Last week I had a good rant about the persecution complex of realist international relations scholars. 

This is a discussion that needs to continue, however -- see the responses by Justin Logan, Alan Alexandroff and Steve Saideman, for example.  So, I invited two of the smartest and least-likely-to-whine realists I know to respond.  John Schuessler (an assistant professor in the Department of Strategy at the Air War College) and Sebastian Rosato (an assistant professor of political science at Notre Dame) offer their take below.  I will respond later in the week: 

Realists are Right After All

Sebastian Rosato and John Schuessler

Dan Drezner claims that academic realists have a "strong, cultivated sense of victimhood." He is tired of what he sees as their unjustified griping that they are pariahs in the academy, among the general public, and in the foreign policy community. And he wants them to just come out and admit that they've failed to "popularize their own ideas."

As it happens, his post comes shortly after the publication of our article, "A Realist Foreign Policy for the United States" (Perspectives on Politics), in which we have a different take on these issues.

Let's start with whether or not people like realism. In our article, we ask what kind of policy the United States can pursue that will ensure its security while minimizing the likelihood of war. We then point out that IR scholars have tended to dismiss the possibility that realism has anything to contribute to the debate. The charge comes in a variety of forms, from ‘realism causes war' to ‘realism prevents progress.' This prompts critics to label realists as irresponsible or even immoral and to call for more ‘enlightened' or ‘morally acceptable' alternatives. It is for good reason that Robert Gilpin has said that "no one loves a political realist." This hostility extends to the policy community. As we discuss in our article, U.S. policymakers have taken and continue to take their cues not from realism but from its main theoretical antagonist, liberalism. There is no need to take our word for it, however. John Owen, Colin Dueck, and Michael Desch, among others, have pointed out that American foreign policy has been guided by liberal principles since the Founding.

Our article describes and defends a realist foreign policy to guide U.S. decision makers. Our recommendation, which is logically derived from realist principles, is that the United States should balance against other great powers as well as against hostile minor powers that inhabit strategically important regions of the world, while otherwise practicing restraint. We then show that had the United States and other great powers followed our realist prescriptions, some of the most important wars of the past century-including the world wars, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War-might have been averted. Simply put, realism offers the prospect of security without war.

We wrote our article at least in part to popularize realist thinking. This would not count for much, and realists could still be accused of failing to spread their ideas, if we were the first realists to do so. But as we note, realists have been vocal contributors to the debate on U.S. foreign policy since World War II, even going so far as to oppose both the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Since the end of the Cold War, realists have been some of the loudest voices calling for restraint, with John Mearsheimer, Chris Layne and Steve Walt all urging the United States to adopt an "offshore balancing" posture, which overlaps considerably with our own preferred policy. On the merits, such an approach, and the realism that underpins it, should be popular. After all, if the United States had abided by its precepts, it likely would have been involved in fewer wars than it has been over the past few decades.

We did not write "A Realist Foreign Policy for the United States" with Dan's criticisms in mind, but if we had we would also have noted the following.

For one thing, we have cited only some of the evidence that Americans dislike realism. Dan argues elsewhere that the public is not unsympathetic to realism, but others have claimed that public opinion is essentially liberal. As for the foreign policy community, we share Justin Logan's sense that there's a dearth or even a complete absence of bona fide realists inside the Beltway. Realism's approval ratings in the academy are hardly better. Dan's concession that realism is not the most popular paradigm among IR scholars is an understatement-indeed, if you ignore Marxism, it's the least popular approach in the field. As a recent survey concludes, "realism does not have the hold on the field it is often thought to have" and, in fact, it never did. Realist research has never made up more than 15% of published articles, for example. And although we agree with Dan that realism commands a lot of attention in the classroom, it is typically presented as a crude, dated, unscientific, amoral approach that needs to be heavily amended or, preferably, jettisoned entirely. No other approach receives as much criticism.

This is unfortunate, as realists seem to turn up on the right side of history as often as not-the Vietnam and Iraq wars are prominent examples-and may do so again if the Obama administration stumbles into a foolish war with Iran (a war that prominent realists have opposed).

This is not to say that we feel victimized.  But as card-carrying members of an academic approach that is excoriated and ignored despite being regularly vindicated by real world events and providing a better recipe for peace and stability than the alternatives, we admit to being confused.

Note: John Schuessler's views are his own and do not represent those of the Air War College, the Air Force, or the Department of Defense.

In the wake of Hurricane Irene, the St. Petersburg Times records an interesting interpretation of recent events from GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. This is a direct quote of Bachmann:

I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending.

An interesting hypothesis!! So, there are three possibilities here. The first is that Bachmann was joking -- in which case, wow, that's a really tasteless joke given the loss of life and probably warrants a pretty big apology.

The second is that Bachmann is simply nuts wrong. Doug Mataconis points out,

I’m not sure how this computes given the fact that the storm largely spared Washington, D.C. and New York, while hammering a red states like North Carolina and a heavily Republican area like Virginia’s Tidewater region.

Well, socialist-supporting Vermont got hit pretty hard too, but still, this is a fair point, and "Bachmann being wrong" seems like another safe bet.

The third possibility is the one I want to explore, however -- what if Bachmann is right? What if God really is using wrath to coerce humanity into implementing a particular set of policy preferences?

A God-fearing person would naturally decide to obey. However, this kind of coercive demand strikes me as a pretty massive intrusion into human sovereignty. The point of a democracy is for majorities of citizens and their elected representatives to decide matters of policy. Recent history suggests that neither sovereign governments nor their populations take kindly to coercive threats from other men. If we acquiesce to Divine demands now, don't we just let God win?

Bachmann's response suggests an obvious bandwagoning approach to the awesome power of deities: When God says jump, you should say, how high? And, indeed, if the Almighty really is omnipotent, this strategy has much to recommend it. Bandwagoning is generally recommended when the targeted actor is comparatively weak, has few natural allies, and believes that the targeting actor can be appeased with concessions. This seems to fit the Old Testament, monotheistic God to a tee.

On the other hand, however, might a balancing approach yield better long-term results? After all, God has a disturbing track record of making demands like this. We know from Genesis the Old Testament that the Almighty has a tendency to, well, you know, smite humans on a semi-regular basis. There's the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, an awful lot of Egyptians, etc. This doesn't even include the number of times God demanded death (the sacrifice of Isaac, Ninevah) only to relent at the last minute. Sure, God has some good reasons in some of these instances, but from a threat assessment perspective, it's veeeeery disturbing.

Maybe the bandwagoning criteria don't apply. If one operates along the monotheistic assumption*, humans should ask if there is a possible ally out there to help resist God's will [Don't go there --ed.], an entity who is God's enduring rival [You're really going there, aren't you?! --ed.] , one who might have the necessary power to make God think twice about all that smiting?

It's time to wonder … would a temporary alliance with Satan really be that bad? [Yes it world!! --ed.] Winston Churchill once said, "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." Now I'm not sure I would even go that far … the whole selling souls thing sounds like a pretty big demand too. That said, a sober, realpolitik perspective would demand that making a deal with the devil has to be a policy option that stays on the table.

[How about a nice buck-passing strategy instead?--ed. Hey, I'd love to just force other creatures like, say, apes to go toe-to-toe with God, but I just don't see it happening.]

Readers are warmly encouraged to puzzle this out for themselves -- or, instead, to buy the very entertaining Biblical Games by Steven Brams.

*The monotheism assumption is important when thinking about how to cope with a venegeful god. If the universe turns out to be polytheistic, then the question becomes whether us mortals can sow dissension among the gods before someone releases a Kraken.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think? 

President Obama is scheduled to address the country this evening on Libya, and the odds are pretty good that Ben Rhodes will be writing the bulk of the speech.  I'm sure the speech will be interesting, full of false choices for the Obama administration to surmount and the like. 

Still, what I'd love to see is Rhodes' first draft -- you know, the one where he just spits out exactly what he thinks Obama is thinking on Libya, warts and all. 

Well, fortunately, due to your humble blogger's vast and imaginary network of sources inside the Beltway, I have secured a copy of that first draft of the speech, reprinted below for your edification:

FIRST NOTES/DRAFT OF POTUS LIBYA SPEECH

By Benjamin Rhodes

I'm addressing you, my fellow Americans, because my administration's message on our war limited humanitarian intervention kinetic military action in Libya has truly and totally sucked.  Seriously, I'm gobsmacked at how f***ing incoherent we've been in communicating our rationale to the foreign policy community and the American public.  The bickering within my administration and within the international coalition has not helped -- sweet Jesus, multilateralism can be a royal pain in the butt sometimes.  No wonder public support has been relatively anemic (although there's also the fact that I'm launching another war when all Americans care about right now is the domestic economy). 

How bad is it?  I'm getting hit by the neocons for moving without Congressional permission less than a week after I was getting hit by them for not moving quickly enough!!  Thank God for Newt Gingrich, or I'd look really bad.  Now I'm getting flak from the left on not being consistent with R2P when, in fact, anyone who knows anything about R2P knows that I'm doing the best I can.  Seriously, I'm supposed to intervene militarily in Bahrain and Syria too?  Sure, right after I send the 82nd Airborne to liberate Tibet.  At least I can ignore the criticism from those who went on junkets to Tripoli last year.  Hypocrisy sure is a bitch, huh? 

What kills me, what absolutely kills me, is that in just ten days, without any boots on the ground, we've accomplished one whole hell of a lot.  First off, if we hadn't intervened, the rebels would have been routed in Benghazi, and Khaddafy would be in control of the entire country again.  OK, so maybe the "100,000 dead" figure was a bit exaggerated, but surely the fall of Benghazi would have created hundreds of thousands of Libya refugees flowing into Egypt, which is exactly what that country doesn't need right now.   Anyone who doesn't realize that the situation in Libya and the situation in Egypt are connected is a f***ing moron (which, since we forgot to mention this fact for an awfully long time, apparently includes my messaging shop). 

Now, the situation on the ground looks pretty much like how things looked during the high tide of the Libyan rebellion.  So long as our air support continues, that's now the worst-case scenario -- and you know what, that's actually pretty tolerable.  It would mean that the rebels would control about 70% of Libya's oil reserves and that the regions of the country most hostile to Khaddafy would be free of his grip.  Over time, sanctions will start to hit Khaddafy's resources, the Libya Transitional Council can get its act together, and we can burden-share with NATO a hell of a lot more.  The Libyans don't want our boots on the ground any more than we want to have them there -- so further escalation is not in the cards. 

All the while -- and remember, this is the worst-case scenario -- the United States will have accomplished two direct deliverables and quite a few positive policy externalities.  Directly, we averted a humanitarian disaster and created a buffer in eastern Libya that eases any economic or humanitarian pressure on Egypt (which is where our strategic interest lies). 

In many ways, the policy externalities are even bigger.  The biggest bonus is that, for once, our hard power is actually augmenting our soft power.  Those images on Al Jazeera of Libyans saying thank you to the United States -- that's pure soft power gold.  When you compare how the U.S. government has handled the Arab Revolutions  to Al Qaeda or Iran, the contrast is pretty stark.  What's happened in Libya has helped to obscure our more realpolitik response in, say Bahrain.  Oh, and we managed to find a purpose for NATO.

Is this messy?  Duh, of course!  Could this intervention distract us from The Big Picture?  Maybe for the past week and this week, sure, but it's not like Iran or China is really exploiting what's going on in the Middle East -- they're too busy trying to pretend it's not happening domestically.  As for North Korea learning that it's a mistake to give up their nukes, I'm pretty sure they'd learned that lesson way back in 2003, thank you very much. 

Look, I'd have loved for the messaging to be clearer, and in retrospect it would have been good if we'd had asked Congress for authorization, but this is what happens when you make foreign policy on the fly in a region wracked by revolution.  It's not perfect, but if you think about the counterfactuals real hard, I'm fully confident that the benefits massively outweigh the costs of this intervention.  So there. 

John Mearsheimer has the lead essay in the latest issue of The National Interest. Entitled "Imperial by Design," the main thesis is not going to shock anyone familiar with Mearsheimer's theoretical and policy writings over the past two decades:

The root cause of America's troubles is that it adopted a flawed grand strategy after the Cold War. From the Clinton administration on, the United States rejected [grand strategies of offshore balancing or selective engagement], instead pursuing global dominance, or what might alternatively be called global hegemony, which was not just doomed to fail, but likely to backfire in dangerous ways if it relied too heavily on military force to achieve its ambitious agenda.

The rest of the article details the flawed strategies pursued by the Clinton and Bush administrations, and then closes with this warning:

The United States needs a new grand strategy. Global dominance is a prescription for endless trouble -- especially in its neoconservative variant. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is populated from top to bottom with liberal imperialists who remain committed to trying to govern the world, albeit with less emphasis on big-stick diplomacy and more emphasis on working with allies and international institutions. In effect, they want to bring back Bill Clinton's grand strategy....

President Obama is making a serious mistake heading down this road. He should instead return to the grand strategy of offshore balancing, which has served this country well for most of its history and offers the best formula for dealing with the threats facing America -- whether it be terrorism, nuclear proliferation or a traditional great-power rival.

Mearsheimer's essay has drawn praise from others at FP, but I confess to finding it conceptually fuzzier than most of his other work.

He's positing that a global dominance strategy doesn't work, and that the post-Cold War era demonstrates that it doesn't work. To demonstrate this, however, he focuses the overwhelming majority of the essay on the Bush administration. Fair enough, except that he's arguing that Obama is copying Bill Clinton and not George W. Bush. Here is the entirety of Mearsheimer's discussion of the Clinton period:

Bill Clinton was the first president to govern exclusively in the post-Cold War world, and his administration pursued global dominance from start to finish. Yet Clinton's foreign-policy team was comprised of liberal imperialists; so, although the president and his lieutenants made clear that they were bent on ruling the world-blatantly reflected in former-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's well-known comment that "if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future"-they employed military force reluctantly and prudently. They may have been gung ho about pushing the unipolar moment onward and upward, but for all their enthusiasm, even these democracy promoters soon saw that nation building was no easy task.

During his first year in office, Clinton carelessly allowed the United States to get involved in nation building in Somalia. But when eighteen American soldiers were killed in a firefight in Mogadishu in October 1993 (famously rendered in Black Hawk Down), he immediately pulled U.S. troops out of the country. In fact, the administration was so spooked by the fiasco that it refused to intervene during the Rwandan genocide in the spring of 1994, even though the cost of doing so would have been small. Yes, Clinton did commit American forces to Haiti in September 1994 to help remove a brutal military regime, but he had to overcome significant congressional opposition and he went to great lengths to get a U.N. resolution supporting a multinational intervention force. Most of the American troops were out of Haiti by March 1996, and at no time was there a serious attempt at nation building.

Clinton did talk tough during the 1992 presidential campaign about using American power against Serbia to halt the fighting in Bosnia, but after taking office, he dragged his feet and only used airpower in 1995 to end the fighting. He went to war against Serbia for a second time in 1999 -- this time over Kosovo -- and once again would only rely on airpower, despite pressure to deploy ground forces from his NATO commander, General Wesley Clark, and then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

By early 1998, the neoconservatives were pressuring Clinton to use military force to remove Saddam Hussein. The president endorsed the long-term goal of ousting the Iraqi leader, but he refused to go to war to make that happen. The United States under Bill Clinton was, as Richard Haass put it, a "reluctant sheriff." (emphasis added)

There are some factual errors in this account (Clinton did not pull out immediately after the Black Hawk Down incident -- in fact, he bolstered U.S. forces and then withdrew six months later). More importantly, however, the policies described in this section suggest that Mearsheimer is going Vizzini on the phrase "global dominance." There's very little in the quoted section that bears resemblance to the bolded statement -- at best, it looks imperial by accident rather than design. That doesn't sound like a global dominance strategy to me -- and nowhere in this section does Mearsheimer describe the strategic costs that came with Clinton's approach.

(Maybe one could argue that Clinton's reluctant successes in Bosnia and Kosovo paradoxically bolstered Americans' faith in the utility of force, and that this faith paved the way for neoconservatism to pursue a more militarized approach. But Mearsheimer doesn't make that argument, and I don't think it holds up terribly well).

Mearsheimer is warning us that Obama is trying to replicate Clinton's grand strategy (though he offers minimal evidence to support this assertion). His implicit argument is that Clinton's strategy was a disaster, but he provides no evidence to support this assertion, and I don't think it's obviously correct either.

Instead, Mearsheimer devotes page after page to chronicling the errors of the Bush administration's grand strategy. Which is fine, but after the 5,476th evisceration of the neoconservative grand strategy, diminishing marginal returns do start to kick in. Bush 43's errors of strategy, management and implementation are pretty sui generis, to the point where it's dangerous to generalize from the Bush administration to the entire post-Cold War era.

Maybe offshore balancing is the right grand strategy to pursue, the Clintonian approach was blinkered, and Obama's approach is flawed. These are good propositions to debate and argue. The tragedy of Mearsheimer's "Imperial By Design" is that all of these points are asserted rather than argued.

There's been a lot of oh-my-God-China-is-eating-America's-lunch-have-you-seen-how-pretty-their-infrastructure-is?-kind of blather among the commentariat. And, to be sure, China has had a good Great Recession. But one of the points I've been making on this blog repeatedly is that, for all of China's supposed deftness, "China's continued rise seems to be occurring in spite of strategic miscalculations, not because of them."

Now, I had also assumed that China's leadership would quickly move down the learning curve and practice a more subtle form of statecraft. After reading Keith Bradsher in the New York Times today, however, I guess I was wrong:

Sharply raising the stakes in a dispute over Japan’s detention of a Chinese fishing trawler captain, the Chinese government has blocked exports to Japan of a crucial category of minerals used in products like hybrid cars, win turbines and guided missiles.

Chinese customs officials are halting shipments to Japan of so-called rare earth elements, preventing them from being loaded aboard ships this week at Chinese ports, three industry officials said Thursday.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao personally called for Japan’s release of the captain, who was detained after his vessel collided with two Japanese Coast Guard ships about 40 minutes apart as he tried to fish in waters controlled by Japan but long claimed by China. Mr. Wen threatened unspecified further actions if Japan did not comply.

Is this effort at economic statecraft going to accomplish Beijing's objectives? In a word, no. True, according to Bradsher, "China mines 93 percent of the world’s rare earth minerals, and more than 99 percent of the world’s supply of some of the most prized rare earths." 

It's also true, however, that Japan has been stockpiling supplies of rare earths. Furthermore, this kind of action is just going to lead to massive subsidies to produce rare earths elsewherein the world (including the United States) and/or develop rare earth substitutes. Oh, and one other thing -- given the spate of flare-ups between Japan and China as of late, the last thing Tokyo will want to do is back down in the face of Chinese economic coercion. 

Don't get me wrong -- if China persists in this ban, there will be come economic costs to the rest of the world. Those costs just won't translate into any political concessions. [UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has an excellent follow-up story suggesting that China is not imposing a ban.] 

It is hardly surprising that (reported) actions like these are leading the entire Pacific Rim right to Washington's door: 

[R]ising frictions between China and its neighbors in recent weeks over security issues have handed the United States an opportunity to reassert itself — one the Obama administration has been keen to take advantage of.

Washington is leaping into the middle of heated territorial disputes between China and Southeast Asian nations despite stern Chinese warnings that it mind its own business. The United States is carrying out naval exercises with South Korea in order to help Seoul rebuff threats from North Korea even though China is denouncing those exercises, saying that they intrude on areas where the Chinese military operates.

Meanwhile, China’s increasingly tense standoff with Japan over a Chinese fishing trawler captured by Japanese ships in disputed waters is pushing Japan back under the American security umbrella....

“The U.S. has been smart,” said Carlyle A. Thayer, a professor at the Australian Defense Force Academy who studies security issues in Asia. “It has done well by coming to the assistance of countries in the region.”

“All across the board, China is seeing the atmospherics change tremendously,” he added. “The idea of the China threat, thanks to its own efforts, is being revived.”

Asserting Chinese sovereignty over borderlands in contention — everywhere from Tibet to Taiwan to the South China Sea — has long been the top priority for Chinese nationalists, an obsession that overrides all other concerns. But this complicates China’s attempts to present the country’s rise as a boon for the whole region and creates wedges between China and its neighbors. 

This latest rare earth ban is just going to accelerate this trend. The ironic thing about this is that it's not like U.S. grand strategy has been especially brilliant. The U.S., however, has two big advantages at the moment. First, it's further away from these countries than China. Second, Washington's actions and rhetoric have been far more innocuous than Beijing's.

In yet another New York Times story, David Sanger provides a small clue as to whether Beijing either knows or cares about the blowback from its recent actions:

Early this month Mr. Obama quietly sent to Beijing Thomas E. Donilon, his deputy national security adviser and by many accounts the White House official with the greatest influence on the day-to-day workings of national security policy, and Lawrence H. Summers, who announced Tuesday that he would leave by the end of the year as the director of the National Economic Council....

[O]fficials familiar with the meetings said they were intended to try to get the two countries focused on some common long-term goals. The Chinese sounded more cooperative themes than in the spring, when two other administration officials were told, as one senior official put it, that “it was the Obama administration that caused this mess, and it’s the Obama administration that has to clean it up.”

Well, that is learning, but it's of a very modest kind. 

Now, it is possible that Beijing has simply decided that its internal growth is so big that it can afford the friction that comes with a rising power. My assessment, however, is that they're vastly overestimating their current power vis-a-vis the United States, and they're significantly undererstimating the effect of pushing the rest of the Pacific Rim into closer ties with the United States (and India).  

More significantly, and to repeat a theme, China is overestimating its ability to translate the economic interdependence of the Asia/Pacific economy into political leverage. With these misperceptions, however, China is risking some serious conflicts down the road.

Am I missing anything? I'm serious -- this problem ain't going away anytime soon.

The Obama administration has been trying to road-test the National Security Strategy.  Last month is was NSC Advisor James Jones' address to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy -- which is now remembered more for a politically incorrect joke than anything else. 

This weekend it was the president's turn in his commencement address at West Point.  Is there anythng of interest to note?  Some are focusing on what he said about Iraq (victory + withdrawal of combat troops this year).  Let's focus on Obama's bigthink, which I'd label realist internationalism. 

Here's the realist sections:

[W]e must first recognize that our strength and influence abroad begins with steps we take at home. We must educate our children to compete in an age where knowledge is capital, and the marketplace is global. We must develop clean energy that can power new industry and unbound us from foreign oil and preserve our planet. We have to pursue science and research that unlocks wonders as unforeseen to us today as the microchip and the surface of the moon were a century ago.

Simply put, American innovation must be the foundation of American power - because at no time in human history has a nation of diminished economic vitality maintained its military and political primacy. And so that means that the civilians among us, as parents and community leaders, elected officials, business leaders, we have a role to play. We cannot leave it to those in uniform to defend this country - we have to make sure that America is building on its strengths....

And so a fundamental part of our strategy for our security has to be America's support for those universal rights that formed the creed of our founding. And we will promote these values above all by living them - through our fidelity to the rule of law and our Constitution, even when it's hard; even when we're being attacked; even when we're in the midst of war.

Seriously, that last paragraph could have been the mash-up version of John Quincy Adams' 1821 July 4th speech. 

Here's the internationalist part:

Yes, we are clear-eyed about the shortfalls of our international system. But America has not succeeded by stepping out of the currents of cooperation - we have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice, so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities and face consequences when they don't.

So we have to shape an international order that can meet the challenges of our generation. We will be steadfast in strengthening those old alliances that have served us so well, including those who will serve by your side in Afghanistan and around the globe. As influence extends to more countries and capitals, we also have to build new partnerships, and shape stronger international standards and institutions.

Now, realism and multilateralism don't go hand in hand terribly well -- here's the key paragraph where Obama tries to link them:

The burdens of this century cannot fall on our soldiers alone. It also cannot fall on American shoulders alone. Our adversaries would like to see America sap its strength by overextending our power. And in the past, we've always had the foresight to avoid acting alone. We were part of the most powerful wartime coalition in human history through World War II. We stitched together a community of free nations and institutions to endure and ultimately prevail during a Cold War.

Essentially, the administration will try to argue that multilateralism serves as a force multiplier, allowing America to extend its reach while burden-sharing with supporters who benefot from an American-led international order.

Does this formulation work?  I like the emphasis on internal renewal, and I tend to think that the United States does retrenchment strategies better than most countries.  That said, one problem with multilateralism is that burden-sharing often turns into free-riding. 

Another p;roblem is that without an animating idea, it's difficult to retain multilateral solidarity.  "Multilateralism for multilateralism's sake" doesn't work unless you live in Brussels -- and even then it's a bit dodgy.  "All for one, and one for keeping order" has its virtues, but emotionsal resonance isn't one of them.  

There has to be a purpose beyond order to rally allies to a cause.  We'll see if the Obama team has one when the NSS rolls out. 

Developing....

I see that Steve Walt couldn't resist critiquing Obama's Nobel Peace Prize speech.  At the end of his post, he argues that Obama should be judged by his actions and not his words:

I still think we should pay less attention to what he said and focus on what he and his advisors do. In his first year in office, President Obama has made two critical decisions involving matters of war, peace and justice. The first is his decision to abandon the admirable principles he set forth in his Cairo speech in June, to tacitly accept the continued expansion of Israel's West Bank settlements, and to collude in a well-orchestrated assault on the Goldstone Report on war crimes in Gaza.  The result will be to perpetuate precisely the sort of injustice that gives rise to very violence he deplored in his speech. The second is his decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan -- sending 17,000 troops last spring and 30,000 more last month -- despite the continued absence of a compelling rationale or coherent strategy for success.

From Day One, Obama has shown that he is a thoughtful and intelligent leader who takes his responsibilities seriously and weighs decisions carefully. But in the end, what matters is not how long or hard he thinks or how well he talks. What matters is whether he makes the right decisions. And by that criterion, he's 0 for 2.

No doubt, these are important policy actions.  The most important, however?  No, I don't think so -- not if you really buy the precepts of realism (Indeed, one of the things I love about purebred realists is how they emphasize the importance of power beyond all else, and then obsess about every aspect of American foreign policy except great power interactions). 

No, what should matter most for realists is how the United States engages the other great powers of the world -- China, Russia, and maybe India and the European Union.  By this metric, the four most important actions the Obama administration has taken to date are:

• Revamping the missile shield that was ostensibly suppposed to cover Eastern Europe in the event of an Iranian missile attack in a way that mollified Russia. 
• Nearly completing negotiations with Russia on a follow-up to the Start II treaty 
• Refraining from branding China as a currency manipulator in Treasury's report to Congress
• Elevating the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue with China to the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue

On the whole, in great power politics, I'd say Obama is doing reasonably well.  Relations with Russia are unquestionably better than they were a year ago.  Sino-American relations are fraught with more tension, as recent events in Copenhagen suggest.  However, I'm with James Fallows in noting that Obama's China trip was more successful than most commentators noted in November. 

There might come a time in the future when the United States must balance against these countries, but that day is a long way off.  For now, however, one could argue the Obama administration's emphasis on developing a more robust economic foundation for American power necessitates relatively peaceful relations with the other great powers. 

What do you think? 

As public relation stunts go, I think the President of Maldives has managed to top that f$%&ing balloon boy family:

President Mohamed Nasheed, Vice President Dr Mohamed Waheed and 11 cabinet ministers donned scuba gear and submerged 4 meters below the surface of sea to hold the world's first underwater cabinet meeting, in a bid to push for a stronger climate change agreement in the upcoming climate summit in Copenhagen.

“We are trying to send our message to let the world know what is happening and what will happen to the Maldives if climate change isn't checked” said President Nasheed, speaking to the press as soon as he resurfaced from underwater.

“What we are trying to make people realize is that the Maldives is a frontline state. This is not merely an issue for the Maldives but for the world. If we can't save the Maldives today, you can't save the rest of the world tomorrow”, said President Nasheed further.

During the 30-minute meeting held in the turquoise lagoon off Girifushi Island, with a backdrop of corals, the President, the Vice President and eleven other Cabinet ministers signed a resolution calling for global cuts in carbon emissions.

This has definitely generated some press coverage, so props to Nasheed for an imaginative stunt. 

Just to be contrarian, however, I do wonder if it's the case that as small island nations go, so does the rest of the world.  Because they are sovereign actors, small island nations often possess greater influence than their population or GDP merits.  Would a rational, cost-benefit analysis of how to allocate climate change resources between mitigation and adaptation really place such a high priority on a bunch of small countries with a combined population of less than ten million? 

This isn't a rhetorical question -- I honestly don't know. 

You know how so many in the blogosphere bitch and moan about the ability of neoconservatives to get their policy proposals published even after screwing up on Iraq? 

I'm kind of curious how these people feel about Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett's op-ed in the New York Times today about Iran.  I mean, this is a scant few months after they served as apologists for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after the controversial June election.  I guess the Leveretts know Gwen Pollard well. 

Others can debate whether the Leveretts deserve the prime real estate on the NYT op-ed page.  I'd like to focus on the fact that the op-ed itself makes no f***ing sense whatsoever. 

Let's take a look at it, shall we?

[T]he meeting on Thursday in Geneva of the United Nations Security Council’s five permanent members and Germany with Iran (the “five plus one” talks) will not be an occasion for strategic discussion but for delivering an ultimatum: Iran will have to agree to pre-emptive limitations on its nuclear program or face what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls “crippling” sanctions.

However, based on conversations we’ve had in recent days with senior Iranian officials — including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — we believe it is highly unlikely Iran will accept this ultimatum.

Oh, wow... senior Iranian officials told the Leveretts that they would not concede?  Well, I'd definitely take that at face value.  I'm sure these were the same people who told the Leveretts that Ahmadinejad was the legitimate victor back in June.  Clearly, these are reliable sources with zero incentive to dissemble to regime-friendly pundits in the United States.  And it's not like they have anything to hide.  Oh, wait....

 American officials tend to play down Iranian concerns about American intentions, citing public messages from President Obama to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, as proof of the administration’s diplomatic seriousness. But Tehran saw these messages as attempts to circumvent Iran’s president — another iteration, in a pattern dating from Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal, of American administrations trying to create channels to Iranian “moderates” rather than dealing with the Islamic Republic as a system.

Wow again.  See, I would view these exchanges with Khamenei as attempts to talk to the person with actual control over Iran's nuclear program, as opposed to the guy who rants on and on about how the Holocaust was just a big myth. 

Indeed, the Obama administration is "dealing with the Islamic Republic as a system" -- and they are trying to talk to the people with genuine foreign policy power.  The Leveretts, on the other hand, seem to be convinced that the only way to talk with Iran is through Ahmadinejad. 

Unfortunately, the Obama administration was enticed by the prospect of regime-toppling instability in the aftermath of Iran’s presidential election this summer. But compared to past upheavals in the Islamic Republic’s 30-year history — the forced exile of a president, the assassination of another, the eight-year war with Iraq and the precipitous replacement of Ayatollah Khomeini’s first designated successor, Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, with Ayatollah Khamenei — the controversy over this year’s election was hardly a cataclysmic event.

Seriously, how did this paragraph get past the op-ed editors?  First of all, beyond a rhetorical flourish or two and asking Twitter to hold off on their scheduled maintenance, what exactly did the Obama administration do to foment regime-toppling instability?  Second, if the largest street demonstrations since the 1979 revolution don't qualify as a big event, what would convince the Leveretts of the import of the June election?  More YouTube videos?  Hand puppets? 

Instead of pushing the falsehood that sanctions will give America leverage in Iranian decision-making — a strategy that will end either in frustration or war — the administration should seek a strategic realignment with Iran as thoroughgoing as that effected by Nixon with China. This would require Washington to take steps, up front, to assure Tehran that rapprochement would serve Iran’s strategic needs.

On that basis, America and Iran would forge a comprehensive framework for security as well as economic cooperation — something that Washington has never allowed the five-plus-one group to propose. Within that framework, the international community would work with Iran to develop its civil nuclear program, including fuel cycle activities on Iranian soil, in a transparent manner rather than demanding that Tehran prove a negative — that it’s not developing weapons. A cooperative approach would not demonize Iran for political relationships with Hamas and Hezbollah, but would elicit Tehran’s commitment to work toward peaceful resolutions of regional conflicts.

This seems as propitious a moment as any to cave to popular demand that I articulate some thoughts on the sanctions question with regard to Iran.  I would expect some somewhat more utility in the sanctions process than the Leveretts.  If the U.S. can foster cooperation among the P5 + 1, and the Iranians see the extent of this cooperation, then I think they'd be willing to deal.  That's not an easy proposition to pull off, and would require both diplomatic skill and will.  That does not mean it should't be tried, however.  Even the effort to build momentum in the Security Council might prompt serious bargaining from the Iranians. 

I would also like to know how the Iranian opposition feels about sanctions.  If they reject them as a policy tool, well, that's a good argument against their imposition.  On the other hand, if this is a replay of South Africa, then that's something else to consider. 

One final point -- the analogy with Nixon's opening to China makes zero sense in the current context.  Nixon was trying to outflank the Soviet Union during the Cold War by cozying up to their most powerful bordering state.  What the Leveretts seem to be proposing is a multilateral move to bring Iran in from the cold -- which benefits Russia and China far more than it benefits the United States.  In other words, I'm not sure how a Nixon strategy works in the P5 + 1 framework. 

I suppose that the Obama administration could attempt secret shuttle diplomacy with Iran to outflank Moscow and Beijing.  Such a gambit would infuriate our European allies and push Israel into panicking, however -- and I'm not sure that's worth whatever strategic gains would be had by a rapprochement with the regime in Tehran. 

So, to review, I give the Leverett op-ed an "I" -- for being inchoate, inconsistent, and idiotic. 

In the past month, two peer-reviewed academic articles have aimed point-blank at realism and yelled "Fire!" 

In Perspectives on Politics, Ido Oren argues that there is a logical tension between the idea of realism as an objective paradigm and realists proffering policy prescriptions: 

Realist International Relations thinkers often intervene in political debates and criticize their governments' policies even as they pride themselves on theorizing politics as it “really” is. They rarely reflect on the following contradictions between their theory and their practice: if there is a “real world” impervious to political thought, why bother to try to influence it?

Samuel Barkin makes a similar point in the latest issue of Foreign Policy Analysis: 

Attempts by some contemporary realists to both claim that international politics are objectively predictable and at the same time prescribe particular foreign policies cannot hold together logically, because they are internally contradictory. The core argument of this article is that these attempts not only fail to fulfill their goal, but that the attempt to be scientific, to see the world as predictable, is ontologically incompatible with the core insight of classical realism, that we must see the world as it is, rather than as we want it to be.

To which I say.... meh. 

I see where Barkin and Oren are coming from, really, I do.  It is certainly the case that this is an area where, say, constructivism has a comparative advantage over realism -- because the former is a theory that allows discursive and rhetorical strategems to affect real world events. 

That said, this is also one of those logical points that sounds devastating in a grad seminar but seems less persuasive when applied outside the world of Imre Lakatos (though I would pay money to see someone from APSA flash their badge at the annual meeting and say, "Freeze, Mearsheimer!!  You can't use an interest-group explanation to explain such a broad swath of American foreign policy and still call yourself an offensive realist!  That violates section 2.1 of the negative heuristic.  You'll have to come with me!") 

First, it's not clear to me that these sins are unique to realism.  Other paradigms can claim objectivity, posit systemic effects and yet still proffer policy advice. 

Second, structural effects can take different forms at different junctures.  A realist could therefore proffer policy advice along the lines of:  "No matter what you do as a policymaker, the inevitable outcome is going to be X.  However, if you choose policy action A, X will happen with a lot of unnecessary bloodshed and expenditure, whereas if you choose policy action B, X happens with a minimum of negative side-effects." 

Third, there is a difference between a scientific paradigm and individual experts offering concrete advice.  The latter might contradict the former, but then again, the complexities of the real world often contradict the simplifying assumptions we make in our models.  The art of policymaking often requires knowing exactly which model applies under what conditions -- and this is hardly a matter of settled debate. 

What do you think? 

The first two paragraphs of "Will Iran be President Obama's Iraq?" by Flynt Leverett, Hillary Mann Leverett, and Seyed Mohammad Morandi: 

Although bloody images continue to be replayed on American television, the protests that broke out in Tehran following Iran’s presidential election on June 12 are, predictably, dwindling. They are fading because further demonstrations would no longer be about alleged election irregularities but, rather, would be a challenge to the Islamic Republic itself — something only a small minority of the initial protesters support.

While the protests are subsiding, days of round-the-clock, ill-informed commentary in the United States have helped to “sell” several dangerously misleading myths about Iranian politics. Left unchallenged, these myths will inexorably drive America’s Iran policy toward “regime change” — just as unchallenged myths about Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and ties to Al Qaeda paved the way for America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The Leverett's certainly provide one possible reason for the dwindling number of protestors. 

But... um... how to put this... could another reason be the fact that, last week, the police and Basij did little to interfere with the daylight protests, whereas this week the organs of the Iranian state have made it clear that they are prepared to kick the ever-living s**t out of demonstrators? 

As Andrew Sullivan points out, the degree to which the Leveretts seem genuinely giddy about Ahmadinejad staying in power is bordering on the bizarre. 

Bloggers at Foreign Policy and elsewhere have discovered Strange New Respect for IHT/NYT columnist Roger Cohen.  Cohen has been writing a fair amount about the Middle East as of late.  I've been, well, less enamored of Cohen's writing, though in fairness to him I'm tough on all foreign affairs columnists. 

This brings us to today's Cohen column, and the paradox contained in his last few paragraphs.  Cohen's recent columns have been all about his trip to Iran, in which he accurately described a country that was not spending every waking moment plotting to destroy the United States.

Today's column points to the pragmatism of Iran's leadership and urges the United States to be equally pragmatic:

Pragmatism is also one way of looking at Iran’s nuclear program. A state facing a nuclear-armed Israel and Pakistan, American invasions in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, and noting North Korea’s immunity from assault, might reasonably conclude that preserving the revolution requires nuclear resolve.

What’s required is American pragmatism in return, one that convinces the mullahs that their survival is served by stopping short of a bomb.

I completely agree with the first excerpted paragraph of Cohen's column -- which is why I don't buy the second paragraph. 

As Cohen ably demonstrates, Iran's leadership sees a lot of threats in its near abroad and recognizes the utility of a nuclear deterrent.  What can the United States possibly offer that would convince Iran's mullahs to give that up? 

Security guarantees?  Accepting those is not terribly pragmatic from Iran's perspective.  Why should Iran trust the United States' word on this?  From Tehran's perspective, would you trust the ability of the Obama administraion to rein in Israel? 

The lifting of financial sanctions?  As Iran's mullahs might put this, whoop-dee-frickin-doo.  Rachel Loeffler argues that these sanctions carry some bite, but the nuclear program is a domestic crowd-pleaser and offers the hope of policy autonomy that a lifting of sanctions does not provide.  The only sanction that would really hurt Tehran enough to buckle is a gasoline embargo, and the Russians and Chinese will never sign on to one of those. 

Pragmatically, I seriously doubt that the United States can offer anything to get Tehran to halt its nuclear program.  This leads to one of two possible decisions:  pre-emptive action to delay the program, or accepting the inevitable. 

Contra Cohen, the most pragmatic thing for the United States to do is to expect nothing fruitful to come from negotiations with Iran -- and to (nonviolently) prepare for the contingency of a nuclear Iran.  

A question to my realist colleagues here at FP -- why on God's green earth would Iran ever accede to an agreement whereby it gives up any autonomy in its nuclear program? 

The New York Times' Simon Romero reports that Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez is doing a 180 on allowing investment from evil rapacious capitalist pig-dogs Western oil companies:

President Hugo Chávez, buffeted by falling oil prices that threaten to damage his efforts to establish a Socialist-inspired state, is quietly courting Western oil companies once again.

Until recently, Mr. Chávez had pushed foreign oil companies here into a corner by nationalizing their oil fields, raiding their offices with tax authorities and imposing a series of royalties increases.

But faced with the plunge in prices and a decline in domestic production, senior officials have begun soliciting bids from some of the largest Western oil companies in recent weeks — including Chevron, Royal Dutch/Shell and Total of France — promising them access to some of the world’s largest petroleum reserves, according to energy executives and industry consultants here.

Their willingness to even consider investing in Venezuela reflects the scarcity of projects open to foreign companies in other top oil nations, particularly in the Middle East.

Chávez's actions pleasantly surprise me, because retrenchment and realpolitik were not the only option.  One could have envisioned Chávez reacting by ratcheting up tensions with neighbors as a short-term solution.  Although I suspect most Americans would prefer to see the back of Hugo, this kind of behavior suggests that Venezuela is never going to rise to the problem level of, say, Iran. 

The willingness of the oil companies to re-enter the fray in Caracas is more intriguing.  In recent years there has been a lot of loose talk about how holders of capital also hold the levers in a bargaining situation with debtors, because the latter must do what they can to please the former. 

In fact, recent research suggests that when debtors violate their contracts, the price to be paid is often much less than anticipated.  Chávez certainly seems quite aware of this fact. 

What puzzles me is that Chávez's reputation does suggest that the moment oil prices go up again, he'll reverse course yet again and put the screws on his foreign investors.  In understand that exploration opportunities are scarce, but the willingness of these firms to go back is item #345 on Things I Do Not Understand About Energy Markets.