Since gun regulation failed the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, some pundits have trotted out the "failure of presidential leadership" meme. See Maureen Dowd, Ron Fournier, Dana Milbank, or Peggy Noonan for example. To most political scientists -- hell, to most people who've taken an advanced poli sci course --  this a pretty unpersuasive argument. Andrew Rudalevige, Ezra Klein, Seth Masket, Jonathan Bernstein, and Jonathan Chait have all pushed back fiercely on this question. 

Now, that said, pushback on the leadership question is difficult for two reasons. First, there's a lot of the political commentariat that wants the world to operate along the Aaron Sorkin Big Speech Theory of Politics. Klein is correct to observe that "the world isn't here to please you," but it's amazing how much wishcasting can make it easy to ignore. 

The second problem is that in pushing back, it is too easy for critics to be interpreted as saying that presidential leadership does not exist. So critics should point out moments or opportunities for presidential leadership to better define the boundaries of this concept. 

For one example, I give you Randall Archibold and Michael Shear's story in the New York Times about Obama's Mexico trip. The title gives it away:  "Obama Seeks to Banish Stereotypical Image of Mexico." 

President Obama, in speech to high school and university students here, said Friday that it was time to banish the stereotypical Mexico of violence and people fleeing across borders and embrace the new image of a strengthening democracy and economy.

“I have come to Mexico because it is time to put old mind-sets aside,’’ Mr. Obama said to vigorous applause from hundreds of students at the National Anthropology Museum. “It’s time to recognize new realities, including the impressive progress in today’s Mexico. For even as Mexicans continue to make courageous sacrifices for the security of your country, even as Mexicans in the countryside and in neighborhoods not far from here struggle to give their children a better life, it’s also clear that a new Mexico is emerging.'’

Although poverty remains deep and wages have stagnated, Mr. Obama focused on the positive signs of the economy, including growth measurements that exceed those in the United States, a surge in the manufacturing and technology industries and rising levels of middle class Mexicans.

OK, this matters. As the Chicago Council on Global Affairs demonstrated in their poll this week, Americans have a dim and distorted view of Mexico. Mention that country, and the three issues that spring immediately to mind are drugs, illegal immigration, and the "giant sucking sound" of NAFTA. In point of fact, illegal immigration has slowed to a trickle and outward Mexican FDI has exploded. Mexico's new president is pretty popular, and the next head of the WTO might be Mexican as well. Most Americans know nothing contained in the last two sentences. 

One thing presidents can do with their bully pulpit is try to correct public misperceptions that are detrimental to the national interest ... like U.S. views on Mexico. Let's not kid ourselves -- one visit and one speech alone won't do that. But it can start to alter public attitudes on the margins. That's a start -- and very useful example of positive presidential leadership. 

Your humble blogger has been knee-deep in chairing, discussing, and attending International Studies Association panels all of which seem to have the word "diffusion" in the title and SOMEONE PLEASE MAKE IT STOP!!!

Now, naturally, with the global financial crisis and its aftermath there's been a lot of talk about debts and deficits. And with the defense sequester and what-not, there's been a lot of talk about rising levels of partisanship.  And I've come to the reluctant conclusion that a lot of this talk need to stop, like, right now. 

Here's the dirty truth about most international studies scholars: They know a fair amount about the high politics of international affairs and almost next to nothing about the rest of life. Of course, the rest of life does impinge on world politics, so there's some natural overlap. The problem starts when, in talking about non-IR stuff, we start to think that we have just as much expertise in these areas. Which we don't. At all. 

Last night I tweeted a query about what areas IR scholars should be quiet about and got way too many answers to fit in a blog post. So, here are five things about which I'd really like 99 percent of international relations scholars to shut the hell up:

1) Macroeconomic policy. Should the United States cut its deficit further? Are budget cuts, tax cuts, or tax increases necessary? How can the eurozone escape its current macroeconomic malaise? Most of us have no friggin' clue what the correct answers are for the United States, and that goes double for the euro zone. So unless you're actually publishing scholarly work on global macroeconomic policy, shut up.

2) The role of money in American politics. Foreign policy scholars are far too often shocked -- shocked!! -- when they see interest group politics at work. The Citizens United decision has only amplified this lament. The reaction to this is to either bemoan the general health of the American polity or to start developing simple theories that argue that money or lobbies explain everything about politics. Now I might not be the biggest fan of the American politics subfield, but I'm pretty sure they know more about this topic than we do. So shut up and read what they have to say.

3) Partisanship in the United States. Did you know that it's getting worse? And that it's paralyzing the U.S. government? And that it's getting worse? One of the natural biases of foreign policy scholars is to think in terms of a national interest, and then act appalled when there are different partisan conceptions of that term. Basically, what applies to #2 applies to this point as well.   

4) The Internet. As near as I can determine, when asked about this technology affects international politics, most scholars answer with some variation of "networks networks networks cyber cyber cyber." Some scholars do very good work on this subject. The rest of us should shut up for a spell and read them. 

5) Diffusion. Never again. Ever.   

What else, my dear readers, would you like to see less gabbing about from international affairs scholars? 

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?

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

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

Ian Bremmer:

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

Niall Ferguson: 

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

Donald Rumsfeld: 

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

Jennifer Rubin: 

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

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

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

Merry Christmas, foreign policy wonks!! 

Your humble blogger is headed to the United Kingdom this week to give a few talks and generally escape the election and post-election frenzy.  Blogging will be light.  However, before departing for the land of scones and Devonshire cream, there's one last election-related issue that's worth some words. 

As I briefly discussed a few weeks ago, there's a brewing conflict about how to read the polls for the U.S. presidential election.  This has crystallized into some latent, not-so-latent, and pretty damn blatant hostility towards' FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver.  Now, some interpret this as simply a part of a larger War on Numbers.  As Brendan Nyhan notes, Silver's analysis lines up with all of the other analytic forecasters. 

But let's try to be fair here.  I think there are a couple of different criticisms going on here from different quarters of the public sphere, and it's worth evaluating them on their own terms. 

The first and simplest one is Matt K. Lewis, who points out why conservatives aren't keen on Silver's analysis:

Silver comes out of the baseball statistics world, and his defenders like cite sports and gambling analogies when defending him. But there is a key difference. If Silver says the Giants have only a 5 percent chance of winning the World Series again next year, it is highly unlikely that would impact the outcome of games. Umpires won’t begin making bad calls, the fans won’t stop attending games, etc.

But when the public sees that a prominent New York Times writer gives Barack Obama a 70 percent chance of winning, that can become a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy. It has consequences. It drives media coverage. It dries up donations. Whether Silver likes it, or not, people do interpret his numbers as a “prediction.” They see this as election forecasting.

This sounds about right, in two ways.  First, it does highlight the ways in which forecasters can actually affect the outcome.  Second, it's actually a compliment to Silver and his peers, because it reflects the belief that their assessments carry weight with the money.  One does wonder whether it would have been liberal operatives pushing back if the forecasters were unanimous that Romney was the favorite at this point. 

The point is, however, that part of the criticism is simply raw politics.  That's fine, and can therefore be dismissed pretty quickly. 

The second critique is more substantive, and rests on the notion that the assumptions that pollsters and forecasters are using when they crunch their numbers are flawed.  Dan McLaughlin at Red State offers up a decent version of this critique: 

Nate Silver’s much-celebrated model is, like other poll averages, based simply on analyzing the toplines of public polls. This, more than any other factor, is where he and I part company....

My thesis, and that of a good many conservative skeptics of the 538 model, is that these internals are telling an entirely different story than some of the toplines: that Obama is getting clobbered with independent voters, traditionally the largest variable in any election and especially in a presidential election, where both sides will usually have sophisticated, well-funded turnout operations in the field. He’s on track to lose independents by double digits nationally, and the last three candidates to do that were Dukakis, Mondale and Carter in 1980. And he’s not balancing that with any particular crossover advantage (i.e., drawing more crossover Republican voters than Romney is drawing crossover Democratic voters). Similar trends are apparent throughout the state-by-state polls, not in every single poll but in enough of them to show a clear trend all over the battleground states.

If you averaged Obama’s standing in all the internals, you’d capture a profile of a candidate that looks an awful lot like a whole lot of people who have gone down to defeat in the past, and nearly nobody who has won. Under such circumstances, Obama can only win if the electorate features a historically decisive turnout advantage for Democrats – an advantage that none of the historically predictive turnout metrics are seeing, with the sole exception of the poll samples used by some (but not all) pollsters. Thus, Obama’s position in the toplines depends entirely on whether those pollsters are correctly sampling the partisan turnout....

Let me use an analogy from baseball statistics, which I think is appropriate here because it’s where both I and Nate Silver first learned to read statistics critically and first got an audience on the internet; in terms of their predictive power, poll toplines are like pitcher win-loss records or batter RBI.

Oh, snap.  I've read enough sabermetrics to know a diss when I see it. 

Now I don't think Silver and his ilk would agree with McLaughlin's reasoning -- see Nick Gourevitch for a useful counter.  But I do I think Silver agrees with McLaughlin's on the source of their disagreement.  As Silver's latest post title suggests:  "For Romney to Win, State Polls Must Be Statistically Biased": 

The pollsters are making a leap of faith that the 10 percent of voters they can get on the phone and get to agree to participate are representative of the entire population. The polling was largely quite accurate in 2004, 2008 and 2010, but there is no guarantee that this streak will continue. Most of the "house effects" that you see introduced in the polls — the tendency of certain polling firms to show results that are consistently more favorable for either the Democrat or the Republican — reflect the different assumptions that pollsters make about how to get a truly representative sample and how to separate out the people who will really vote from ones who say they will, but won’t.

But many of the pollsters are likely to make similar assumptions about how to measure the voter universe accurately. This introduces the possibility that most of the pollsters could err on one or another side — whether in Mr. Obama’s direction, or Mr. Romney’s. In a statistical sense, we would call this bias: that the polls are not taking an accurate sample of the voter population. If there is such a bias, furthermore, it is likely to be correlated across different states, especially if they are demographically similar. If either of the candidates beats his polls in Wisconsin, he is also likely to do so in Minnesota....

My argument... is this: we’ve about reached the point where if Mr. Romney wins, it can only be because the polls have been biased against him. Almost all of the chance that Mr. Romney has in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, about 16 percent to win the Electoral College, reflects this possibility.

Here we have a pretty simple and honest disagreement.  Silver thinks the pollster's models for what the electorate and turnout will look like are pretty accurate; McLaughlin doesn't.  They agree that if Romney wins it will be because practically all of the state polls are biased against him.  

The final critique is the one that fascinates me -- the notion that traditional pundits can look beyond the polls at more ineffable factors like "momentum" and "crowd sizes" and "closing arguments" and "energy" and "early voting" other  kinds of secret sauces to deternmine who will win.  These guys rely on numbers but also the political instincts they've hones for decades as pundits.  This is basically what Michael Barone has done, for example, in his prediction of a Romney blowout.  

In some ways this mirrors the "scouts vs. stats" divide that ostensibly existed in baseball as Silver was developing PECOTA and Michael Lewis was writing Moneyball.   And a lot of commentators are setting it up that way. 

I'd tend to agree that this is the most bogus line of criticism... but a few things prevent me from rejecting this analysis entirely.  First, there is the crazy possibility that pundits really do possess "local knowledge," as Hayek would put it, that forecasters lack.  I'm not sure I really buy this hypothesis, but it's possible.   

Second, as Silver himself observed in The Signal and the Noise, scouts get a bum rap.  Over time, the evidence suggests that the scouts who worked at Baseball America actually outperformed the sabermetricians at Baseball Prospectus.  As Silver acknowledges, just because something can't be quantified doesn't mean it's unimportant.  Maybe pundits like Barone have picked up on these "intangibles."  Or maybe they have an implicit theory of the election that turns out to be superior to what is, at this point, a strictly poll-driven model.  To put it another way:  polls at this point are merely the intervening variable between the causal factors that the pundits like to talk about (the economy, the candidate's narrative) and the outcome (the election). 

To be honest, I doubt that any of this is true.  But the great thing is that come Wednesday, we'll know which group is more right.  And then let the taunting commence!!

In a futile determined effort to expand his public intellectual brand, your humble blogger was on the Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC for about an hour this AM.  It was a veeeeery interesting experience.  Now, I know that some readers of this blog aspire to poison me and take my place on the FP masthead punditry themselves.  So, as a public service, this is what happens when you go on a Sunday morning talk show:  imagine the Law & Order chunk-CHUNK! going after each paragraph:

WEDNESDAY:  I receive a polite email from one of Melissa's segment/booking producers, who we'll call "M", asking if I want to be on the show this Sunday.  Having never done this kind of punditry before, and having my previous obligation for the weekend cancelled, I accept. 

Immediately after accepting, I experience two contradictory emotions.  First, the fear builds that they will email back the same day and say, "uh, we just re-checked our Rolodex, and.. [laughs] we have no idea who thought you merited being on television."  At the same time, I realize I'm going to have to watch the rest of the prime-time Republican National Convention speeches.  At which point I let loose a strong of profanities [What if had been the DNC instead?--ed.  The same number of profanities would have been released.]

THURSDAY:  I talk with M again, who runs down the planned topics with me -- the RNC, the DNC, the state of the election, and gun violence.  Immediately I have a slight quandry -- my expertise is in international relations, not electoral politics.  Do I dare to think I can play in the sandbox for a Sunday morning talk show?  At which point my inner media whore screams, Gollum-like, "YES!!  WE WANTS TO BE ON THE TV!!!  IT'S OUR PRECIOUS!!" 

This is, as near as I can determine, the First Commandment of Televsion Punditry -- you have to be secure enough in your abilities to chat with authority about issues outside your intellectual wheelhouse. 

FRIDAY:  To make my inner media whore proud, I start reading up on gun violence statistics.  I also read as much commentary as I can about the Republican National Convention.  Whatever intelligence I gain from the former I lose by reading the latter.   

SATURDAY:  Full disclosure:  Melissa and I were political science colleagues at the University of Chicago back in the day, so I'm familiar with her style and her politics.  That said, I haven't been a regular watcher of her MSNBC show, so I tune for the first half-hour in to get a sense of the roundtable.  Clearly MHP leans juuuuust a little to the left.  This raises an identity issue -- am I supposed to be  wearing the hat of "defender of conservatism"?  It's not a role I've been comfortable with as of late.  Or am I gonna wear the "dispassionate, snarky observer of the political scene"?  I feel much more comfortable with that hat on.  In all likelihood, it's going to be a little from column A and a little from column B.

LATER ON SATURDAY:  If you're going to be on roundtable for radio/television, there's a 98% chance you will need to do a "pre-interview" with a producer so they have a sense of what you're going to say during the conversation.  So I have that conversation with M, during which I learn that the topics have been jiggled around a bit and all those minutes hours of sketchy detailed online research into gun violence stats won't be worth much.  Instead, we'll be talking gay marriage.  Which is fine, I will rally with yet more Wikipedia-surfing intense study of primary texts.  And, of course, that segment will be moved as well.  So, the Second Commandment of Television Punditry is that the schedule will always change.

EVEN LATER ON SATURDAY:  The MHP show is classy -- they took care of all the flight/hotel/car service logistics.  So by Saturday night I found myself in a comfortable midtown hotel with a lovely view of Central Park.  Surfing the web furiously to research for Sunday AM, I see that some fireworks broke out on MHP's Saturday show after I switched off to pack.  Melissa was responding to the panel's most conservative participant making a point.  Ruh-roh. 

To prep, I take notes on each of the "blocks" or segments that I'm supposed to weigh in on.  I'm a professor and an academic, and therefore alwasys feel better with notes. 

SUNDAY MORNING PRE-SHOW:  I get to 30 Rock on time, which means I'm the first panelist there.... or so I think.  In actuality, the two female panelists -- NYU's Cristina Beltran and the Center for American Progress' Aisha Moodie-Mills -- are in makeup.  As they enter the green rom, I quickly comprehend that I am in deep trouble, because I am not nearly as pretty.  As the clock ticks towards 10 AM, and no one comes to get me, I am petrified that I have been typecast as the splotchy-faced redneck surrounded by urbane alluring panelists.  Before this scenario can play out in even weirder directions inside my head, however, M sends me to makeup.  They apply as enough powder to my face to fuel at least two Dunkin' Donuts franchies -- but it works .  My family later informs me that I looked good, so many, many thanks to those professionals at MSNBC. 

SUNDAY MORNING, 10 AM-11 AM:  OK, having done my first hour of Sunday morning chat -- which you can watch here, here, here and here -- I have learned the following effects on one's senses when three cameras and numerous klieg lights are pointed in your general direction:

A)  Time speeds up.  Seriously, that hour flew by.  Every time I was feeling like we were getting to a good part of the conversation, we hit a commercial break. 

B)  Almost all prep work is useless.  I knew exactly what I wanted to say in response to the first question asked, and I did that competently.  After that, whatever good punchy things were in my notes might as well have been left back at home for all the use they were to me.  Part of the issue is visual -- you don't want to be looking down at your notes.  Another part of the issue, which I've blogged about before, is the academic weakness of trying to directly answer the question. 

C)  Really, cameras can make you stupid.  If you mangle your words during an ordinary conversation, or even when giving a speech, you can take a moment and regroup.  If you mangle your words during a panel show, you become acutely aware that you're screwing up, which compounds the problem.  Another panelist will be happy to enter the breach.  On at least two occasioons, I had written down a better answer than the one that came out of my mouth during the program. 

SUNDAY MORNING, 11 AM:  I  need to get to the airport to come home, but I find two pieces of critical feedback from the experience worthwhile.  The first was the thumbs-up that Moodie-Mills and her partner give me as I exit the green room.  The second is an anonymous  email I soon find in my inbox: 

Drezner........Why are you such an idiot? Your appearance on MSLSD was laughable and embarrassing. It's really sad and embarrassing how you liberal bedwetters continue to be brainwashed by your worthless president. Why can't you clowns form a coherent thought on your own? Exactly, because you buffoons are mindless robots programmed by your worthless president. Barnum and Bailey have nothing on you clowns. What do you call a basement full of liberals? A whine cellar. Keep up the good work loser................

Why, it's... it's a troll!!  I've made it!!  I'M A REAL PUNDIT NOW!!!!!

Last week your humble blogger attempted to clean up one Beltway pundit's sloppy command of the facts. Meanwhile, a much more prominent pundit made an even bigger mess:

Time Magazine columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria has apologized "unreservedly" to Jill Lepore for plagiarizing her work in The New Yorker.

"Media reporters have pointed out that paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore's essay in the April 22nd issue of The New Yorker. They are right," Zakaria said in a statement to The Atlantic Wire. "I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers."

Zakaria's column about gun laws for Time's August 20 issue includes a paragraph that is remarkably similar to one Jill Lepore wrote in April for a New Yorker article about the National Rifle Association. (The similarities were first flagged by NRANews.com and first reported by Tim Graham of the conservative watchdog group Newsbusters, who leveled the plagiarism charge.)

Time suspended Zakaria for a month, CNN suspended him from his GPS hosting duties pending further review, and the Washington Post is looking into his work there. Rodger Payne has a useful round up of the relevant links.

Once the news broke, there was a whole lotta Twitter speculation about how and why this happened. Many media types assume that this was a mistake made by one of Zakaria's flunkies/assistants/interns, but in some ways that's just the proximate cause. A better question would be: why would Fareed Zakaria outsource any writing under his name to others?

I used to think that doing this kind of thing required willful negligence on the part of a writer. Now my view has changed a bit. It's still negligence, but with only a fraction of Zakaria's writing obligations, I can see all too clearly how this happened.  To paraphrase Chris Rock, I'm not saying I approve... but I understand.  

The New York Times lists Zakaria's day jobs, and they're formidable: "Mr. Zakaria, 48, balances a demanding schedule, doing work for multiple media properties. He is a CNN host, an editor at large at Time, a Washington Post columnist and an author."

Most people who wind up in this situation don't just snap their fingers and take on all of these jobs at once. It's a slow accretion of opportunities that are hard to say no until you are overextended.  I'm not remotely close to being a member of the League of Extraordinary Pundits like Zakaria.  Still, even I've noticed that, as writing & speaking obligations pile up, corners get... well, let's say rounded rather than cut. 

I suspect, as one has more gobs of money tossed at them than they ever expected out of life approaches League status, three factors dramatically increases the likelihood of this kind of thing happening.  First, since the distribution of punditry assignments likely follows a power law distribution, superstars are asked to write a lot more, the pressure builds up.  Second, to compensate, the pundit has to hire a staff -- and most people who get into the writing/thinking business are lousy at managing subordinates and staff.  Third, if small shortcuts aren't caught the first time a writer uses them, they become crutches that pave the way for bigger shortcuts, which then become cheats. 

None of this is to excuse Zakaria for what he did.  It just makes me very sad.  I enjoyed his first book, and I've enjoyed Fareed Zakaria GPS because it's one of the few Sunday morning shows devoted to international affairs.  It didn't air this Sunday because of what happened.  

I hope the show goes on, with or without Zakaria.  And either way, I hope whoever hosts it learns from this mistake. 

Dear Neoconservative Foreign Policy Flacks Who Work for Mitt Romney: 

Hey there -- how's the campaign going?  Oh, sorry, touchy topic. 

So listen... I can see why you're all pissed off and everything that Robert Zoellick has agreed to act as the foreign policy "transition chief" for the Romney campaign.  Zoellick has never really been "one of you," and he's more commonly associated with James Baker than with any neoconservative guru. 

So yeah, I can see why you'd leak your complaints about this to Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post.  Rubin might have her flaws, but if she's proven anything this election cycle, it's that she's a reliable stenographer for the Mitt Romney campaign. 

Here's the thing, though -- if you're gonna leak to Rubin, I think you're also gonna have to do her homework for her.  Rubin has been a bit sloppy as of late in her "Right Turn" posts, trivial stuff like confusing "Third Way" with "Third Wave."  

With the Zoellick post she just cut and pasted wrote up, however, I think she's gone from trivial mistakes to out-and-out incompetency and/or lying.  Here's one paragraph: 

For foreign policy hawks, Zoellick is an anathema. As the right hand man in the State Department and Treasury Department of James A, Baker, who was infamous for his anti-Israel stance, Zoellick acquired a reputation as ”soft” on China, weak on pressuring the Soviet Union at the close of the Cold War, opposed to the first Gulf War and unsupportive of the Jewish state. His stint as U.S. Trade Representative, and Deputy Secretary of State, in the George W. Bush administration did nothing too alter his image with foreign policy hardliners. That tenure will no doubt complicate Romney’s efforts to distance himself from his predecessor. And in 2011, Zoellick shocked foreign policy gurus by delivering a speech praising China, suggesting that it was a “responsible stakeholder” in Asia, at a time human rights abuses and aggressive conduct in Asia were bedeviling the Obama administration.

Now there's a lot of tendentious crap in that paragraph, but the doozy is the embedded link.  Cause if you click on it, you get to a story with the headline: "Robert Zoellick: China 'Reluctant Stakeholder' in World Economic Woes".  Here's the opening few paragraphs:

China is a vital but "reluctant stakeholder" in the current wave of Western financial woes, said Robert B. Zoellick, President of the World Bank.

Zoellick told listeners that China benefits from the international system and needs to "share the responsibilities" of that engagement, for the sake of both sides of the Pacific.

Hey, did you notice a key word difference between what Rubin claims Zoellick said and what Zoellick actually said?  And that the word "responsible" appears nowhere in that story?  And that Zoellick's statement here is fully consistent with what he told a Chinese audience the next month?  So either Rubin didn't bother reading the embedded link you provided her, or she didn't read the embedded link at Zoellick's Wikipedia entry... or she didn't care.  Whichever way it went down, it doesn't look good for either you or Rubin. 

[An aside: Now I know what you're going to say -- Zoellick coined the "responsible stakeholder" language. That's partially true -- he introduced the idea in this 2005 speech. However, if you, like, actually read the speech, you'll see that he was arguing that, "We need to urge China to become a responsible stakeholder in that system." Zoellick wasn't saying that China was already responsible, as Rubin suggests in her Wikipedia dump column. He was offering an aspirational goal for the Chinese government.] 

You want to hit Zoellick?  I think you're wrong, but fine, I get that.  You want to use Rubin to do it?  Then I suggest you write out exactly what she should print, and then double-check your f**king footnotes.  Cause otherwise, the errors and distortions she prints will rebound back onto you. 

All the best! 

Daniel W. Drezner

Your humble blogger is not naive in the ways of punditry.  He is keenly aware that the only way to move up the punditry food chain is to bemoan the crumbling state of America's infrastructure while pining for better high-speed rail, better schools, and ORDER, dammit!! 

In the interest of serving the greater good, your humble blogger has decided to do the crucial pundit fieldwork necessary to adopt this position.  I am therefore taking the Acela "hi speed" train from Washington, DC, to New York City, and shall chronicle every moment of import along the way in this blog post.  So buckle your seat bekts -- it's going to be a bumpy ride:

8:10 AM:  Part of the pundit code is getting into a local taxi and getting colorful quotes from them.  Alas, my cabbie was not the chatty type.  Also, despire the morning rush-hour time, there wasn't a lot of sitting around time.  Oh, and his cab was clean too.  Clearly, Washington DC is receiving favored treatment in its infrastructure. 

8:35 AM:  I get to Union Station to find much of it being renovated.  There are cranes and construction equipment everywhere!  What is his, Shanghai?!  Of course, in the Far East, they're just building new things, whereas here in the decaying United States, we're trying to preserve our crumbling monuments to modernity [Oh, that is Pulitzer GOLD, baby!!--ed.]

8:40 AM:  I want to get coffee from Starbucks, but the Acela line has already started forming.  I bypass the coffee to make sure I get a good seat.  Anger at stupid American regulations... rising!!

9:00 AM:  On the train, I hold my breath as I try to access Acela's wifi.  Many an expeletive has been tweeted in anger at this unreliable system.  In my case, however, it opens with no difficulty.  There is a warning page informing me that, for myriad reasons, the wifi might cut in and out and it can't access certain pages.  Still, Amtrak's web service has jumped up a notch since the last time I took the Acela... or, again, the NYC-DC corridor gets preferential treatment compared with the Boston trains.  Note to self:  hire eager-beaver grad student to unearth Amtrak perfidy. 

9:10 AM:  I can't access YouTube.  That's it, this is the worst f***ing WiFi service I've ever encountered.  There's no WAY this would happen in China!!!

9:20 AM:  Well, the Acela reveals itself to be erratic, as it starts to slow down from its pathetically low "hi speed" -- oh, it's stopoing st the BWI station.  Never mind. 

9:33 AM:  Sure, I could have opted for the quiet car, but I wanted to mix with "the people," get a sense of what they're talking about amongst themselves.  So far, they're talking about... PowerPoint presentations.  There's a column in here somewhere...

10:00 AM:  So far, the train has been on time, the WiFi has worked, and even the non-quiet car has been pretty sedate.  Friedman's Rage is not building.  [Bye-bye Pulitzer!!--ed.] No, wait, the train ride is kinda bumpy.  Very bumpy at times.  Kind of like... like... the American body politic!!  [Atta boy!  You're back in the game!--ed.] 

10:20 AM:  The WiFi cut out for, like 10 minutes south of Wilmington.   How sad and pathetic for America.  Why, if this had happened in, say, Chongqing, at least one train bureaucrat would have been executed and one British hedge-fund manager would have been poisoned to set an example for other trains.  

10:39 AM: The WiFi is becoming erratic again, causing additional mutterings from other passengers in my car. One of them says "This would never happen in Michael Bloomberg's America!!" #notreally.

11:35 AM: The train has arrived in Newark. I look around. God, I miss China.

11:45 AM:   Your pundit's long morning nightmare has come to an end on a gorgeous day in Manhattan.  I learned a lot about America on this trip, but even more importantly... I learned a lot about myself.   [Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Aaron Sorkin!!--ed.]

David Brooks' New York Times column this AM is a riff off of a Peter Thiel lecture about the odd relationship between capitalism and competition. Thiel's point is that our meritocratic society conditions individuals to compete -- for admission to good schools, good jobs, and so forth -- when, in fact, the goal of the capitalist should be to innovate their way to the capitalist holy grail -- a temporary monopoly.

Brooks takes this argument and runs with it:

students have to jump through ever-more demanding, preassigned academic hoops. Instead of developing a passion for one subject, they’re rewarded for becoming professional students, getting great grades across all subjects, regardless of their intrinsic interests. Instead of wandering across strange domains, they have to prudentially apportion their time, making productive use of each hour.

Then they move into a ranking system in which the most competitive college, program and employment opportunity is deemed to be the best. There is a status funnel pointing to the most competitive colleges and banks and companies, regardless of their appropriateness.

Then they move into businesses in which the main point is to beat the competition, in which the competitive juices take control and gradually obliterate other goals. I see this in politics all the time. Candidates enter politics wanting to be authentic and change things. But once the candidates enter the campaign, they stop focusing on how to be change-agents. They and their staff spend all their time focusing on beating the other guy. They hone the skills of one-upsmanship. They get engulfed in a tit-for-tat competition to win the news cycle. Instead of being new and authentic, they become artificial mirror opposites of their opponents. Instead of providing the value voters want — change — they become canned tacticians, hoping to eke out a slight win over the other side.…

You know somebody has been sucked into the competitive myopia when they start using sports or war metaphors. Sports and war are competitive enterprises. If somebody hits three home runs against you in the top of the inning, your job is to go hit four home runs in the bottom of the inning.

But business, politics, intellectual life and most other realms are not like that. In most realms, if somebody hits three home runs against you in one inning, you have the option of picking up your equipment and inventing a different game. You don’t have to compete; you can invent (emphasis added).

Now, there's definitely a strong element of truth to Brooks' point. True innovators in many fields are searching for the genuinely new idea, and then run with it. I, for one, have a (temporary) monopoly in the international relations theory and zombies market. So I get what Brooks is trying to say here.

And yet, in the end, I think this is a crap argument, for a few reasons:

1) Brooks too neatly divides the innovation from the competition elements of market life. Indeed, the company that made Thiel super-rich -- Facebook -- is exhibit A for this point. Facebook didn't really innovate anything that MySpace or other social networking sites hadn't done already. Rather, because social networking is an arena where greater size means greater profitability, Facebook managed to beat its competitors at gaining market share. It did this through a few bells and whistles, but Facebook did not "create a new market and totally dominate it," as Brooks would put it.

2) Brooks has a tendency to conflate different dimensions of social activity as if they're one and the same, and that bolded sentence is exhibit A of that. In point of fact, a politician usually can't invent a different game -- or, if s/he does, it's often called a coup or a revolution. Brooks is clearly disgusted with the ticky-tack, news-cycle, tweet-length tactical fights of politics, and I can't say I blame him. But Brooks of all people should know that politics is also about Very Big Arguments that cannot be avoided. Say what you will about either Barack Obama or the GOP House of Representatives, but over the past two years they've been having The Big Argument. I don't think either of them can risk abandoning the intellectual competition (though maybe this is another option).

Similarly, as someone schooled in intellectual life, walking away from an argument means you've lost the argument. That's not the end of the world, but given that arguing about ideas is what intellectuals do, it's not great either. I think Thiel's argument works well for business -- but business is manifestly not like other spheres of life.

3) It's worth noting that Brooks and Thiel mistakenly conclude that if the meritocratic system was adjusted, the best and the brightest would become better entrepreneurs. I question that hypothesis. Here's the pithy Larry Summers observation that's worth remembering. Summers was actually making an argument consistent with Brooks and Thiel, pushing back against the Amy Chua "Tiger Mom" silliness:

"Which two freshmen at Harvard have arguably been most transformative of the world in the last 25 years?" he asked. "You can make a reasonable case for Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, neither of whom graduated." If they had been the product of a Tiger Mom upbringing, he added, their mothers would probably have been none too pleased with their performance.

The A, B and C alums at Harvard in fact could be broadly characterized thus, he said: The A students became academics, B students spent their time trying to get their children into the university as legacies, and the C students—the ones who had made the money—sat on the fund-raising committee.

The thing is, these groups are more self-selecting than Summers, Brooks and Thiel believe. Which means altering the meritocratic incentives won't change all that much.

Am I missing anything?

In my experience, pundits tend to be risk-averse in calling out a very rich person on their economic or financial analyses.  There's a couple of intuitive logics at work here: 

1)  Most pundits don't know much about economics, and so are leery of entering those waters;

2)  The really rich person likely became really rich because they demonstrated a shrewd understanding of the markets -- therefore, who is the low-six-figure-or-less-earning pundit to challenge such high-yielding wisdom;

3)  Most pundits refuse to admit that they don't understand something that reads like gobbledgook, because they're afraid this makes them look like an idiot.

Well, your humble blogger has never been afraid of looking like an idiot... which brings me to PIMCO's Bill Gross.  I'll occasionally read his monthly newsletter when a link to it pops up in my Twitter feed.  Every time, I'm amazed at the florid, rambling, not-really-related-to-his-main-point way he opens these little essays. Sometimes I find the analysis afterwards useful, sometimes I find it eerily similar to what someone says after spending too much time with Tom Friedman.  I gather he's had better years as an analyst than he did in 2011, but everyone has down years and bad predictions. 

Here's the thing, though -- I can't understand a word of his latest Financial Times column:  Here's how it opens: 

Isaac Newton may have conceptualised the effects of gravity when that mythical apple fell on his head, but could he have imagined Neil Armstrong’s hop-skip-and-jumping on the moon, or the trapping of light inside a black hole? Probably not. Likewise, the deceased economic maestro of the 21st century – Hyman Minsky – probably couldn’t have conceived how his monetary theories could be altered by zero-based money.

Things get a little clearer towards the end of the op-ed... but not much.  His February 2012 newsletter appears to be an expanded version of this op-ed (plus the usual wacky opening), so let's go there to see what he's trying to say: 

[W]hen rational or irrational fear persuades an investor to be more concerned about the return of her money than on her money then liquidity can be trapped in a mattress, a bank account or a five basis point Treasury bill. But that commonsensical observation is well known to Fed policymakers, economic historians and certainly citizens on Main Street. 

What perhaps is not so often recognized is that liquidity can be trapped by the “price” of credit, in addition to its “risk.” Capitalism depends on risk-taking in several forms. Developers, homeowners, entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes epitomize the riskiness of business building via equity and credit risk extension. But modern capitalism is dependent as well on maturity extension in credit markets. No venture, aside from one financed with 100% owners’ capital, could survive on credit or loans that matured or were callable overnight. Buildings, utilities and homes require 20- and 30-year loan commitments to smooth and justify their returns. Because this is so, lenders require a yield premium, expressed as a positively sloped yield curve, to make the extended loan. A flat yield curve, in contrast, is a disincentive for lenders to lend unless there is sufficient downside room for yields to fall and provide bond market capital gains. This nominal or even real interest rate “margin” is why prior cyclical periods of curve flatness or even inversion have been successfully followed by economic expansions. Intermediate and long rates – even though flat and equal to a short-term policy rate – have had room to fall, and credit therefore has not been trapped by “price.” 

Even if nodding in agreement, an observer might immediately comment that today’s yield curve is anything but flat and that might be true. Most short to intermediate Treasury yields, however, are dangerously close to the zero-bound which imply little if any room to fall: no margin, no air underneath those bond yields and therefore limited, if any, price appreciation. What incentive does a bank have to buy two-year Treasuries at 20 basis points when they can park overnight reserves with the Fed at 25? What incentives do investment managers or even individual investors have to take price risk with a five-, 10- or 30-year Treasury when there are multiples of downside price risk compared to appreciation? At 75 basis points, a five-year Treasury can only rationally appreciate by two more points, but theoretically can go down by an unlimited amount. Duration risk and flatness at the zero-bound, to make the simple point, can freeze and trap liquidity by convincing investors to hold cash as opposed to extend credit (emplases in original).

And... sorry, I still don't get it.  I get why zero interest rates are bad for bondholders like PIMCO.  I get that flat yield curves + high amounts of economic uncertainty = cash hoarding.   What I don't get is that:

A)  Gross himself acknowledges that the yield curve ain't flat;

B)  Low interest rates allow for private-sector deleveraging, which is a prelude to stimulating market demand;

C)  Low interest rates prevent today's government binge from being even more expensive than it would be in normal times (by keeping financing costs down);

D)  If uncertainty is decreasing -- and that appears to be the case with the U.S. economy -- then low interest rates should spur greater entrepreneurial investments. 

So, at the risk of threatening my status in the International Brotherhood of Serious Global Political Econmy Bloggers That Talk Seriously About Economics, I hereby ask my commenters to explain Bill Gross' concerns to me. Because I don't get it -- and I'm beginning to wonder if I'm not the only one.

Earlier this week Walter Russell Mead blogged about the mortal danger facing a prominent international relations theory:

American fast food continues to worm its way ever deeper into Pakistani affections. Hardee’s recently joined McDonald’s in Islamabad and both are doing well, says the Washington Post.

Since McDonald’s is also thriving in India, an IR theory is about to be put to a test. The “McDonald’s theory” holds that no two countries with McDonald’s in them will ever go to war. Once you have a middle class big enough to support hamburger franchises, the theory runs, war is a thing of the past.

I wish. The 2008 war between Russia and Georgia dealt the theory a blow; an India-Pakistan war would be the end.

Whether or not that happens, the theory is a bust. Countries often become more militaristic as their middle classes rise.

A touch a touch, I do confess it!! It appears that the collective reputation of international relations theory has been tarnished, yet -- wait a second, who came up with that theory in the first place?

As it turns out, it was not some academic IR theorist like me, but rather a Prominent Foreign Affairs Columnist of Some Renown … kinda like Mead (but not really). Yes, it was indeed Tom Friedman who first suggested "The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention."

Mead concludes that the theory is a bust, and Wikipedia appears to back him up:

[T]he NATO bombing of Serbia proved the theory wrong, though in a later edition Friedman argued that this exception proved the rule: the war ended quickly, he argued, partly because the Serbian population did not want to lose their place in a global system "symbolised by McDonald's" (Friedman 2000: 252–253).... In 1998, McDonald's host countries India and Pakistan fought a border war over Kashmir. While not a full scale war, both countries flaunted their nuclear capabilities. At least two wars between McDonald's hosting nations have occurred since the NATO bombing of Serbia: the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon; and the 2008 conflict between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia.

(Actually, Wikipedia is underestimating how many times the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention has been falsified … according to Wikipedia. The Kargil War was in 1999, not 1998, and according to casualty estimates, there were more than 1,000 battle deaths, which meets the standard definition of a war.)

Empirical quibbles aside, this certainly falsifies Friedman's original "strong" hypothesis of "no two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other." The thing is, international relations theories are kinda like … er … zombies. Even if you think you've killed them off, they can be revived.

Let's water down Friedman's strong hypothesis a bit. Is it true that, "two countries that both have a McDonald's are significantly less likely to fight a war against each other?" Mead thinks the answer is no, but my hunch is that it would be yes. A cursory glance at the scholarly literature suggests that no one has actually tested it, so … get to it, aspiring MA thesis writers!!

That said, even if the weaker version was true, would it be useful from either a theoretical or policy perspective? I think the answer here is no, and this is one important way in which academic IR theorists do better than, say, Tom Friedman. The comparative advantage of the Golden Arches Theory is pedagogical -- it's easy to explain to anyone. The problem is that McDonald's is really an intervening variable and not the actual cause of any peace. And while IR scholars sometimes roll their eyes at democratic peace theory, the literature has produced significant progress about the ways in which that hypothesis is constrained (in a world of democratizing states, for example).

Mead is correct to observe that this particular IR theory is in trouble. I'm marginally more sanguine about the state of academic IR theory overall, however.

[Note to readers: Because Dan was upgraded to business class on his trip to Beijing, he was exposed to a serious viral infection in the food called metaphoricus overloadus, known more commonly as Friedman's Disease. Rest assured, it is far from fatal -- it usually passes after 24 hours of no travel. As near as we can determine, all the facts in the blog post below are accurate. While suffering from Friedman's Disease, however, side effects do include rapid-fire, over-the-top metaphors. Remember: You've been warned!! --ed.]

To truly understand the phenomenon that is China, you need to fly into Beijing's airport and then try to get into the city. That's it; that's all you need. Just that adventure alone will tell you all you need to know about the contradictions of the Middle Kingdom.

First you enter a glittering, modern airport, with helpful signs in Mandarin and English. It's sheer scale and modernity telegraphs the ways in which China has already entered modernity. The monorail from my terminal to baggage claim was a pointed reminder of how much the United States lags behind in infrastructure investment in recent years.

And yet, there's the traffic. Summer in Beijing is a confusing miasma of traffic and smog and traffic. As my compatriot and I clambered into our taxi at Beijing's immaculately clean and modern airport, we knew that the ride to the hotel could take anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes depending on the traffic. Just as we Americans don't know when exactly China will catch up, the Chinese are not sure how long it will take to get there.

We might like to think that driving in a New York City taxi is as exciting as a carnival ride, but that's nothing compared with a taxi ride on a Beijing superhighway. In New York, there's always that sense that, in the end, the taxi driver won't risk an actual collision. On the road to Beijing, however, I witnessed at least two last-minute swerves and road rage that would have made Los Angelenos blush. Using an accent that an old-style New York cabbie would have admired in its sheer swarthiness, my cabbie kept honking for at least two minutes after a car viciously cut him off.

It's a fantastical engineering problem, getting so many cars and motorcycles and trucks and buses to merge and move in the same direction. And that's when it hit me like a thunderbolt -- China itself is like this superhighway. It's massive in size, 10 lanes easy. It's filled with an array of vehicles determined to get ahead. The problem is that when you combine all the vehicles together, the real possibility of a two-week-long traffic jam in which everyone wants to go somewhere but nobody gets anywhere is clearly a possibility. Predicting China's future is like predicting the traffic:  You know there will be some stop-and-go, but you just don't know how much of it there will be.

When we got to the hotel, I paid my cabbie and he signaled that I owed him four more yuan. I was suffering from ATM disease, so I took out a single U.S. dollar bill and a 100-yuan note, looked at him, and said, "You choose." He paused, and then took the yuan note and made the necessary change. Clearly, all of us participating in this hyperaccelerated, globalized economy are going to have to make the necessary change soon enough.

Events in Egypt are now officially happening Too Fast to Blog About While Egyptians are Still Awake. 

Sooo... in the meantime, I have a review of George Friedman's The Next Decade:  Where We've Been... and Where We're Going  in the latest issue of Texas Monthly.  Friedman is the founder and CEO of Stratfor, which is based in Austin, Texas. 

Here's how the review opens and closes:

As a rule, those who predict the future of world events should be viewed the same way Hermione Granger viewed Hogwarts’s divination classes—with unremitting skepticism. Social scientists may have something to offer in the way of explanation or short-term speculation, but there are serious limits to any kind of global soothsaying. World politics are simply too complex to forecast anything precisely in the medium term; it’s like asking a meteorologist to predict the weather a decade from now....

Perhaps I exaggerated Hermione’s skepticism of divination a bit. An otherwise stellar student, she was clearly frustrated that she was simply no good at it. Similarly, I should confess a smidgen of envy at Friedman’s conviction that he will be proved right about everything. Some writers are so sure of their beliefs that their assuredness has a viral quality, infecting the reader even if their logic fails. Friedman possesses that certainty in truckloads, and The Next Decade contains a few nuggets of insight as well. But make no mistake: Things will happen over the course of the next decade—and the next year and the next week—that will completely rock George Friedman’s world. (emphasis added)

Hey, are my predictive powers amazing or what??!!  OK, those predictive powers were really the result of an excellent editor at Texas Monthly, but you get the idea. 

I believe you can read the whole thing.  Incidentally, his key insight into Egypt comes on page 92:  "Even if the secular Nasserite regime fell, it would be a generation before Egypt could be a threat, and then only if it gained the patronage of a major power."  Ah, that explains why Israel is handling these events so calmly.  Oh, wait...

For a fun exercise, see if Friedman's current analysis jibes with how he predicts the next decade.