A few months ago, the Tobin Project sponsored a YouGov poll to be put in the field on American attitudes towards foreign policy and national security.  Dartmoth political science Benjamin Valentino conducted the poll, being so good as to solicit, collate and structure questions solicited from other political scientists, myself included. 

You can look at all of the topline results here, with party-line breakdowns to the responses.  The question I offered was Q53: "In thinking about a country's influence in the world, which single factor do you think matters most?"  The response:

25.9%  "The country's military strength"

45.0%  "The size of the country's economy"

8.2%  "The attractiveness of the country's culture"

21.0% "Don't know"

As for party line splits, Republicans stressed military strength almost as much as GDP (39.8% to 42.5%), which made them a bit of an outlier compared with Democrats or independents. 

Related to this is Q57, which asked respondents whether they preferred a high growth world in which "the average American's income doubles, but China grows faster than the United
States and China's economy becomes much larger than America's" or a low growth world, in which "the average American's income increases by only 10 percent, but the U.S. economy remains much larger than China's."  A majority (50.7%) preferred the low growth world, thus supporting my long-standing argument that Americans are stone-cold mercantilists. 

I also submitted a variant of Q21:  "In your opinion, what country is America's most important foreign ally?" to see whether Israel made it into the "super-special" ally status desired by a few neoconservatives and political leaders.  Again, the results and party splits are interesting.  Among the entire sample, Israel placed second, behind only Great Britain.  It was a much stronger second among the GOP respondents, however -- among Democrats, Israel actually came in third, below -- gasp! -- Canada.   

Readers are strongly encouraged to scan the the entire poll -- there's a lot of great stuff.  The responses to Q25 ("How strongly do you agree or disagree with the following statement? 'The United States faces greater threats to its security today than it did during the Cold War.'") will make Micah Zenko and Michael Cohen want to bang their heads against a wall.  And the GOP responses to Q64 ("Which of the following statements best describes your views on whether Barack Obama was born in the United States or another country?") are, shall we say, disturbing. 

I was never formally introduced to either Vaclav Havel or Christopher Hitchens, but I encountered both of them exactly once.  I was lucky enough to hear Havel deliver a speech at Stanford University in the fall of 1994.  I don't remember much about the speech itself beyond a vaguely metaphysical theme.  What I do remember is a specific physical gesture.  At one point during the proceedings, at Havel's request, Joan Baez came on stage, played her guitar, and sang a song.  After Havel spoke, everyone exited the stage, Havel last.  He noticed Baez's guitar, and picked it up.  As he left the stage, he looked over his shoulder and raised the guitar over his head.  The expression on his face screamed, "can you believe I'm holding Joan Baez's friggin' guitar??!!!" 

My encounter with Hitchens was a little more mundane -- we were both participating at an AEI panel in early 2001 on international law.  I was on a morning panel, and afterwards, Hitchens gave the lunch keynote.  I can recall the standard Hitchens attributes:  him reeking of cigarettes and alcohol, but nevertheless giving a very good speech.  What I also remember is talking with one of the AEI assistants who was tasked with "handling" Hitchens for the day.  We started chatting, and at one point she said plainly, "the minute he leaves here will not be soon enough for me." 

I'd love to be able to divine some deeper meaning from their deaths, but I'm not quite as inspired a writer as either of them.  It's funny to think that Hitchens started out politically to the left of Havel, swerving a bit to his right about a decade ago, but that's not a theme.  Rather, this being a blog, I have two unrelated thoughts. 

First, as someone who has written a thing or two about public intellectuals, Havel really was extraordinary as someone who could be trusted with power.  As Mark Lilla noted in his excellent The Reckless Mind, intellectuals don't really have a distinguished track record when they actually acquire power.  Havel was a notable exception -- perhaps because he never really thought he should have it.  In David Remnick's New Yorker write-up of the end of Havel's (politically successful) presidency, the politics of doubt that I like so much shines through quite clearly: 

At times, Havel felt thoroughly insufficient, a fraud. A familiar Prague voice, the voice of Kafka, told him what anyone who has grown up in a police state knows instinctually—that it could all end as easily as it started.

"I am the kind of person who would not be in the least surprised if, in the very middle of my Presidency, I were to be summoned and led off to stand trial before some shadowy tribunal, or taken straight to a quarry to break rocks," he told a startled audience at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, less than six months after taking office. "Nor would I be surprised if I were to suddenly hear the reveille and wake up in my prison cell, and then, with great bemusement, proceed to tell my fellow-prisoners everything that had happened to me in the past six months. The lower I am, the more proper my place seems; and the higher I am the stronger my suspicion is that there has been some mistake."

In Havel's thirteen years as President—first of Czechoslovakia and then, after the Slovaks and the Czechs divided into two states, in 1993, of the Czech Republic—many of his advisers repeatedly begged him to delete, or at least soften, these public moments of self-doubt. What effect would they have on an exhausted people waiting for the radical transformation of their country? (Imagine Chirac or Blair, Bush or Schröder beginning a national address with an ode to his midnight dread!) Havel, however, would not be edited. The Presidential speech was the only literary genre left to him now, his most direct means of expressing not only his personal feelings but also the spirit of the distinctively human politics he wanted to encourage after so many decades of inhuman ideology. "Some aides tried to stop him, but these speeches had a therapeutic value for him," Havel's closest aide, Vladimír Hanzel, told me.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates observed recently, most people are mediocre and, if they were given power, would likely not exercise it all that benevolently.   Havel was about as far away from mediocre as one could be. 

Hitchens was not mediocre, but neither was he gentle, and so his passing generated a more variegated response.  There was the eruption of fond memories from fellow writers at his ability to consume and produce prodigious amounts of prose and other substances -- this one is my favorite.  It's also led Glenn Greenwald to grouse about the hagiography that the death of public figures ostensibly produces: 

We are all taught that it is impolite to speak ill of the dead, particularly in the immediate aftermath of someone’s death. For a private person, in a private setting, that makes perfect sense. Most human beings are complex and shaped by conflicting drives, defined by both good and bad acts. That’s more or less what it means to be human. And — when it comes to private individuals — it’s entirely appropriate to emphasize the positives of someone’s life and avoid criticisms upon their death: it comforts their grieving loved ones and honors their memory. In that context, there’s just no reason, no benefit, to highlight their flaws.

But that is completely inapplicable to the death of a public person, especially one who is political. When someone dies who is a public figure by virtue of their political acts — like Ronald Reagan — discussions of them upon death will be inherently politicized. How they are remembered is not strictly a matter of the sensitivities of their loved ones, but has substantial impact on the culture which discusses their lives. To allow significant political figures to be heralded with purely one-sided requiems — enforced by misguided (even if well-intentioned) notions of private etiquette that bar discussions of their bad acts — is not a matter of politeness; it’s deceitful and propagandistic. To exploit the sentiments of sympathy produced by death to enshrine a political figure as Great and Noble is to sanction, or at best minimize, their sins. Misapplying private death etiquette to public figures creates false history and glorifies the ignoble.

Meh.  I read a lot of the Hitchens write-ups, and a fair number of them were pretty blunt about his personal and political dark sides.  Even critics like Corey Robin acknowledge the  "consistent line" of “Yes, he was wrong on Iraq, but…”  in the public responses to his death.  This suggests that Hitchens has not, in fact, been a subject of one-sided requiems. even by those who liked him. 

I suspect two things are going on in the public reaction to Hitchens' death, one unique to him and one that's more general.  What was unique about Hitchens was that he was an archetype brought to life.  Here was a real, honest-to-goodness heavy drinking, heavy smoking, occasionally rude Brit who could nevertheless dash off excellent writing on a daily basis.  Where do you actually see that outside of the movies nowadays? 

The more general trend is that in an age of self-publishing, perhaps the personal and the public are more fused than Greenwald realizes or comprehends.  Hitchens hung around with a lot of writers, and as friends it's not shocking that their initial responses will be to talk about the private individual behind the public persona.  As time passess, more strangers will push back, there will be more sober reassessments, and eventually some kind of perspective is achieved.  The thing about the internet is that it amplifies these cycles of reactions and counterreactions for all to see.   

Yesterday FP alum Laura Rozen detailed the State Department's push to have economic statecraft to the front and center of U.S. diplomacy:

[I]n many ways, Hillary Clinton's diplomatic portfolio is increasingly indistinguishable from many of the leading challenges in global economic policy. Trade issues obviously have a direct impact on America's efforts to emerge from the present economic downturn--from the battles over the national debt to the the need to stimulate job growth. But economic issues also shape other less-noted features of the American foreign-policy agenda, be it the effort to contain fallout from Europe's debt crisis, to the rise of major economic powers such as China, Brazil, Turkey and India—all of whom come bearing their own foreign policy ambitions....

So Hillary Clinton has been working hard to beef up the economic bench strength of the State Department, while also mounting a bid for State officials to play a more decisive role in determining U.S. global economics policy. Aides expect her to lay out what they are calling the "Clinton doctrine on economic statecraft" early this month, likely in a speech in New York. Timing and venue for the address are still being worked out, her aides say.

"This is coming from a sense that we are seeing the lines between national security and economic security blur as emerging powers are doing more to advance their economic power, and fitting their national security strategy is more about economic interest," the State Department adviser told the Envoy Friday....

"As we pursue recovery and growth, we are making economics a priority of our foreign policy," Clinton said at the International Institute for Strategic Studies-Shangri La conference in Hong Kong in July. "Because increasingly, economic progress depends on strong diplomatic ties and diplomatic progress depends on strong economic ties. And so the United States is working to harness all aspects of our relationships with other countries to support our mutual growth."

Full disclosure:  State Department officials have reached out to your humble blogger  in a sign of true desperation to talk about ways in which economics should be integrated into American foreign policy.  Don't panic -- I know that they're talking to smarter people than I as well.

Economic statecraft is only as useful as the economic power that fuels such statecraft -- namely, the attraction of  possessing a large, dynamic, growing economy for imports, deep capital markets, provisions for foreign assistance, and a model of economic development that looks attractive to others.  Now, getting Congress to vote on negotiated-long-ago trade deals is certainly a step in the right direction.  Talking about Russian entry into the WTO is also constructive. 

On the other hand.... I fear that the State Department is fighting through hurricane-level winds on this front to make a difference.  First, the trade deals just sent to Congress are the last ones we're going to see for a while.  Doha is dead, the Trans-Pacific Partnership still hasn't materialized, and all of the momentum on trade policy is to move towards futile gestures closure.  The dynamic, growing economy is not looking so dynamic, and those deep capital markets are getting extremely jittery. 

Finally, there's foreign aid -- which brings us to this New York Times front-pager by Steven Lee Myers: 

 America’s budget crisis at home is forcing the first significant cuts in overseas aid in nearly two decades, a retrenchment that officials and advocates say reflects the country’s diminishing ability to influence the world....

The financial crunch threatens to undermine a foreign policy described as “smart power” by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, one that emphasizes diplomacy and development as a complement to American military power. It also would begin to reverse the increase in foreign aid that President George W. Bush supported after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as part of an effort to combat the roots of extremism and anti-American sentiment, especially in the most troubled countries.

Given the relatively small foreign aid budget — it accounts for 1 percent of federal spending over all — the effect of the cuts could be disproportional. (emphasis added)

It's striking to see Myers be that blunt in his assessment of the effects of these budget cuts.  Look, foreign aid is far from a panacea, but one has to think of these forms of economic statecraft as spending on preventing rather than curing ailments in American foreign policy.  As a general rule, the former is far cheaper than the latter.  The latter also tends to involve a much greater allocation of blood and treasure.  I know why foreign aid is the first item on the chopping block -- unlike military spending, it doesn't go to Congressional districts -- but let me go on record as saying this is a stupid own-goal by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.  Even if one buys the need for fiscal austerity, there's a lot more waste in the Pentagon than the State Department. 

So American economic power looks set to wane, and the Amerian model of political economy seems broken.  On the one hand, this is not a strong foundation upon which to build a more effective economic statecraft.  On the other hand, this is precisely the moment during which policymakers need to think about how to be more efficient with America's still-impressive reservoirs of economic strength. 

Consider the comments below as a suggestion box -- what would you recommend the State Department do to improve upon American economic diplomacy? 

Last week Reuters' Emily Flitter filed quite the story, entitled "China flexed its muscles using U.S. Treasuries ," about China's financial power over the United States.  Here's the opening: 

Confidential diplomatic cables from the U.S. embassies in Beijing and Hong Kong lay bare China's growing influence as America's largest creditor.

As the U.S. Federal Reserve grappled with the aftershocks of financial crisis, the Chinese, like many others, suffered huge losses from their investments in American financial firms -- from Lehman Brothers to the Primary Reserve Fund, the money market fund that broke the buck.

The cables, obtained by WikiLeaks, show that escalating Chinese pressure prompted a procession of soothing visits from the U.S.Treasury Department. In one striking instance, a top Chinese money manager directly asked U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for a favor.

This story generated a lot of interest across the mediasphere.  FT Alphaville called it "Diplomacy by US Treasuries."  AFP reports that the "sensitive cables show just how much influence Beijing has and how keen Washington is to address its rival's concerns." 

As someone who's published on this question, you'd think I'd be very happy at the attention this issue is receiving.  And Flitter deserves kudos for going through the cables to find clear efforts by Chinese officials to use its financial muscle to get what it wanted from the United States. 

The thing is, the reportage is framed to suggest that China not only asked for concessions, but the United States granted them.  And Flitter's own story suggests that very little in the way of concessions actually happened. 

Here are the portions of Flitter's story that discusses U.S. responses to Chinese pressure: 

On Chinese requests to halt/restrict arms sales to Taiwan:  Flitter records no response.  These concerns were voiced in late 2008 and the arms sales went ahead in early 2010, so there doesn't appear to be much influence here.  AFP suggests that this pressure led the U.S. to not sell F-16's to Taiwan, but I don't think that option was ever in the cards. 

On Chinese demands that they be provided guarantees for Chinese re-entry into the U.S. repo market:

The U.S. government does not appear to have offered the Chinese a special setup guaranteeing U.S. banks. Instead, the cables show, American diplomats reassured the Chinese by pointing out that Washington had infused banks' balance sheets with $700 billion in fresh capital, effectively propping up the banking system.

On Chinese demands for providing explicit U.S. government guarantees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt: 

To defuse the situation, the Treasury Department sent Undersecretary for International Affairs David McCormick to Beijing for two days in October 2008. The gesture went over well.

"All of Undersecretary McCormick's counterparts appeared to appreciate his willingness to come to Beijing in the midst of a financial crisis," Piccuta wrote in a cable dated October 29, 2008. "Interlocutors stressed that unless leaders' concerns about the viability of banks and U.S. government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) are assuaged, lower-level officials will be constrained from taking on greater counter-party risks."

The cables show McCormick trying to reassure the Chinese. "In each meeting, Undersecretary McCormick emphasized that even though the U.S. government did not explicitly guarantee GSE debt, it effectively did so by committing to inject up to $100 billion of equity in each institution to avoid insolvency and that this contractual commitment would remain for the life of these institutions," [Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing Dan] Piccuta wrote.

On Chinese protests regarding Federal Reserve purchases of Treasuries and agencies in March 2009:  Flitter has no response, though the fact that the Fed went ahead with QE2 suggersts that Chinese pressure didn't deter the Federal Reserve.

On responses to Chinese requests that CIC be allowed to participate in bidding on Morgan Stanley's new equity issuance:

There's no record in the cable of how Geithner responded, but it was only a day later, on June 3, that CIC announced plans to purchase $1.2 billion in Morgan Stanley shares.

A spokesperson for the Fed said in the instance of the June 3 CIC investment, no application for an exemption was made to the Federal Reserve Board.

On the general dynamic of Chinese financial pressure:

The cables also indicate a high level of confidence among the Americans that China can't entirely stop buying U.S. debt, a sentiment shared by most economists who describe the dynamic as a form of mutually assured financial destruction. 

So, to sum up, the Chinese maybe got a small break on being able to particupate in the Morgan Stanley auction.  Beyond that, all of these efforts led to the dilomatiic equivalent of hand-holding and not much else.  And, hey, what do you know, that's pretty much consistent with what I wrote about this back in late 2009.  So, contrary to some deep-seated fears of mine, the Wikiliaks cables appears to buttress rather than contradict prior scholarship. 

Flitter deserves credit for making explicit what had only been inferred, but I'm worried that commentators are drawing the wrong lessons from her article.  The big reveal here is not that China tried to exercise its financial muscle.  The big reveal is that these efforts generated next to nothing in the way of U.S. concessions.  China's financial might does give it the ability to deter U.S. pressure -- but to China's growing frustration, it doesn't yield much else. 

Foreign Policy asked many smart people, and then me, for some nuggets of unconventional wisdom heading into 2011.  My contribution is on how China isn't all that and a bag of chips. 

My closing paragraph: 

Exaggerating Chinese power has consequences. Inside the Beltway, attitudes about American hegemony have shifted from complacency to panic. Fearful politicians representing scared voters have an incentive to scapegoat or lash out against a rising power -- to the detriment of all. Hysteria about Chinese power also provokes confusion and anger in China as Beijing is being asked to accept a burden it is not yet prepared to shoulder. China, after all, ranks 89th in the 2010 U.N. Human Development Index, just behind Turkmenistan and the Dominican Republic (the United States is fourth). Treating Beijing as more powerful than it is feeds Chinese bravado and insecurity at the same time. That is almost as dangerous a political cocktail as fear and panic.

 Be sure to read the rest of them -- really, the other contributors are all smarter than me. 

Over the weekend I finally saw The Social Network and read Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker essay about social networks. Both Gladwell and Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter for The Social Network, have their issues with futurists who embrace these technologies as the beginning of a social revolution. 

Now I'm pretty sympathetic to these arguments. In the past, I've expressed a fair amount of ambivalence about the power of Internet technologies to transform the world. After reading the essay and watching the movie, however, I can't say I'm all that convinced by their theses. 

Let's start with Gladwell, because it's the lesser of the two arguments. Gladwell contrasts the relationships and connections forged on Twitter/Facebook with real-world movements. He argues that the latter work when based on a hierarchical structure with strong ties among the participants. The former is based on a networked structure with weak ties. Therefore:

Social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.

This structure makes networks enormously resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn’t have an editor, sitting in New York, who directs and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each entry is self-organized. If every entry in Wikipedia were to be erased tomorrow, the content would swiftly be restored, because that’s what happens when a network of thousands spontaneously devote their time to a task.

There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well.... Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?

This sounds good, except this doesn't describe networks all that well. Networks eliminate neither hierarchical power nor strong ties -- they're simply expressed in different ways. Actors in central nodes, with lots of dynamic density among other actors, can command both power and discipline. Not all networks will look like this, but the ones successful at fomenting change will likely resemble it. To put it more precisely: social networks lower the transactions costs for creating both weak ties and strong ties, loose collaborations and more tightly integrated social movements. 

It's not either/or, a point Oliver Willis raises:

Things bubble over to real world via social networking when influencers push the influenced to do something. Social networks tend to magnify this, and the web does give some of us who would never be real-life leaders a way of having some sway. I find it odd that Gladwell misses this, because this is the whole point of his bestseller The Tipping Point.

I’ve no doubt that getting your followers to do something in the real world is more complicated than getting them to retweet or “Like” something, but I don’t think the barrier to doing that is social networking’s distributed nature but rather the intensity of the network following you. But this is the same as in the real world. Network leaders need to have leadership skills no matter the medium.

The movie The Social Network was far more interesting. There is some controversy over what's been fictionalized, what's been mysoginized, and what's been left out of the film, and I'm sympathetic to some of these arguments. Taking what was intended to be on the screen, however, The Social Network also suggests the ways in which offline and online structures intersect. There were many reasons for Facebook's rise, but I have to think that the site's initial exculsivity helped to give it something that MySpace and Friendster lacked. 

The film has many great moments (if Aaron Sorkin was meant to translate any real-life figure onto film, it was Larry Summers). Both the ending and Sorkin's interviews about the film, however, suggests that there's an emptiness at the core of Facebook that hollows out 21st-century friendships. 

I don't buy this. Social networking sites giveth as much as they taketh away. Speaking from my own experience, I've found myself becoming closer with some friends and less close with others based on Facebook. 

More generally, there seems to be a generational effect whenever a new social technology emerges. Different generations react in radically different ways:

1) The Mature Generation tends to disdain the technology as yet another example of the world going to hell in a handbasket. 

2) For the Maturing Generation, the new technology is both a blessing and a curse. The adroit learn how to use the new technology to vault to social, political or economic heights that they would not have otherwise achieved. At the same time, a new technology without new social norms inevitably creates confusion about what is acceptable and what is taboo. Some people lose status as a result. 

3) For the Youngest Generation, the technology isn't new by the time they come to use it. They're savvy in the ways that the technology is both an opportunity and a risk, and can navigate those waters without thinking too hard. For this generatioon, the social technology is part of the new normal. 

Sorkin has demonstrated his Oldest Generation credentials since the "Lemon-Lyman" episode of The West Wing. Which is fine. But there are other generations out there, and they're not relating to these technologies the way that Sorkin thinks. 

I have a confession to make -- last week this blog was not manufactured in the U.S. of A.  No, your humble blogger outsourced his blogging to... well, himself, overseas. 

In an example of real hardship duty, I was teaching U.S. Foreign Policy at the Barcelona Institute for International Studies to a truly international collection of students -- Spaniards, Germans, Brits, Americans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Ghanaian, Kenyan, Turkish, Belgian, Mexican, Nicaraguan... you get the idea. 

One mildly surprising finding from surveying my stidents was the extent to which many of them believed that the United States government was consciously manipulating every single event in world politics.  Ironically, at the moment when many Americans are questioning the future of U.S. hegemony, many non-Americans continue to believe that the U.S. government is diabolically manipulating events behind the scenes (For example, the Ghanaians in the crowd wanted to know why Obama visited their country last week.  The standard "promotion of good democratic governance" answer did not satisfy them, They were convinced that there had to be some deeper, potentially sinister motive to the whole enterprise). 

As a result, I spent much of the week trying to point out the possibility of fundamental attribution error and the like.  But I don't think I did a terribly good job.  Trying to prove people convinced that conspiracies exist -- with some justification, to be fair -- that sometimes what you see is what you get is not an easy enterprise. 

Going forward, the persistence of anti-Americanism in the age of Obama might have nothing to do with the president, or his rhetoric, or even U.S. government actions.  It might, instead, have to do with the congealed habits of thought that place the United States at the epicenter of all global movings and shakings.  The tragedy is that such an exaggerated perception of American power and purpose is occurring at precisely the moment when the United States will need to scale back its global ambitions. 

Question to readers:  how can the United States defalate exaggerated perceptions of U.S. power? 

P.S.  Just to be clear, I'm not saying that this kind of conspiracy theorizing in world affairs is only the product of non-Americans.  For a good example of ludicrous American conspiracy-mongering about other countries, click here.