United States

A year after Barack Obama's election, I'm seeing a lot of post-mortems on his administration's first year in foreign policy.  Ben Smith's Politico story is a nice template for them: 

Foreign policy never goes according to campaign plan, but for President Barack Obama, who promised a hardheaded new engagement with the world, the last week and the weeks he sees looming ahead must be discouraging.

Across a region spanning Pakistan to the Mediterranean, foreign leaders seem to be challenging the very premise of his policy: that foreign countries can reasonably be persuaded to move in the direction of common interests, and that a better-loved America can get more done.

In Afghanistan, an all-out effort to promote a legitimate election turned into a scramble to prevent a civil war and ease the defrauded challenger off the stage. Iran persuaded the White House to drop its late-September deadline for action and then appears to have rejected a deal on nuclear fuel. Great powers such as Russia and China show no appetite for crucial concessions, while the U.S. Congress continues to block major action on a pillar of Obama’s policy goals — international action on climate change.

To which I say:  meh.  First, Smith's premise about Obama's foreign policy isn't quite right.  Sure, I think Obama and his foreign policy team would love it if "foreign countries can reasonably be persuaded to move in the direction of common interests, and that a better-loved America can get more done."  But c'mon, these are not stupid people, and I'm pretty sure that they know the limits of diplomatic goodwill and reasoned discourse. 

Second, you always need to grade on a curve -- i.e., how has Obama's first ten months stacked up to prior administratons?  Most incoming administrations screw up plenty in their first year in office.  With Clinton, there was flip-flopping over Haiti, dithering over Bosnia, screw-ups over Japan, etc.  With Bush 43, there was a lack of consultation with allies over treaty withdrawals, a dramatic policy shift on North Korea that badly embarrassed South Korea's leadership and eventually had to be walked back, and that whole failure-to-prevent 9/11 problem.  Even with George H.W. Bush, the first six months primarily consisted of a strategic review of the Soviet Union that was overtaken by events the moment it was finished. 

Will Obama have to walk back or reverse course on foreign policy?  He's done so on Israel, to be sure, and might do so on Afghanistan.  He has had successes in Honduras, Russia and the Somali pirates, however.  So far, I'd say Obama is shooting par for the course. 

I haven't been a huge fan of certain aspects of Obama's foreign policy -- like Philip Levy, I'm not thrilled with his trade policy.  Mostly, however, I'd characterize his foreign policy actions as reasonable -- and pretty much what I'd expected a year ago today. 

What about you, dear readers -- how do you grade Obama's foreign policy? 

When we last left off with Tom Coburn's jihad against public funding for political science, Coburn was arguing that, "Theories on political behavior are best left to CNN, pollsters, pundits, historians, candidates, political parties, and the voters, rather than being funded out of taxpayers' wallets."

After the blog mockery that this observation received last week, I see that Coburn is doubling down on this strategy: 

[T]he Oklahoma Republicans office was not shy in its point-by-point rebuttal, with jokes about tweed jackets and the cushy life of the average college professor, and questions about whether ivory-tower political scientists aren't overmatched by the semiprofessionals on the cable and network talkfests.

"The irony of this complaint is that real-world political science practitioners employed by media outlets - [George] Stephanopoulos, [Peggy] Noonan, James Carville, Karl Rove, Paul Begala, Larry Kudlow, Bill Bennett (the list goes on) - may know more about the subject than any of our premier political science faculties," Coburn spokesman John Hart said.

Well, one could respond with jokes about the uber-cushy life of the average U.S. senator, or proffer jokes about Coburn's belief that he's a human lie detector, or just marvel at the vast foreign policy knowledge that Stephanopoulos, Noonan, Carville, Rove, Begala, Kudlow, and Bennett possess. 

But I honestly don't see the point anymore.  Matt Blackwell at the Social Science Statistics blog explains why:

In the 111th Congress, Coburn has had very little success with his amendments [batting 3 for 29, or .103--DD]...

Seven of the rejections are instances when Coburn's amendment was tabled without discussion. Most of the rejections have been of proposed budget cuts or banning funds from certain projects And this is just in this year. Out of all the roll call votes on Coburn-sponsored amendments in the Senate over his tenure, only 8 out of 68 have actually passed....

Tom Coburn knows that putting out no-win amendments is a great way to take positions in the Senate without committing to anything. Minority amendments are a costless signal of the blandest kind--even a political scientist can see that.

My latest bloggingheads diavlog is with the New America Foundation's Flynt Leverett, who co-authored an op-ed last week that didn't sit too well with me.  We discuss the Leveretts' proposal for a grand bargain with Iran and all of its implications. 

I come away from the diavlog even more skeptical of the Leverett proposal -- the more I listened, the more I thought that:

1. Today's Iran would not go for it;
2. The collateral damage inflicted on our allies would be nontrivial;
3. There is no domestic political support for such an initiative; and,
4. From a realpolitik perspective, it's not demonstrably better than the alternatives.  

Opinions will vary, however -- give it a listen and let me know what you think in the comments. 

The American Political Science Association has informed me that Senator Tom Coburn has introduced a floor amendment to strip away all National Science Foundation funding for political science. 

Now, as a political scientist, I have some skin in this game.  I've never received a dollar of NSF funding, but much of my own work has built off of studies that were funded by the National Science Foundation.  So my natural instinct is to oppose this.  You want to chalk up my opposition to simple material interests, be my guest. 

Looking at Coburn's explanation for his amendment, however, I'm even more perturbed.  This is the first part of his explanation: 

When Americans think of the National Science Foundation, they think of cross-cutting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Most would be surprised to hear that the agency spent $91.3 million over the last 10 years on political "science" and $325 million last year alone on social studies and economics....

NSF spent $91.3 million over the last 10 years on political "science." This amount could have been directed towards the study of biology, chemistry, geology, and physics. These are real fields of science in which new discoveries can yield real improvements in the lives of everyone.  

Actually, what surprised me is how little the NSF is spending on political science.  Tom Coburn is ticked off because the federal government is shelling out a whopping $9.13 million per year on political science?  We're running a $1 trillion deficit and Coburn thinks that poli sci's $9.13 million is what's crippling the hard sciences?   That dog won't hunt. 

Moving on....

The National Science Foundation has misspent tens of millions of dollars examining political science issues which in reality have little, if anything, to do with science [such as]....

The Human Rights Data Project: which concluded that the United States has been "increasingly willing to torture enemy combatants and imprison suspected terrorists," leading to a worldwide increase in "human rights violations" as others followed-suit;

Hmmm.... seems to me that finding a correlation of that significance is:

1. Most definitely science;
2. Pretty friggin' important.

Going through the rest of Coburn's list of "abominations," I can see one or two grants that might raise my hackles -- but that's going to be true of any grant-giving exercise.  See Henry Farrell and Andrew Gelman on this point as well.  As Gelman observes, "really, the list of 'wasteful projects' seems pretty lame to me. Golden Fleece material, it ain’t."

Here's the key paragraph in Coburn's explanation: 

If taxpayers are going to get their money's worth from the significant funding increases being entrusted to the National Science Foundation, the agency should be held accountable for how those funds are being spent. The political science program which does not withstand scrutiny should be eliminated immediately. Theories on political behavior are best left to CNN, pollsters, pundits, historians, candidates, political parties, and the voters, rather than being funded out of taxpayers' wallets, especially when our nation has much more urgent needs and priorities (emphasis added).

OK, dear readers, I want you to close your eyes and imagine a world in which your entire knowledge of political behavior emanated only from CNN, pollsters, pundits, historians, candidates, and political parties.

Take your time.  I'll wait. 

If that world didn't scare you, well, then, you have nothing to worry about.  The rest of you can marvel at Coburn's failure of logic. 

Basic research in the hard sciences or the social sciences is a public good -- these things tend to get underprovided in a perfectly free market.  It's not clear to me at all why Coburn thinks that the $9 million spent on poli sci is a waste but the gazillions from the public trough spent on the hard sciences are not a waste when private corporations, industrial associations, scientific publications, universities, and private citizens couldn't fund this stuff. 

Now, I must grudgingly concede one point in Coburn's favor:  APSA's response to this is that it, "encourages political scientists to contact their Senator's office TODAY to ask them to vote against Coburn's amendment."  This suggests to me despite our massive federal subsidy, APSA has yet to understand how to influence political behavior. 

Having a couple of hundred political scientists call their Senators ain't going to matter.  Using our vast control of the liberal mainstream media the interwebs to generate media interest in Coburn acting like an ignorant jackass seems much more useful. 

BWA HA HA HA HA HA!!

[Um... is this news?  If Coburn regularly acts like an ignorant jackass, then would this be deemed newsworthy?--ed.  Uh-oh.]

Over at the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman looks back at the G-20 Pittsburgh summit and thinks that Europe will take over the G-20 process: 

The realisation that the G20 is Europe’s Trojan horse struck me at the G20’s last summit in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago. The surroundings and atmosphere were strangely familiar. And then I understood; I was back in Brussels, and this was just a global version of a European Union summit.

It was the same drill and format. The leaders’ dinner the night before the summit; a day spent negotiating an impenetrable, jargon-stuffed communiqué; the setting-up of obscure working groups; the national briefing rooms for the post-summit press conferences.

All of these procedures are deeply familiar to European leaders – but rather new to the Asian and American leaders whom the Europeans are carefully entangling in this new structure. Watching an Indonesian delegate wandering, apparently carefree, through the conference centre in Pittsburgh, I felt a stab of pity. “You don’t know what you are getting into,” I thought. “You are going to waste the rest of your life talking about fish quotas.” (Or, this being the G20, carbon-emission quotas.)

The Europeans did not just set the tone at the G20 – they also dominate proceedings, since they are grossly over-represented. Huge countries such as Brazil, China, India and the US are represented by one leader each. The Europeans managed to secure eight slots around the conference table for Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, the president of the European Commission and the president of the European Council. Most of the key international civil servants present were also Europeans: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund; Pascal Lamy of the World Trade Organisation; Mario Draghi of the Financial Stability Board.

As a result, the Europeans seemed much more tuned into what was going on than some of the other delegations. Puzzling over the new powers given to the IMF to monitor national economic policies in the Pittsburgh conclusions, I was interrupted by an old friend from the European Commission, who recognised the language immediately. “Ah yes,” she said, “the open method of co-ordination.”

Hmmm..... no, I'm not buying this.  Or, to put it another way, if the G-20 is a European plot, then it would be the worst plot since.... insert your least favorite M. Night Shyalaman film here.

Sure, the Europeans are overrepresented at the G-20.  But compare that to the G-8, where (when you factor in the EU), they occupied more than half of the chairs around the table.  The G-20 doesn't augment the power of Europe -- it dilutes it. 

This interpretation fits with what I heard from some of the G-20 participants as well.  There was a surprising degree of common cause between the BRIC economies and the United States in the run-up to Pittsburgh.  Given the outcome, there is an obvious explanation for the BRIC economies' behavior. 

Why did the U.S. go along?  Washington maintains stronger bilateral ties with each of the other G-20 members than most do with each other.  If one thinks of the United States as the central node in a more networked governance arrangement, then one can see how the reforms made to date do not weaken American influence.  The primary loser, then, is Europe.

Maybe Gideon will be proven correct -- it's certainly true that the Europeans might have a comparative advantage in this kind of diplomatic death-by-detail approach.  On the other hand, the Americans and Russians aren't exactly newbies at this.  The Chinese and Indians have been moving down the learning curve pretty fast.  And the Brazilians already have a reputation for being diplomats who punch above their weight. 

Developing....

We're coming up on the five-year anniversary of Jon Stewart's verbal skewering of Crossfire in particular and the whole genre of left-right cable gabfests in general.  Stewart said these kind of shows were "hurting America" because of their general blather and failure to ask politicians good, sharp questions. 

Stewart's appearance on Crossfire generated quite the navel-gazing among the commentariat, and played no small role in the eventual disappearance of Crossfire, The Capitol Gang, Hannity & Colmes, and shows of that ilk.  

So, five years later, I have a half-assed blog question to ask -- did Jon Stewart hurt America by driving these shows off the air? 

If you're expecting a lengthy defense of the Crossfire format right now, well, you're going to be disappointed.  My point rather, is to question what replaced these kinds of shows on the cable newsverse.  Instead of Hannity & Colmes, you now have.... Hannity.  Is this really an improvement?   

As inane as the crosstalk shows might have been, one of their strengths was that they had people with different ideological and political perspectives talking to (and sometimes past) each other.  You could argue that the level of discourse was pretty simplistic and crude -- but at least it was an attempt at cross-ideological debate.  People from different ideological stripes watched the same show and heard the same arguments.  Nowadays, if you're looking for that kind of exchange, you either have to fast all week until the Sunday morning talk shows, or go visit bloggingheads. 

Instead of Crossfire-style shows on cable news, you now have content like Hannity, Glenn Beck, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, etc.  These programs have no cross-ideological debate.  Instead, you have hosts on both the left and the right outbidding each other to see who can be the most batsh**t insane ideologically pure.  These shows attract audiences sympathetic to the host's political beliefs, and the content of these shows help viewers to fortify their own ideological bunkers to the point where no amount of truth is going to penetrate their worldviews.  Which allows these hosts to say any crazy thing that pops into their head and hear nothing but "Ditto!" after they say it. 

Again, you have to discount this as a half-assed blog observation, but it seems to me that shows like Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann are now sucking up the available oxygen in the cable newsverse that programs like Capitol Gang use to breathe.  Is that really a good thing? 

So, five years later, I'd like to ask Mr. Stewart a question -- was your rant good for America? 

UPDATE:  Two quick responses.  First, this commenter argues that the Glenn Becks of the world are far worse than the Keith Olbermanns of the world, and that this post has a "plague on both houses" quality to it. 

OK, let's stipulate that the bulk of the output that I'm decrying in this post comes from the right rather than the left.  I'll even further stipulate that Rachel Maddow represent the best of this kind of format.  So stipulated. 

Feel better now?  Does that stipulation in any way affect the argument I made above?  No, I didn't think so. 

Second, James Joyner responds with this observation:

Contra-Tucker Carlson, I actually believe shows like Stewart’s “Daily Show” and Stephen Colbert’s “Colbert Report” do a better job of illuminating issues than the screamfests did.  But that’s a rather low bar. 

Well...... maybe.  When Stewart is on his game, he is quite the interrogator.  But Carlson was correct about one point -- politicians had a clear incentive to duck the screamfests in favor of "soft news" formats like the morning network shows, late-night talk shows, "fake news" shows like Stewart's or SNL, or even Oprah.  How many politicians now choose to duck Stewart's show entirely for even softer news outlets.  And, to repeat -- what replaced the left-right screamfests?  Ideologically pure screamfests. 

Thanks, but no thanks. 

I found out about the 9/11 on the phone in Heathrow Airport waiting to board a plane home.  I was trying to call my wife (and having difficulty getting through) to let her know that my flight had been mysteriously delayed.  Then she told me what happened. 

My first thought once I recovered from the shock?  It could have been worse. 

It really could have been.  For the next few weeks, I kept imagining follow-up scenarios to ratchet up the mayhem and panic.  Thankfully, none of them have come to pass.  But I wasn't the only one to envision ever-worsening scenarios. 

Eight years on, it's good to see that the scar of 9/11, though always present, has faded.  In the New York Times, N.R. Kleinfield interviews various New Yorkers about their post-9/11 expectations -- and their pleasant surprise that the city's vitality has exceeded those expectations:

So much has been said and written about what happened on 9/11. The following day is forgotten, just another dulled interlude in the aftermath of an incoherent morning.

But New Yorkers were introduced that day to irreducible presumptions about their wounded city that many believed would harden and become chiseled into the event’s enduring legacy.

New York would become a fortress city, choked by apprehension and resignation, forever patrolled by soldiers and submarines. Another attack was coming. And soon.

Tourists? Well, who would ever come again? Work in one of the city’s skyscrapers? Not likely. The Fire Department, gutted by 343 deaths, could never recuperate.

If a crippled downtown Manhattan were to have any chance of regeneration, ground zero had to be rebuilt quickly, a bricks and mortar nose-thumbing to terror.

Eight years later, those presumptions are cobwebbed memories that never came to pass. Indeed, glimpses into a few aspects of the city help measure the gap between what was predicted and what actually came to be.

If the best revenge is living well, then the city of New York has exacted its revenge many times over. 

Just as TNR's precise transcription of Denis McDonough's talking points long disquisition about the Obama administration's policy planning process comes out, Roger Cohen unfurls his long-form essay in the New York Times Magazine about the administration's thinking on Iran, the Middle East, and U.S. foreign policy.

Here's the bigthink of Cohen's essay: 

Just how far Obama is ready to go in engagement’s name has become clearer in Iran. At the time of that Thursday demonstration, almost a week after the election, the toughest thing he had found to say about the turmoil was that the suppression of peaceful dissent “is of concern to me and it’s of concern to the American people.” He had also equated Ahmadinejad with Moussavi, from the U.S. national-security standpoint, because both support the nuclear program, even as people died for the greater openness that Moussavi espoused.

A sobered America is back in the realpolitik game. A favored phrase in the Iran team goes, “It is what it is.” Now the question is whether such an approach can yield results. Can Ross honor his own precept to match objectives with “available means”? To the nuclear clock has been added a democracy clock, complicating every diplomatic equation. An Iran of mullahs and nukes has morphed, for many Americans, into the Iran of beautiful, young Neda Agha-Soltan, cut down with a single shot while leaving a June 20 demonstration, a murder caught on video that went viral. Whatever Obama’s realism — and it’s as potent as his instinct for the middle ground — a president on whom so much youthful idealism has been projected can scarcely ignore the Neda effect.

All well and good, but there's a nugget buried in Cohen's tale that wories me juuust a bit.  As fans of Laura Rozen are aware (and if you're not a fan, you should be), Barack Obama had a disappointing meeting with Saudi King Abdullah last month: 

[T]wo sources, one a former U.S. official who recently traveled there and one a current official speaking anonymously, say the meeting did not go well from Obama's perspective. What's more, the former official says that Dennis Ross has told associates that part of what prompted Obama to bring him on as his special assistant and NSC senior director for the "Central Region" last month was the president's feeling that the preparation for the trip was insufficient.

Ok, except that after reading Cohen's story, I can't help but wonder whether Ross was part of the problem rather than part of the solution.  Here is Cohen's description of Ross' meetng with the Saudi King -- which occured six weeks before Obama's: 

On April 29, in Dammam, in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, Ross sat down with King Abdullah. He talked to a skeptical monarch about the Obama administration’s engagement policy with Iran — and talked and talked and talked. When the king finally got to speak, according to one U.S. official fully briefed on the exchange, he began by telling Ross: “I am a man of action. Unlike you, I prefer not to talk a lot.” Then he posed several pointed questions about U.S. policy toward Iran: What is your goal? What will you do if this does not work? What will you do if the Chinese and the Russians are not with you? How will you deal with Iran's nuclear program if there is not a united response? Ross, a little flustered, tried to explain that policy was still being fleshed out.

When the Saudis are accusing you of being all hat and no cattle, you know you have a problem.

Seriously, let's think about this from Abdullah's perspective for a second.  A new envoy comes to chat filled with new plans and ideas on Iran.  Except it turns out that these new plans and ideas haven't been filled out exactly -- key contingecies haven't been thought through, etc.  For a leader who had to deal with eight years of George W. Bush, this had to sound a lot like U.S. foreign policy déjà vu.  Why should he have been more forthcoming with Obama. 

So, just to be clear, Obama found that meeting unsatisfactory -- and as a result he brings in the guy who might have laid the groundwork for the unproductive meeting? 

Look, Ross is a smart guy, and he might have ust had a bad day when he met with Abdullah.  But there are times when the Obama administration, for all the talk about embtracing realpolitik,* doesn't sound terribly realist at all. 

*Granted, there are other points in the essay where the administration sounds positively Waltzian.