to lower head counts, more effective departments or savings.

“My gut tells me those benefits will end up being much smaller than advertised, and the costs much larger,” said Steven M. Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, pointing to the time wasted during the consolidation and the changed political dynamic between the agencies and Congress.

But experts on government efficiency applauded the initiative, saying it was overdue, and some analysts said it made sense to combine agencies involved in business development, foreign investment and trade promotion into a single department with the mandate to promote American exports.

“If you look at American exports, it’s dominated by big business,” said Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University. “If you want small and medium enterprises to get more involved in exporting” — a goal of the Obama administration — “having small business and the trade office in the same agency makes sense,” he said. “So this could be a boon for that.”

Now, based on that quote, you might think that I'm pretty enthusiastic about this initiative.  If, however, you checked my initial tweets about this proposal, you would notice a lot more agreement with what Stephen Teles said in the paragraphs above me.  My instant assessment was that this was one of those "reorganizing government" initiatives that makes a lot of sense in the abstract but probably leads to more transition costs than long-term benefits.  Indeed, the first thing that came to mind could be summed up in four words:  Department of Homeland Security. 

So what gives?  This is what happens when I talk to reporters.  I had a long chat with Annie Lowrey during which I listed A) the various ways in which Congress won't go for this; and B) why merging different organizational cultures will likely be a big mess.  Lowrey then asked me if there was any rationale for this kind of reorganization.  At which point I said what was quoted in the paper of record. 

Now if you know my views about the National Export Initiative, you'll see I don't hold out much hope of this accomplishing anything.  Still, to repeat, Lowrey's quote of me is completely accurate, and it is a decent motivation for this kind of initiative. 

This is one of those mismatches between reporters and experts.  It's not really the reporter's job to convey the full gist of a conversation with an expert.  This story isn't "What Dan Drezner The Expert Thinks About Something," after all.  Still, this is often the natural expectation of many experts, because we think about the entire conversation, not just one part of it.  Furthermore, it's an expectation that, despite multiple occurences like this, stubbornly persists in my brain.  So the impulse to develop disciplined talking points and not stray from them has never developed. 

Why?  Because I like answering questions fully, or trying to, anyway.  That's why I got a doctorate, and why I became a professor.  This impulse, by the way, is why so many experts loathe presidential debates.  The candidates are  usually too savvy to directly answer a question.  Rather, they are being tested on their ability to pivot from the question that's asked to the talking point that is closest to that question. 

This is a long-winded way of saying that what I said in the Times was the truth but not the whole truth.  And that the odds are good that I'm probably going find myself in this situation again.  And that's OK -- one of the perks of having this blog is that when this sort of thing happens, I can ramble my way to a more fuller explanation of my views. 

So check out David Rothkopf for a full-throated defense of Obama's proposal.  Despite my quote in the Times, you're not going to see one here. 

UPDATE:  Now this is fascinating.  The Anchorage Daily News runs a version of the Times story -- except that the ADN version has much fuller quotes from more experts.  The relevant portion: 

One government efficiency expert, Jitinder Kohli, applauded the move.

"These efforts to rationalize government are long overdue, frankly," said Kohli, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. "In fiscally tight times, it's even more important to think carefully about how to deliver savings — and that includes making websites easier to use, providing single points of entry and streamlining."

"In the world of business, reorganization happens all the time, for good reason," Kohli added. "The world changes around businesses, and businesses change to better serve the world. But the government is far, far less nimble."

Still, a body of research throws cold water on the notion that such reorganization leads to lower head counts, more effective departments or cost savings.

"The most important considerations are the costs in wasted time while they do the reorganization, how this changes the politics of the affected agencies in relation to Congress and other executive branch agencies, and how specific the purported benefits of consolidation are," said Steven M. Teles, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. "My gut tells me those benefits will end up being much smaller than advertised, and the costs much larger."

Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts, said "This is one of those ideas that looks great in abstract. But you're talking about merging the organizational cultures of five or six agencies. It takes a long time for efficiencies and synergies to work out. They're not going to play well for a while."

Nonetheless, Drezner said that having a single body devoted to export promotion made sense.

"If you look at American exports, it's dominated by big business," he said. "If you want small and medium enterprises to get more involved in exporting" — a goal of the Obama administration — "having small business and the trade office in the same agency makes sense. So this could be a boon for that."

Susan C. Schwab, who served as a U.S. trade representative during the Bush administration, agreed that the move might improve export promotion. But she said that it might do so at the expense of broader trade policy.

"You'd take a small, very efficient agency and have it totally swallowed up by this behemoth," said Schwab, who is now a professor of public policy the University of Maryland. "From a trade policy perspective, it makes no sense at all."

Schwab added, "Trade policy involves so many different sectors of the economy, and U.S. interests. It's foreign policy. It's manufacturing. It is services, agriculture, consumers, labor, the environment, intellectual property."

An agency without a strong trade representative, she said, could end up giving "short shrift" to some concerns.

Had this been the version that the Times ran, I wouldn't have bothered blogging about this, because my quotes were both accurate and captured to gist of what I was saying. 

Of course, this is a longer story, which reminds me that sometimes it's not the reporter that has mismatched incentives -- it's the editor worried about length. 

Walter Russell Mead has not been the biggest fan of the current president, so it's worth quoting at length what he said in a recent blog post about Obama's Pacific Rim trip: 

The cascade of statements, deployments, agreements and announcements from the United States and its regional associates in the last week has to be one of the most unpleasant shocks for China’s leadership — ever.  The US is moving forces to Australia, Australia is selling uranium to India, Japan is stepping up military actions and coordinating more closely with the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea, Myanmar is slipping out of China’s column and seeking to reintegrate itself into the region, Indonesia and the Philippines are deepening military ties with the the US: and all that in just one week. If that wasn’t enough, a critical mass of the region’s countries have agreed to work out a new trade group that does not include China, while the US, to applause, has proposed that China’s territorial disputes with its neighbors be settled at a forum like the East Asia Summit — rather than in the bilateral talks with its smaller, weaker neighbors that China prefers.

Rarely has a great power been so provoked and affronted.  Rarely have so many red lines been crossed.  Rarely has so much face been lost, so fast.  It was a surprise diplomatic attack, aimed at reversing a decade of chit chat about American decline and disinterest in Asia, aimed also at nipping the myth of “China’s inexorable rise” in the bud....

[I]t was as decisive a diplomatic victory as anyone is likely to see.  Congratulations should go to President Obama and his national security team.  The State Department, the Department of Defense and the White House have clearly been working effectively together on an intensive and complex strategy.  They avoided leaks, they coordinated effectively with half a dozen countries, they deployed a range of instruments of power.  In the field of foreign policy, this was a coming of age of the Obama administration and it was conceived and executed about as flawlessly as these things ever can be.

You know it was a good foreign policy trip when Politico runs the "Obama will soon miss his foreign policy successes as he returns to the Washington mire" storyline upon his return. 

The standard line among the press and expert analysts is that the combination of speeches and actions represents a dramatic foreign policy "pivot" to East Asia.  This elides some prior speeches that suggested this was under way for some time, but still -- what does it mean? 

I'd suggest three things.  First, it's an interesting moment to highlight some macro trends that are relatively favorable to the United States.  In comparison to, say, China or Europe, the United States looks to be in decent shape.  Over the longer term, trends in both energy and manufacturing suggest that the United States will continue a time-honored tradition and emerge from a crisis of its own making in a stronger relative position than before.  If the administration is smart, it will marry its recent successes to these longer-term trends as a way of constructing a more optimistic strategic narrative. 

Second, China is likely to pursue a more accommodating posture in the short run.  As Mead notes, the official Chinese reaction has been muted.  The unofficial reaction has ranged from the hyperbolic to the inscrutable.  Still, as I've pointed out repeatedly, China's behavior in 2009 and 2010 was a giant honking invitation for the rest of the Pacific Rim to cozy up to the United States.  And that's what should worry Beijing.  It's not that the United States is interested in maintaining its presence in East Asia -- that interest has not wavered.  What has changed is the eagerness with which the countries in the region, ranging from Australia to Myanmar, have reciprocated. 

Third, while the Obama administration deserves credit for this foreign policy swing -- and for some fun, compare and contrast coverage of this trip with Obama's Pac Rim swing from two years ago -- the "pivot" language is badly misplaced.  A pivot implies that the United States will stop paying attention to Europe or the Middle East and start paying attention to East Asia.  While I'm sure that's what the Obama administration wants to do, it can't.  Europe is imploding, as are multiple countries in the Middle East.  The United States can't afford to ignore these regions, since uncertainty there eventually translates into both global and domestic problems.  A European financial meltdown or an Egyptian political meltdown will have ramifications that simply can't be ignored. 

Talking about a United States "pivot" in foreign policy is meaningless.  The US, like an overstuffed couch, is simply too big to pivot. 

What do you think? 

My FP colleague Steve Walt has responded to my Obama-praising blog post with a long litany of Obama foreign policy failures.  He includes climate change, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, the global economy, North Korea, failing to cure cancer.... you get the drift. 

Walt closes with the following observation: 

Where Dan and I agree, however, is the crucial role of domestic politics. For if you look at the failures listed above, what is striking is that most of them are heavily shaped by domestic constraints. Doing something serious about climate change would have real consequences for business and consumers, and that wasn't going to happen when we are teetering on the brink of another recession. Making progress on Israel-Palestine or on Iran would require bringing in a new Middle East team and taking on the Israel lobby (including the Christianist wing of the GOP), and Obama abandoned that course after the Cairo speech in June 2009. His decisions to escalate in Afghanistan and to try to stay in Iraq were clearly shaped by domestic political concerns, and especially the perennial Democratic fear of being perceived as "weak" on national security. Trade liberalization is always a contentious issue here at home, and especially tough to tackle with a weak economy.

In short, Dan's broader point about Obama's foreign policy successes is insightful: the president has done well in those relatively minor areas where domestic politics do not loom large and where he can exercise unilateral authority. But on the more important and more difficult issues where you would have to convince the American people to follow a new path, he's come up mostly empty.

Steve raises some interesting issues, and as I noted in my initial post, I absolutely agree that Obama's foreign policy has had flaws.  That said, I have a few quarrels with Walt's claims. 

First, in some cases, what Walt would consider a "success" might not be what others consider a success.  On Iran, for example, Walt laments that "the administration [has not] managed to think outside the box and try a different approach."  Beyond the Leveretts, however (and Ron Paul), I'm not sure anyone else would agree with Steve in that assessment.  Furthermore, to be fair, I think there's some pretty strong evidence that the administration did think outside the box in handling the nuclear issue.

Second, part of the issue here is how one defines a "success" in foreign policy. For example, Walt says the following on Libya as to why it's a failure:

[D]idn't the "Mission Accomplished" moment in 2003 in Iraq teach us about the dangers of declaring victory prematurely? We can all hope that the Libyan revolution fulfills its idealistic hopes and avoids the various pitfalls that lie ahead, but it is way too early to start bragging about it, or declaring it the model for future interventions. And if Libya does go south, enthusiasm for the "Obama Doctrine" will fade faster than watercolors in the Libyan sun.

Walt's observation is eminently sensible -- there are many ways in which Libya could evolve in a direction unfriendly to American interests. This gets to a deeper issue, which is how one defines "success" in politics vs. political science. Afghanistan looked like a success in 2001; Iraq looked like a success in 2003. Obviously, over time, these situations changed. As political scientists, we need to keep tabs on these developments.

In politics, however, voters tend not to do all that much updating, particularly in terms of foreign policy. It takes high-profile events for new information to filter down to candidates who read one whole page of foreign news almost every day the American public. It will be interesting to see how Libya (and Egypt, and Tunisia, and Syria, etc.) play out over the next few decades. My post was about the next year, however -- and Obama will be able to claim credit if it looks like things are going well, and fall back on "we didn't play that big of a role" if things fall apart. From a policy perspective, that's a very cynical way of looking at things -- but it makes sense from a political perspective.

Third, in many of the cases that Walt cites as failures, the problem isn't necessarily the domestic politics of the United States but the domestic politics of other countries.  On climate change, Israel, Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq, it's impossible to discuss the outcomes without recognizing the domestic political constraints/chaos in these countries.  While each of them possesses elements willing to cooperate with the United States, there are spoilers aplenty in all of these countries. This is a problem that Bush faced when he was in office, Obama has faced now, and will be a bigger problem over time.  It's a sign that the degree of difficulty in conducting American foreign policy has gone up. 

This brings me to my final cavil.  I'd really like the Steve Walt of this blog post to reconcile his arguments with... the Steve Walt who just published "The End of the American Era" in The National Interest. See, that Steve Walt views American decline as both inevitable and structural, which implies that these outcomes aren't a function of Obama's leadership per se but impersonal forces of history. Many of the cases Walt cites as Obama "failures" in his blog post are treated as ineluctable outcomes of relative American decline in his TNI essay.  Which is it?    

While today is undeniably International Talk Like a Pirate Day, it also appears to be Let's Release Something About Trade Day inside the beltway.  Scanning these documents, I'm pretty depressed about the future of trade policy and trade politics.   

The Council on Foreign Relations released a Task Force Report on Trade and Investment Policy.  The Task force was populated from a bipartisan list of eminences who agreed upon the following list of bullet points: 

1)  A trade-negotiations agenda that opens markets for the most competitive U.S.-produced goods and services

2)  A National Investment Initiative that would coordinate investment policies to create more high-wage, high-productivity jobs in the United States

3)  A robust and strategic trade enforcement effort that ensures U.S. companies and workers are not harmed by trade agreement violations

4)  A greater push to promote U.S. exports through more competitive export financing and a more active U.S. government role in supporting American overseas sales

5)  An expanded use of trade to foster development in the world’s poorest countries

6)  A comprehensive worker adjustment and retraining policy

7)  A new deal with Congress to give the president a mandate to negotiate trade-opening agreements with an assurance of timely congressional action

OK, let's see... (1) is just a restatement of principles, (3) is an old saw that only gets repeated during a presidential election season, (4) sounds awfully similar to the status quo policy, (5) is not a politically viable option, (6) is a political non-starter, and (7) will only happen if a single party controls the executive and legislative branches. So, to sum up, all of the the good, innovative policy proposals are politically impossible right now. 

You can understand why I'm feeling a bit like Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles. 

As much as I want to see further trade liberalization, however, I'm getting equally weary of lazy pro-trade rhetoric.  Consider, as Exhibit A, this open trade letter to President Obama that Jaggdish Bhagwati pulled together (reprinted in The American Interest).  The key paragraph has the following assertions: 

The fear of the labour unions that trade with the poor countries produces poor in the rich countries is mistaken. The demand of the business lobbies that want ever more concessions from others is excessive. The contention of some experts that the gains from Doha are minuscule is flawed in neglecting the costs of the failure of Doha and the ensuing damage to the WTO. The retribution by a protectionist public is greatly exaggerated: many jobs today depend on both exports and imports and the polls reflect that.

As the 2012 campaign heats up, let's just re-write that last paragraph in the language of political pollsters: 

If you push to ratify Doha as is, the unions will freak, big business will stand on the sidelines, some experts will argue that the gains are miniscule, and the public will likely disapprove of the deal unless they suddenly care enough to follow the issue.  Get to it, President Obama! 

The worst part of that paragraph, however, is the claim regarding "ensuing damage" to the WTO is Doha fails.  Anyone paying attention to Doha has been aware that the trade round has been deader than a doornail since before rthe 2008 financial crisis.  It's so dead that the Bush administration's last trade negotiator proposed scrapping it.  What's striking is that, three years after Doha became DOA, the damage to the WTO appears to be pretty minimal.  The wave of protectionism triggered by 2008 crested a while ago, and trade volumes recovered quickly.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not happy that Doha is dead -- but the WTO's survival does not seem contingent on its passage.   

Am I missing anything? 

Despite Fareed Zakaria's best efforts, it seems that foreign policy commentators can't stop offering advice on American grand strategy. 

Richard Haass provides the latest salvo in Time.  After arguing that no other great power can offer a serious revisionist challenge to the current system, concluding, "Today's great powers are not all that great."  With that set-up, he proposes a grand strategy of "Restoration": 

The U.S. would continue to carry out an active foreign policy—to create international arrangements to manage the challenges inherent in globalization, to invigorate alliances and partnerships, to deal with the threats posed by an aggressive North Korea, a nuclear-armed Iran and a failing Pakistan.

But under a doctrine of restoration, there would be fewer wars of choice—armed interventions when either the interests at stake are less than vital or when there are alternative policies that appear viable. Recent wars of choice include Vietnam, the second Iraq war and the current Libyan intervention. There would, however, continue to be wars of necessity, which involve vital interests when no alternatives to using military force exist. Modern wars of necessity include the first Iraq war and Afghanistan after 9/11....

Restoration is not just about acting more discriminating abroad; it is even more about doing the right things at home. The principal focus would be on restoring the fiscal foundations of American power. The current situation is unsustainable, leaving the U.S. vulnerable either to market forces that could impose higher interest rates and draconian spending cuts or to the pressures of one or more central banks motivated by economic or conceivably political concerns.

Reducing discretionary domestic spending would constitute one piece of any fiscal plan. But cuts need to be smart: domestic spending is desirable when it is an investment in the U.S.'s human and physical future and competitiveness. This includes targeted spending on public education, including at the community-college and university levels; modernizing transportation and energy infrastructures; and increasing energy efficiency while decreasing dependence on Middle East oil. Spending cuts should focus on entitlements and defense. Further deficit reductions can be achieved by reducing so-called tax expenditures such as health care plans and mortgage deductions. The goal should be to reduce the deficit by some $300 billion per year until the budget is balanced but for interest payments on the debt.

Adopting a doctrine of restoration for several years would help the U.S. shore up the economic foundations of its power.

Over at Democracy Arsenal, Jacob Stokes thinks restoration (or some variant of it) sounds peachy: 

[Hasss' argument is] derivative of what journalist Peter Beinart called a “solvency doctrine” back in 2009. He wrote, “No matter what grand visions Obama may harbor to remake the world, the central mission of his foreign policy--at least at first--will be to get it out of the red.” None of these plans or explanations is perfect, of course, but taken together, they seem to me good starting points for what a grand strategy for the U.S. should look like, namely a focus on tending to the sources of American power rather than on making more commitments that draw on it.

Color me skeptical.  It's not that I don't like the ideas behind Haass' argument -- they're sympatico with a welter of realpolitik-friendly strategies that have been promulgated at regular intervals. 

There are two currently insurmountable political problems with Haass' strategy, however.  The first is that it is ridiculously hard for the U.S. government to draw down military commitments -- particularly if the U.S. military doesn't want to do it.  It's worth remembering that Barack Obama entered office with a worldview that closely matched Haass' restoration idea -- and yet, in the end, he expanded U.S. operations in Afghanistan and attacked Libya to boot.  The U.S. military strongly supported the former, while Obama's foreign policy advisors jump-started the latter.  [So, you're saying that if a powerful executive-branch foreign-policy actor favors the use of military statecraft, it's gonna happen?--ed.  Um... yeah, I guess I am.]

The second is that a restoration strategy is really a focus on domestic policy.  And, as I noted in the pages of Foreign Affairs:

The most significant challenge to Obama's grand strategy is likely to emerge at home rather than abroad. Viable grand strategies need to rest on a wellspring of domestic support. The biggest problem with Obama's new grand strategy is its troublesome domestic politics....

By focusing on renewing the United States' domestic strength, the Obama administration has introduced more partisan politics into the equation. There is still some truth to the aphorism that politics stops at the water's edge. But if the administration argues that the key to U.S. foreign policy is the domestic economy, then it increases the likelihood of domestic discord. Based on the tenor of the debates about the rising levels of U.S. debt, the possibility that the president can hammer out a grand bargain over fiscal and tax policies is looking increasingly remote.

I wrote that a few months ago, and of course as the debtopocalypse approaches, I'm sure things will improve in our domestic political discour--- HA HA HA HA HA HA HA... I'm sorry, I couldn't finish that sentence, I was crying bitter tears laughing too hard. 

Restoration won't be happening anytime during this session of Congress... or perhaps ever.  The real problem in today's political climate is devising a grand strategy that is sustainable both domestically and internationally.  I'm reluctantly coming around to Peter Trubowitz and Charles Kupchan's conclusion that the bipartisan political foundations for a viable grand strategy are badly eroded. 

For the past two years, staunch monetarists and economic conservatives have warned about the evils of massive deficit spending and quantitative easing.  They have argued that such policy measures are inevitably inflationary and will debase the currency and raise nominal interest rates.  By and large, supporters of Keynesian policies have responded by loudly pointing to the data on core U.S. inflation and the dollar's performance as falsifying the conservative argument.  And, by and large, they have a point.  If inflationary concerns really were prominent, the dollar should have depreciated in value an awful lot, and nominal interest rates should have soared.  Neither of these things have happened.  Point for Keynesians.    

Right now, however, markets are providing a pretty powerful data point for Tea Party supporters who argue that hitting the debt ceiling is not the end of the world.  Last week Moody's issued the following warning: 

Moody's Investors Service said today that if there is no progress on increasing the statutory debt limit in coming weeks, it expects to place the US government's rating under review for possible downgrade, due to the very small but rising risk of a short-lived default. If the debt limit is raised and default avoided, the Aaa rating will be maintained. However, the rating outlook will depend on the outcome of negotiations on deficit reduction. A credible agreement on substantial deficit reduction would support a continued stable outlook; lack of such an agreement could prompt Moody's to change its outlook to negative on the Aaa rating.

 

Although Moody's fully expected political wrangling prior to an increase in the statutory debt limit, the degree of entrenchment into conflicting positions has exceeded expectations. The heightened polarization over the debt limit has increased the odds of a short-lived default. If this situation remains unchanged in coming weeks, Moody's will place the rating under review.

Make fun of the ratings agencies all you like, but this was front-page news last week.  One would think that markets would be pricing in the possibility of institutional investors diversifying away from dollar-denominated debt, a collapse in the dollar, skyrocketing interest rates, a drastic reduction in nominal GDP, dogs and cats living together, and so forth.  Or, as Tim Geithner put it, "catastrophic economic and market consequences." 

And yet.... last week, the yield on 10 year Treasuries fell below three percent.  Maybe markets are underestimating the likelihood that a debt ceiling deal won't happen, maybe they are underestimating the damage caused by hitting the debt ceiling, or maybe they think the Chinese will continue to buy dollar-denominated debt no matter what happens on the debt ceiling (though read this).  Or... maybe the Tea Party activists have a point. 

So, my question to readers, investors, and experts on the global political economy -- why aren't markets freaking out more about the rising probability of hitting the debt ceiling? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I wrote in The Spectator last year: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan Lizza has a 9,000+ word exegesis on the Obama administration's foreign policy decisionmaking in The New Yorker.  For anyone who's paid attention to this debate over the past six weeks, there's nothing terribly new -- for those who haven't however, it's a decent summary.  The key parts for me:

One of Donilon’s overriding beliefs, which Obama adopted as his own, was that America needed to rebuild its reputation, extricate itself from the Middle East and Afghanistan, and turn its attention toward Asia and China’s unchecked influence in the region. America was “overweighted” in the former and “underweighted” in the latter, Donilon told me. “We’ve been on a little bit of a Middle East detour over the course of the last ten years,” Kurt Campbell, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said. “And our future will be dominated utterly and fundamentally by developments in Asia and the Pacific region.”

In December, 2009, Obama announced that he would draw down U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan by the end of his first term. He also promised, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly last year, that he was “moving toward a more targeted approach” that “dismantles terrorist networks without deploying large American armies.”

“The project of the first two years has been to effectively deal with the legacy issues that we inherited, particularly the Iraq war, the Afghan war, and the war against Al Qaeda, while rebalancing our resources and our posture in the world,” Benjamin Rhodes, one of Obama’s deputy national-security advisers, said. “If you were to boil it all down to a bumper sticker, it’s ‘Wind down these two wars, reëstablish American standing and leadership in the world, and focus on a broader set of priorities, from Asia and the global economy to a nuclear-nonproliferation regime.’ ”....

Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the President’s actions in Libya as “leading from behind.” That’s not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic Convention, but it does accurately describe the balance that Obama now seems to be finding. It’s a different definition of leadership than America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world. Pursuing our interests and spreading our ideals thus requires stealth and modesty as well as military strength. “It’s so at odds with the John Wayne expectation for what America is in the world,” the adviser said. “But it’s necessary for shepherding us through this phase.” (emphasis added)

There's something that's really frustrating about the structure of the essay, and then something else that's frustrating about the content.  Both of them involve China. 

On the structure - despite Lizza's 9,000 words, and despite Obama's stated intention to reorient American foreign policy to be less Middle East-focused, the essay.... is totally focused on the Middle East.  I'm not saying that the Middle East is unimportant, but I'd have liked to have read something about how the Obama administration is dealing with the rest of the world.  Indeed, Lizzaa notes that Obama visited South America during the opening days of the Libya operation precisely "to show that America has interests in the rest of the world."  Despite this effort, the thrust of the article demonstrates its futility during the start of a war.  New military conflicts crowd out attention that should be paid to other arenas of foreign policy.  It would have been nice to see how the administration's strategy is playing/affecting the rest of the world.

The problem with the content is that bolded section.  To tweak Tom Donilon a little bit, I'd characterize it as a "static and one-dimensional assessment" of the U.S. strategic position.  It doesn't allow for the possibility that rising states might experience their own dips in national power, or that attitudes towards the United States might improve as a consequence of shifts in U.S. strategy. 

Countries make strategic missteps when they overestimate or underestimate their own capabilities.  The Bush administration was clearly guilty of overestimation, but there are ways in which the Obama administration is equally guilty of underestimation. 

What do you think? 

After last night's speech on Libya, there's been an orgy of online discourse about whether there is now an Obama Doctrine or not.  All of which is making me feel very, very guilty. 

See, back in early 2009, I wrote one of the earlier posts about whether there was an Obama Doctrine or not.  Glenn Thrush quoted that post in Politico last week, which led to a lot of media inquiries on the matter.   Regardless of what I say on the subject, the topic du jour appears to be whether there is now an Obama Doctrine and how it holds up as a grand strategy.

I don't have the time today to write up my substantive thoughts on the matter, but I do think it would be useful to at least define the terms properly. 

First, on the Obama Doctrine -- unfortunately, foreign policy discourse being what it is, that "XXX Doctrine" has devolved into a meaningless catchphrase coined by news outlets the first time that an administration initiates military or quasi-military force.*  Whenever that happens, the news networks go into paroxysms of speculation about whether such action signals a new doctrine.  Based on Obama's speech last night, it seems pretty clear that the answer to that question on Libya is a clear "no," so I don't think we need to go there. 

Second, even if Libya did lead to an Obama Doctrine, that doesn't equate to a grand strategy.  The Reagan Doctrine, for example, had actual policy content -- it meant the arming and aiding of anti-communist guerillas in peripheral communist countries like Nicaragua or Afghanistan.  Not even the fiercest Reagan acolyte would agree that the Reagan Doctrine was America's grand strategy during the 1980's.  It was rather a policy that was part of the larger strategy of containing Soviet communism. 

Obama did not clearly articulate a grand strategy last night (and just as well, since his delivery was pretty weak).  He has tried to do so in his previous speeches and strategy documents, with variable results.  Far more important that what is said at the beginning of an administration is how Big Decisions are articulated ex post.

In that sense, Dan Nexon is right to say that Obama shouldn't have articulated a grand strategy out of what was clearly an exceptional decision due to exceptional circumstances.  That said, if I were Obama's foreign policy team, I'd start thinking very hard about a speech without the phrase "false choice" in it that clearly prioritizes American interests and values.  Because unless the president defines his grand strategy, pundits will be more than happy to define it -- badly -- for him. 

*Clear exceptions include those doctrines clearly articulated or embraced by Monroe, Teddy Roosevelt, Truman, Nixon, and Reagan.

Your humble blogger has, in the past, live-blogged or live-tweeted the State of the Union address. After reading the National Journal's draft of the speech, I've decided that the mindless applause will convert a decent 30-minute speech into an interminable 75-minute talkathonso I'm gonna watch Mystery Men instead to pass.

Looking over the draft, however, I see that the Obama administration has really taken this competitiveness theme to heart. More than any State of the Union I've seen before, President Obama raises the examples of other countries doing things better than the United States as an impetus for the U.S. to do more. Consider:

The rules have changed. In a single generation, revolutions in technology have transformed the way we live, work and do business. Steel mills that once needed 1,000 workers can now do the same work with 100. Today, just about any company can set up shop, hire workers, and sell their products wherever there's an internet connection.

Meanwhile, nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world. And so they started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science. They're investing in research and new technologies. Just recently, China became home to the world's largest private solar research facility, and the world's fastest computer....

Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik¸ we had no idea how we'd beat them to the moon. The science wasn't there yet. NASA didn't even exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn't just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.

This is our generation's Sputnik moment....

The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations. America has fallen to 9th in the proportion of young people with a college degree. And so the question is whether all of us - as citizens, and as parents - are willing to do what's necessary to give every child a chance to succeed....

Our infrastructure used to be the best - but our lead has slipped. South Korean homes now have greater internet access than we do. Countries in Europe and Russia invest more in their roads and railways than we do. China is building faster trains and newer airports. Meanwhile, when our own engineers graded our nation's infrastructure, they gave us a "D."

We have to do better.

I'm curious to see how this will play out. On the one hand, the administration is obviously using this kind of "we're falling behind other countries!" shtick as a way to build public support for investments in education and infrastructure. In the same speech he talks about falling behind South Korea, for example, he embraces the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.

At the same time, I have two big concerns with this approach. First, there's the risk of rhetorical blowback, in which everyone freaks out and reacts in a hysterical manner.

Second, and more important, the percentage of the speech devoted to microeconomic "competitiveness" issues vastly exceeds the amount devoted to long-term macroeconomic policy. If the federal government really wants to create a better climate for innovation, it needs to send a credible signal that steps are being taken to deal with long-term budgetary problems. That section of the speech was, er, less solid.

[What about the foreign policy sections?!--ed. Meh. Nothing bad -- just nothing of substance either. One could argue that the biggest foreign policy innovation of the SOTU is the administration's decision to use globalization as the political crowbar to pry infrastructure spending investments from Congress.]

Feel free to comment away on what you would like to see in the speech.

As I'm typing this very sentence, it looks like the New START treaty will be passed.  This happened even though GOP arms control pointman Senator Jon Kyl acted like a petulant child for the last month came out in opposition to the treaty (along with Mitch McConnell). 

Slate's David Weigel Fred Kaplan has an excellent summary of why the GOP leadership failed to halt ratification, even though the threshold for blocking it was only 34 senators: 

If a Republican were president, the accord would have excited no controversy and at most a handful of diehard nays. As even most of its critics conceded, the treaty's text contains nothing objectionable in substance.

There were two kinds of opponents in this debate. The first had concerns that President Barack Obama would use the treaty as an excuse to ease up on missile defense and the programs to maintain the nuclear arsenal. In recent weeks, Obama and his team did as much to allay these concerns as any hawk could have hoped—and more than many doves preferred.

So that left the second kind of opponent: those who simply wanted to deny Obama any kind of victory. The latter motive was clearly dominant in this debate (emphasis added)

Let's step back here for a second and contemplate the truth and meaning of that last sentence.  Is it true?  Kevin Drum and Greg Sargent clearly think the answer is yes, and they've got some damning quotes to back up their argument.  Rich Lowry is particularly revealing on this point: 

As the sense builds that ratification is inevitable, Republicans are lining up to get on the “right side.” Lamar Alexander’s support, noted below, is a crucial sign of which way the wind is blowing, although he’ll probably be the only member of the Republican leadership to vote for it. At least Jon Kyl was able to get more money for modernization and that letter from President Obama making assurances on missile defense. Otherwise, this is a dismaying rout (emphasis added)

Um... at best, this is a dismaying rout for the GOP, not the USA.   As Weigel Kaplan points out, however, it's not elements of the GOP didn't favor the treaty:  

The task of Obama and the Democratic floor managers, Sens. Harry Reid and John Kerry, was to convince enough Republicans to view the issue not as political gamesmanship but as an urgent matter of national security. Hence their rallying of every retired general, former defense secretary, and other security specialist—Republican and Democrat—that anyone had ever heard of. (At one point, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she might vote for the treaty if former President George H.W. Bush endorsed it. A few days later, Bush released a statement doing just that.)

A few other things happened as well.  Beyond the U.S. foreign policy establishment, the Eastern European foreign policy establishment got behind the treaty.  There's also the fact that some GOP senators are still nursing a grudge against other GOP senators.  Josh Rogin also points out that the treaty always had GOP supporters.  And, finally, the Obama administration wisely decided to go to the mat on what was a rather unobjectionable treaty, no matter how hard John Bolton bloviates on the matter.  

What does this mean going forward?  In my bloggingheads with Matthew Yglesias last week, I was optimistic that Kyl's blatant obstructionism was a step too far, and that maybe this will lead to a little less needless obstructionism when it comes foreign policy.  There's also the fact that the American people seems to really like what's happened during the lane duck session.  Perhaps the GOP legislators that want to get re-elected will take note of that fact and decide that some cooperaion with the Obama administration on things like KORUS and arms control are a decent idea (there's also the fact that more GOP legislators from Democrat-friendly territory means more moderate Republicans). 

That said, the nuclear negotiations with Russia only get harder from here.  Plus, my gut tells me that the GOP leadership will become even more obsteperous going forward in order to bolster their reputation as the really tough bargaining party and eliminate the bitter aftertaste they're feeling from the lame duck session. 

What do you think? 

I know that the good editors of this magazine have a series of U.S. election articles offering advice and analysis on the midterm elections and their effect on foreign policy.

I also know that even if this turns out to be a big "wave" election, things aren't really going to change all that much on the foreign policy front. This is for the following two reasons:

1) Congress doesn't have too much sway over foreign policy. Sure, things like foreign aid and treaty ratification rely on the legislature, and the election results will affect those dimensions of foreign policy. But think back to 1994 and 2006, in which both houses of Congress turned over to the opposition party. Was there any real change in U.S. foreign and security policy? The Clinton administration was still able to send troops to Bosnia, and the Bush administration was able to launch its "surge" strategy.

Foreign economic policy might be an exception. After both of those elections, the president found it harder to get trade deals through Congress. Given that this president hasn't been all that keen about trade anyway, I don't think the midterms will matter all that much -- though the South Korea-United States Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) might finally be put to a vote with the hope of securing GOP support.

2) In a sour economy, presidents don't get much of a bump for foreign policy successes. The best foreign-policy president of the past four decades was George H.W. Bush. How many terms did he serve? [Hey, this sounds familiar! -- Ed. Click here to see why. The only things that have changed since that post simply reinforce my thesis.] See Aaron David Miller's FP essay for more on this point.

Enjoy watching the returns, poll-watchers -- I'll be going to bed early, secure in the knowledge that U.S. foreign policy will persist in its current form.

Tom Brokaw has acquired sufficient gravitas such that, when he clears his throat in a meaningful way, he gets his own New York Times op-ed essay.

This morning, Brokaw cleared his throat about why the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan in Iraq aren't being talked about during this election campaign season. 

[W]hy aren’t the wars and their human and economic consequences front and center in this campaign, right up there with jobs and taxes?

The answer is very likely that the vast majority of Americans wake up every day worrying, with good reason, about their economic security, but they can opt out of the call to arms. Unless they are enlisted in the armed services -- or have a family member who has stepped forward -- nothing much is asked of them in the war effort.

The all-volunteer uniformed services now represent less than 1 percent of the American population, but they’re carrying 100 percent of the battle…

No decision is more important than committing a nation to war. It is, as politicians like to say, about our blood and treasure. Surely blood and treasure are worthy of more attention than they’ve been getting in this campaign.

It's true that Iraq was a much bigger issue during the 2002 and 2006 midterms. Is Brokaw right that the lack of a draft is deflecting the issue? Sort of. 

Brokaw has half a point in saying that the all-volunteer force blunts the incentive to have a public debate on this Very Important Topic. There's a better reason to explain the silence, however: There's not much daylight between the two parties on this issue. 

In 2008, the Bush administration began the drawdown phase in Iraq. In 2009, the Obama administration anted up for 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan. Neither war is popular with the U.S. electorate. 

Given these political facts, why would either party bring up these conflicts? Democrats can't rail against wars being prosecuted by a Democratic president. Not even nutjob ultra-conservative hacks can credibly claim that Obama has been a "Kenyan anti-colonialist" on the military front. Democrats can't really run on a "see, we told you that Obama isn't a war wimp!" message either. The GOP has little incentive to call for doubling down in these conflicts and can't really pivot towards a "pro-peace" position either. [I suspect the Islamophobia issue is cropping up on the GOP campaign trail because it's a stalking horse for "getting tough" with the United States' enemies. Even here, however, it's not like Democrats have created all that much daylight between them and the party of opposition.] 

If neither party has an incentive to bring up these wars during the campaign, the only way it becomes an issue is if a powerful interest group and/or social movement raises it. Here's here the all-volunteer force comes into play. Perhaps some returning veterans want to bring up the war as an issue for policy debate -- but the returning veterans do not appear to be alienated en masse. There is also no U.S. equivalent of the Union of the Committees of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia -- not that the Russian version was all that effective. All one finds on this terrain are the Cindy Sheehans of the world, and her credibility has been eroding as of late. 

Brokaw is right that matters of blood and treasure should be debated. But a debate requires politicians to have divergent views to debate about -- and right now, that doesn't exist between the major parties. 

There are many peculiar rites of passage for each incoming U.S. administration: the first scandal, the first resignation, the first broken campaign promise, and the first botched use of force. 

Add to this list the first Bob Woodward book of an administration. Like a debutante's coming-out party, there are highly formalized rituals -- the press leaks about the good stuff in the book, the Sunday morning talk show commentators obsessing over the more controversial bits and pieces, the inevitable meta-essays on Woodward himself. As a young foreign policy wonk, I remember looking forward to the latest Woodward tome the way others looked forward to the latest Stephen King novel. 

That was then, however -- with Obama's Wars, has Bob Woodward demonstrated that he's about as irrelevant as the debutante circuit? 

Woodward is operating in a very different media environment now. What used to be his bread and butter -- the political and bureaucratic machinations of presidential administrations -- is no longer his exclusive province. Beyond the Washington Post and New York Times, media outlets as varied as Politico, Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, and the New Yorker now generate monthly weekly hourly revelations that Woodward used to be able to hoard for his books. As my old dissertation advisor used to say, "is there anything new here?"

Let's see what Steve Luxenberg's preview in the Washington Post has to say: 

President Obama urgently looked for a way out of the war in Afghanistan last year, repeatedly pressing his top military advisers for an exit plan that they never gave him, according to secret meeting notes and documents cited in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward....

Among the book's other disclosures:

-- Obama told Woodward in the July interview that he didn't think about the Afghan war in the "classic" terms of the United States winning or losing. "I think about it more in terms of: Do you successfully prosecute a strategy that results in the country being stronger rather than weaker at the end?" he said.

-- The CIA created, controls and pays for a clandestine 3,000-man paramilitary army of local Afghans, known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams. Woodward describes these teams as elite, well-trained units that conduct highly sensitive covert operations into Pakistan as part of a stepped-up campaign against al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban havens there.

-- Obama has kept in place or expanded 14 intelligence orders, known as findings, issued by his predecessor, George W. Bush. The orders provide the legal basis for the CIA's worldwide covert operations.

-- A new capability developed by the National Security Agency has dramatically increased the speed at which intercepted communications can be turned around into useful information for intelligence analysts and covert operators. "They talk, we listen. They move, we observe. Given the opportunity, we react operationally," then-Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell explained to Obama at a briefing two days after he was elected president.

-- A classified exercise in May showed that the government was woefully unprepared to deal with a nuclear terrorist attack in the United States. The scenario involved the detonation of a small, crude nuclear weapon in Indianapolis and the simultaneous threat of a second blast in Los Angeles. Obama, in the interview with Woodward, called a nuclear attack here "a potential game changer." He said: "When I go down the list of things I have to worry about all the time, that is at the top, because that's one where you can't afford any mistakes."

-- Afghan President Hamid Karzai was diagnosed as manic depressive, according to U.S. intelligence reports. "He's on his meds, he's off his meds," Woodward quotes U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry as saying.

Hmmm.... there is some interesting stuff, but it's more in the details (Karzai's depression, the CIA's paramilitaries) than in the overarching narrative. Obama feuded with the military on Afghanistan? There was bureaucratic dissension on Afghanistan? Well, blow me down!! 

This ain't how it used to be. In The Commanders, for example, Woodward showed that JCS Chairman Colin Powell was much more reluctant to attack Iraq than previously known. 

Now it's possible that this is simply a function of me being more cynical older than I used to be. But the fact is, I just don't look forward to a new Bob Woodward book anymore. 

Question to readers:  has Woodward jumped the shark?