OK, in Episode I, your humble blogger talked about what undergraduates should and should not do to get into a quality Ph.D. program in political science.  In this exciting sequel, the natural question to ask is, "what if I'm not an undergraduate?" 

To explain the advice I'm about to give, however, let me begin with a small parable.  Consider two applicants, Johnny Undergrad and Jenny Postgrad.  By a strange coincidence, Johnny and Jenny matriculated at the same undergraduate institution, received identical grades during their time as undergraduates, and both wrote fine theses.  They both followed the guidance provided in my dos and don'ts post to the letter.  The only difference is that Jenny is four years out of college, while Johnny is not.  The latter, a senior, is now applying to grad programs.  So is Jenny, but she's spent the past four years earning some coin and collecting some very relevant work experience for an important government/multinational corporation/NGO/think tank organization.  

Now, you would think, ceteris paribus, that Jenny would have the stronger application for a Ph.D. admissions committee - she's more mature, more seasoned, and possesses an identical academic record.  But you would likely be wrong. 

See, Johnny has been in more recent contact with his undergrad professors.  Since their memory of Johnny is likely stronger than Jenny, their letters of recommendation will be less bland and boilerplate.  Johnny hasn't signaled that callings other than being a professor might tempt him, since he applied straight out of undergrad.  Johnny's grades are an accurate reflection of his abilities, whereas Jenny's academic skills atrophy with every year out of the ivory tower (pro tip:  if you don't know what ceteris paribus means, you're in trouble).  Any thesis that Johnny has written is more up-to date. 

This is the challenge you face if you are a post-baccalaureate applicant - and with each year further away from your graduation date, these problems get worse.  So, if you want to be admitted, Jenny's goal should be to do everything possible to her file resemble something that blows Johnny out of the water.  How does she do that?  Here are five useful tips: 

1.  Reconnect with your professors. You need to have strong letters of recommendation, and almost all of those letters should come from people inside the academy. Fair or not, admissions committees will discount letters from people who themselves do not have a Ph.D.. If you're thinking of applying to a Ph.D. program, start by making sure the profs who you worked closely with as an undergraduate have a sharp memory of you. Remind them of what you were interested in as an undergrad and update them on what's your interests are now. If you've collaborated with academics during your post-bac jobs, make sure they write you a letter. You will need one recommendation from your supervisor/boss even if they don't have a Ph.D. - but make damn sure that, besides praising your overall competence and maturity, they talk about your burning desire to go back to the academy.

2.  Ace your GREs.  The GREs are a good first approximation of whether you have the intellectual chops to cut it in a doctoral program.  If you've been out of school for a while, they might count a bit more, because there is that question of whether you're really ready to go back to school.  An outstanding GRE score will not automatically get you admitted, but it can allay any fears about your abilities to earn a Ph.D.

3.  Craft your personal statement with care.  You have a more interesting tale to tell than undergraduate applicants, because you're like, older and stuff.  That said, the statement also needs to signal an admissions committee that you know exactly what you are getting yourself into, and are eager for the challenge.  Sure, you can talk about how your research interests are born out of your real-world experience, but make sure you also phrase your research interests in the context of the relevant literature.  Again, this signals to an admissions committee that you know your interests from multiple perspectives.  Furthermore, as a twentysomething, you have the luxury of reading up on the relevant academic literature and not being intimidated by big words like when you were 18 years old.  Use that intellectual maturity to your advantage in your statement!! 

4.  Publish, publish, publish!  You know that phrase "publish or perish?"  It's not just for professors anymore.  Demonstrating an ability to publish - even if the publication is not a peer-reviewed academic journal - is a signal to an admissions committee that you understand what you're getting yourself into.  Publishing in a policy journal, or a think tank report, can count for something - particularly if it's a sustained piece of research.  So, if your job requires you to write, try to get that writing into the public domain. 

5.  Get a master's degree.  OK, let's say that your undergraduate performance was... less than stellar.  Or, it's been a long time (more than five years) since you were in college.  These are the situations when getting either a professional or terminal master's degree makes some sense -and a two-year program is a better option than a one-year program.  If you know you want to get a Ph.D., then make sure you indicate that fact to the professors closest to your area of interest at the outset, take their courses, and have them supervise your thesis.  Oh, and write a sharp M.A. thesis and think about getting it published.  Strong letters from professors indicating that you did well in graduate school are the ultimate trump card, and are the one way that Jenny's application packet can blow Johnny's out of the water.  With a good M.A. degree, Jenny can ensure that she is a better, stronger, faster version of Johnny. 

Now, I'm still a bit reluctant to proffer this last recommendation, for a few reasons.  First, a terminal master's ain't cheap.  This means accruing a decent amount of debt and then going to graduate school for a few more years and then, if you're lucky, getting a job that won't help all that much in paying down your debt.  Second, this approach takes at least two years to execute.  You can't apply to a Ph.D. program in your first year of an M.A. program, because applications need to be in by January and your master's program profs won't know you well enough to draft good letters (that's why a two-year program is superior).  Furthermore, as crazy as this sounds, for most Ph.D. programs, your M.A. coursework won't count - you'll often need to do a certain number of course requirements (it does help intellectually, however).  And with all of this, there's still no guarantee you get accepted. 

All that said, however, if you really want the Ph.D. and you're well out of college, this is the best gambit.  A strong performance in an M.A. program - professional or not - is the best signal to a Ph.D. admissions committee that you can cut it in a doctoral program.  Oh, and one last point:  as a risk-averse strategy, choose an M.A. program at a Ph.D.-granting institution, so you can always try to complete your doctorate in your home institution. 

I see the Eurasia Group has published their top ten risks for 2012.  Given arguments by some about proliferating security risks and the necessity for bombing Iran, I'm assuming that it's going to be a pretty threatening year security-wise, right? 

The most important macro theme for 2012: The world’s key political decision-makers will be focused heavily on questions of domestic economic stability at the expense of international security concerns at a moment when politics is having unprecedented impact on the global economy. This conflation of global politics and markets defines the formal end of the 9/11 era, a moment when decision-makers sought to isolate globalization from international security concerns....

The war on terror is being subsumed by fears for the global economic balance. This is not a conventional or unconventional weapons threat. It’s not a balance of terror or an individual terrorist. The new nightmares are of spiraling deficits, the eurozone crisis, and economic relations with China. These have become the primary risks to national security, though there are clearly other ongoing security concerns for the US.

But... but... Al Qaeda and Iran!  Iran and Al Qaeda!!  Surely these are important multidimensional threats, yes? 

Say, what's in this Newsweek story by Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau?

Is it still too soon to write al Qaeda’s obituary? Over the past two years, the group’s ranks have been ravaged by America’s unmanned-aerial-vehicle attacks and by a steady exodus of demoralized jihadis fleeing Pakistan’s tribal areas. When Newsweek interviewed Hanif (his nom de guerre) for our Sept. 13, 2010, cover story, “Inside Al Qaeda,” he estimated that the group had roughly 130 Arabs in Waziristan, along with dozens more Chechens, Turks, Tajiks, even recruits from Western Europe. But little more than a year later, he estimates there are no more than 40 to 60 al Qaeda operatives of any nationality on either side of the border. “Al Qaeda was once full of great jihadis, but no one is active and planning opera-tions anymore,” he complains. “Those who remain are just trying to survive.”....

[B]y all accounts, al Qaeda has been practically wiped out in its former Afghan and Pakistani strongholds. Although America has suspended its drone attacks inside Pakistan since mid-November—the program’s longest hiatus in three years—the respite seems to have come too late for bin Laden’s old associates. “The drone attacks may have ended, but only after the near ending of al Qaeda in the tribal areas,” says a senior Taliban intelligence officer who has been in contact with surviving members of the group. “As far as I can tell, the operational command of al Qaeda has almost been eliminated.” Hanif’s uncle, a Taliban operative, tells Newsweek he’s been in contact with a few al Qaeda members who have taken refuge outside the tribal areas. “All of al Qaeda’s assets who had a strategic vision have been eliminated,” they’ve told him.

Well, surely Iran is on the rise, right?  Right? 

Iran’s ailing currency took a steep slide Monday, losing 12 percent against foreign currencies after President Obama on Saturday signed a bill that places the Islamic republic’s central bank under unilateral sanctions.

The currency, which economists say was held artificially high for years against the dollar and the euro, has lost about 35 percent of its value since September. Its exchange rate hovered at 16,800 rials to the dollar, marking a record low. The currency was trading at about 10,500 rials to the U.S. dollar in late December 2010.

The slide Monday came as Iran tested a domestically produced cruise missile during continuing naval drills near the strategic Strait of Hormuz, sending a message to the West that the country would not tolerate increased sanctions against its profitable oil industry.

But in Tehran, people said they were bleeding money....

"It is clear that there is lack of cohesion within the government on how to fix this,” said a prominent Iranian economist, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue. “The market has lost all confidence in a solution.”

Look, I'm not saying that these actors are not threats.  Test-firing cruise missiles sounds a wee bit disconcerting.  But let's get real here -- these are supposed to be the actors that, combined, create a more threatening environment than the Cold War?  That dog won't hunt. 

As I noted last month, I gave a small talk to the International Policy Summer Institute's Bridging the Gap project.  As a spur to the participants, I offered to publish the best blog post submitted to yours truly

And the winner is.... Nuno Monteiro, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale.  Nuno's entry is a public service post, because it provides a rundown of the lessons he learned at IPSI about how political scientists can be relevant to policymakers: 

Bridging the Gap between Academia and Policy

Nuno Monteiro

After a terrific week of briefings at IPSI on how political scientists can contribute to policy, here are twelve rules I distilled:

1. There are many ways of influencing policy, both direct and indirect. You can exert direct influence by working for the government or for a think-tank. You can also exert indirect influence by publishing blog posts (either as a guest or regular blogger), opeds, policy articles, and doing media. Create a strategy that includes both types of influence.

2. The dichotomy between scholarship and policy is largely false. Most political science topics have policy implications, so think through a topic in scholarly and policy terms. These often cross-pollinate. The key is to choose research topics that allow for double-dipping: topics that have both scholarly import and policy relevance. Then produce scholarly and also policy-oriented products.

3. There are four types of products academics can provide to policymakers. Framework: what's the appropriate theory or historical analogy to understand recent events? Data: what are the patterns and what should the ground truths be? Forecast: what are the possible scenarios? Advice: what should we do?

4. Be willing to be wrong. Even if it is a probabilistic judgment, accept the risk of taking a position.

5. Don't be shy, but don't be a pain. Put your stuff out, send feelers to think-tanks and journals, but make it short.  Any pitch -- for a piece, an oped, a research project -- that takes more than two minutes to read is too long. Be persistent but not insistent (i.e., don't pitch the same idea twice to the same place).

6. Keep a twin-track curriculum. Think-tanks offer opportunities for non-resident fellows, in which you are asked to join a few events every year, write a report, or join a taskforce. This enables you to have a twin-track curriculum in which you always have an academic and a policy affiliation.

7. There are six qualities policymakers appreciate. Be engaging, constructive, future-oriented, discreet, concise, and have pity on those who have to make decisions. And remember, you're an expert, not a pundit.

8. Don't think of a policy piece as a lesser version of a research piece. Policy pieces are not dumbed-down research pieces. They must have specific policy recommendations. Seek to understand what policymakers need before you seek to be understood.

9. Maximize different networks. Don't just network in academia. Try to build networks in media, think-tanks, and government. Attend events and follow up.

10. Get institutional cover and buy in. Give your bosses a sense of why it is that you want to engage in policy debates, and of how this is a plus for your institution.  If there's a chance that something you wrote or said is controversial and will make a splash, give your boss a heads-up in advance.

11. Look for moments in which your specialty is in high demand. There will come a moment when everyone will want to know about your specialty. You should be prepared for when that opportunity arrives. If possible, take the obituary-writer approach: write drafts of possible blog posts, opeds, or policy pieces addressing a problem you see brewing. Then send them out fast.

12. Pick your battles and mix vanilla with habanero topics. If you only do vanilla topics you'll get bored, but if you only do habanero topics you'll get tired and also potentially lose your credibility. Aim for the sweet spot between being an organic intellectual and becoming seen as a wacko.

What say ye, readers -- has Nuno missed anything? 

I know I said I would post by book choices for aspiring senators/presidential candidates yesterday, but current events forced a slight delay.  So, you know the contest:  "if you had to pick three books for an ambitious U.S. politician to read in order to bone up on foreign affairs, what would they be?"  You now know (and are less than thrilled with) the readers' selections.  Below are my choices. 

My selections were based on three fundamental premises.  The first is that politicians do not lack in self-confidence.  This is an important leadership trait, but when it comes to foreign policy, some awareness of The Things That Can Go Wrong is really important.  So my choices try to stress the pitfalls of bad decision-making. 

The second assumption is that trying to force-feed social science principles onto a politico is a futile enterprise -- any decent advisor should provide that role.  What's more important is exposing politicians to the different schools of thought that they will encounter in foreign policy debates.  As with the zombie book, the idea is that by familiarizing individuals to the different theoretical approaches, they can recognize a realist or neoconservative argument when they hear it.  They should then be able to recall how well or how badly these approaches have done in the past, and think about the logical conclusions to each approach. 

Finally, these are American politicians, which means that they are genuinely interested in Americana and American history.  Books that can connect current foreign policy debates to past ones will resonate better. 

So, with that set-up, my three choices:

1)  Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence.  An excellent introduction to the myriad strains of thought that have permeated American foreign policy over the past two and a half centuries.  International relations theorists might quibble with Mead's different intellectual traditions, but I suspect politicians will immediately "get" them. 

2)  David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (for Democrats); James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans (for Republicans).  Americans have a long and bipartisan history of Mongolian clusterf**ks in foreign policy.  Each side should read about their greatest foreign policy mistake of the past century to appreciate that even the best and smartest advisors in the world will not necessarily translate into wise foreign policies. 

3)  Richard Neustadt and Earnest May, Thinking in Time.  Politicians like to claim that they don't cotton to abstract academic theories of the world, that they rely on things like "common sense"  and "folk wisdom."  This is a horses**t answer that's code for, "if I encounter a new situation, I'll think about a historical parallel and use that to guide my thinking."  Neustadt and May's book does an excellent job of delineating the various ways that the history can be abused in presidential decision-making. 

 Obviously, I'd want politicians to read more books after these three -- but as a first set of foreign policy primers, I'm comfortable with these choices. 

If you want to hear more about this, go and listen to my bloggingheads exchange with NSN's Heather Hurlburt on this very question. 

Last night a fellow International Studies Association 9isa0 attendee sent me the following request: 

Hey, aren't you supposed to be providing pithy commentary on events of the last week for the rest of us ISA survivors? Get on that! 

Sigh... it's back to the blogging salt mines.  [Welcome back.... now get to work!!!--ed.]

Let's start off with an easy meta-point.  So far, 2011 has been one of those  years when it seems like a lot has been going on in international affairs -- but is that reality or just perception? 

Hey, turns out it's reality:

Propelled by revolution in the Middle East and radiation in Japan, television news coverage of foreign events this year is at the highest level since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks 10 years ago, news executives in the United States say....

The busy season for foreign news started in January in Tunisia and quickly spread to Egypt, where networks and newspapers deployed hundreds of journalists. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which conducts a weekly accounting of news coverage by national outlets, foreign news added up to 45 percent of all coverage from mid-January through mid-March. In the four years that the accounting has been done, foreign news has averaged about 20 percent of coverage....

But despite extensive coverage of Libya and Japan, the television networks have had major blind spots. Last week, none of the broadcast networks had correspondents in Bahrain, where the United States Navy's Fifth Fleet is based, when security forces crushed the protest movement there, nor in Yemen when forces there killed dozens of protesters. The dearth of coverage of Yemen is largely because of its government’s refusal to grant visas to journalists....

So, cui bono?  Here we get to a veeeerry interesting detail:

If there is any media beneficiary, it is CNN, a unit of Time Warner, which has the most robust international staff levels of any network based in the United States. CNN has paired its domestic and international channels for hours on end, and last week it scored several rare — though probably fleeting — ratings victories against Fox News.

“This is the time when the judicious investments we’ve made in a proper international infrastructure are paying off,” Mr. Maddox said. 

Say, isn't it convenient that CNN had all these assets in place and now gets to use them?  Can anyone out there prove that network hasn't played an instigating role in some of these crises? 

I didn't think so.  I'm gonna start paying very close attention to Anderson Cooper for the rest of 2011.  [Yeah, that doesn't sound weird at all!--ed.]

My last post on the role of political science and political scientists in dealing with Egypt generated some interesting responses via the blogosphere, e-mail, comments, etc.  Let's deal with all of 'em. 

First, Apoorva Shah responds with the following:

I’m not blaming what happened in Egypt on political scientists, as the title of his blog post implies. Rather, I’m saying that the methods with which the political scientists in our academy study the world are so rigid that policy makers imbued in such scholasticism did not appropriately react and make immediate policy decisions when our foreign policy was on the line. Simply put, our administration equivocated. I think they were too confused by all the “variables” involved in Egypt: the protesters themselves, Israel, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hosni Mubarak, etc. In other words, their mental multiple variable regressions failed to produce statistical significance, so they sent mixed messages instead....

None of this is to say that we should shut ourselves off from structured thinking about politics and international affairs. In fact, it should be quite the opposite. Our political scientists shouldn’t be hiding themselves behind theoretical models. They should be studying more history, getting on the ground, doing qualitative research. But look at the syllabus of any graduate level “qualitative methods” class, and I guarantee you it will be just as mind-numbing as their quantitative methods courses.

Perhaps a few months or years from now political science will help us clarify what happened in Egypt over this past week, and it may even look back and dictate what should have been the correct U.S. response. But none of the academic work to date helped policy makers make the right decision when it mattered this week. And that’s the crux of this story. In crunch time, the political scientists failed to get the policy right.

On Shah's first point -- that "policy makers imbued in such scholasticism did not appropriately react" -- well, to get all political science-y, I don't know what the hell he's talking about.  What evidence, if any, is there to suggest that Obama administration policymakers were paralyzed by rigid adherence to political science paradigms?  Looking at the policy principals, what's striking about the Obama administration is that most of the key actors don't have much academic background per se.  Tom Donilon is a politico, for example.  Hillary Clinton is a politico's politico.  I could go on, but you get the idea.   

One thing all social scientists want to see is evidence to support an assertion.  So, I'm calling out Shah to back up his point:  what evidence is there that the U.S. government was slow to react because of adherence to "scholasticism"?  Simply responding "but the response was slow!" doesn't cut it, either.  There are lots of possible causal explanations for a slow policy response -- bureaucratic inertia, conflicting policy priorities, interest group capture, poor intelligence gathering, etc.  Why is "scholasticism" to blame? 

Shah's last two paragraphs are also confusing.  Encouraging "structured thinking" requires an acceptance that theories are a key guide to understanding a ridiculously complex world.  Area knowledge and deep historical backgrounds are useful too -- oh, and so are statistical techniques.  The judgment to assess when to apply which area of knowledge, however, is extremely hard to teach and extremely hard to learn.  And, just to repeat a point from that last post, some political scientists got Egypt right.  Whether policymakers were listening is another question entirely. 

A deeper question is why Shah's view of political science is so widespread.  A fellow political scientist e-mailed the following on this point: 

I think there is a deeper problem here.  We political scientists/political economists may be aware of all of this, but I sense that  it is too easy for outside observers to come to the conclusions Shah's post illustrates.  Quick perusal of journal articles and conference papers, some textbooks, and a great deal of current graduate (and some undergraduate) education in the field can easily lead a rational and intelligent observer to conclude that political scientists are indeed only concerned with plugging cases into models, caring mostly about the model and little about actual political dynamics.  (Have you seen conference presentations in which grad students lay out their dissertation models?  Often sounds more like Shah's description than yours.)  Practitioners may share your understanding of the role of theory, but they often don't do a good job of making this clear to non-specialist readers...and I think to themselves.  I'm not sure what to do about this, but I suspect that Shah's kind of reading of the discipline is just too easy to come to and can seem quite reasonable.

Hmmm.... no, I'm not completely buying this explanation, for a few reasons.  First, as I noted in the past, there are good and valid reasons why academic political science seems so inpenetrable to outsiders.  Second, if this was really the reason that the foreign policy community disdains political scuence, then the economic policy community would have started ignoring economics beginning around, oh, 1932.  Economic journals and presentations are far more impenetrable, and yet I rarely hear mainstream policymakers or think-tankers bash economists for this fact [Umm..... should they bash economists for this?--ed.  I'll leave that to the economists to construct clashing formal models debate]. 

Why is this?  This gets to the third reason -- the fundamental difference between economic policy and foreign policy is that the former community accepts the idea that economic methodologies and theory-building enterprises have value, and are worth using as a guide to policymaking.  This doesn't mean economists agree on everything, but it does mean they are all speaking a common language and accept the notion of external validity checks on their arguments. 

That consensus simply does not exist within the foreign policy community, and Shah simply provides another data point to back up that assertion.  Many members of the foreign policy community explicitly reject the notion that social science methodologies and techniques can explain much in world politics.  They therefore are predisposed to reject the kind of scholarship that political scientists of all stripes generate.   This might be for well-founded reasons, it might be simple innumeracy hostility to the academy, or it might be a combination of the two.  I'd love to have a debate about whether that's a good or bad thing, but my point is that's the reality we face. 

Am I missing anything? 

Gideon Rachman correctly points out the Wikileaks cables do reveal some interesting stuff. One of the oddities that intrigues him:

The sheer bleakness of America's view of Russia -- and this despite all the happy talk of improved relations and a "reset." It is also interesting that the Americans seem to semi-endorse the popular theory that Putin is personally very wealthy, and even name the oil-trading company that could be being used as a siphon.

Yeah, if Wikileaks reveals that the U.S. thinks Russia is such a kleptocratic basket case, why is the Obama administration so intent on resetting the relationship?

Well, first, you could have divined the administration's opinion of Russia without needing Wikileaks.

Second, I suspect the reset was chosen precisely because Russia is such a kleptocratic basket case. For once, I'm ahead of the curve, as I made this point in a paper for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences earlier this year. The key section:

I characterize current U.S. policy toward the Russian Federation as a form of "realist internationalism," By realist internationalism, I am referring to the kind of foreign policy doctrine espoused during the George H.W. Bush administration. This approach recognizes Russia's great-power status and the utility of a great-power concert in dealing with global trouble spots. Rather than prioritizing human rights, democratization, or even economic interests in the bilateral relationship, this policy position prioritizes great-power cooperation on matters of high politics, such as nuclear nonproliferation and the containment of rogue states that transgress global norms....

Russia's demographic situation is a nightmare: the country's population has been shrinking since 1992. The country has experienced positive economic growth over the past decade, but it has been due almost entirely to the run-up in energy prices. The price spike also had a "Dutch Disease" effect on the Russian economy, with an ever greater share devoted to natural resource extraction in general and oil and natural gas in particular. Over the past year, President Medvedev has lamented multiple times that "trading gas and oil is our drug." Russia's other great-power capability is its nuclear arsenal, but because it has failed to modernize the arsenal that is also a deteriorating asset....

At present, Russia's geography, natural resources nuclear stockpile and global governance prerogatives mean that Moscow is still a great power. Compared to the other BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) economies, however, Russia's future trajectory is far from promising. This assessment appears to reflect the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community as well.

Given this state of play, it is not surprising that U.S. foreign policy has reverted to the "equilibrium position" of realist internationalism; over time, the distribution of power between Russia and the United States will trend in America's direction. A pragmatic approach that alleviates Russian concerns about its relative decline echoes the George H.W. Bush administration's approach to a fading Soviet Union.

I'd be happy to hear alternative explanations for the reset in the comments section.

In yesterday's Boston Globe, James Verini trotted out the latest historical analogy for Barack Obama, arguing that the president he's really like is George H.W. Bush. If you read the article, however, you'll see that Verini's argument is primarily based on how the events are similar, rather than the men:

In the first year of Bush's term, he was beset by three unforeseen calamities that are eerily resonant. First was the savings & loan crisis…

Then, in the spring of 1989, student-led protestors began assembling in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and in June Chinese police and soldiers took to beating and murdering them. Like Obama, Bush came into office with higher than average respect from foreign leaders, but he had to shelve plans to improve American-Chinese relations, a blow to his larger ambitions to redefine American engagement with the Communist world…

That didn't turn as many people against him as what was, until this year, the worst man-made natural disaster in American history. In March of 1989 the Exxon Valdez spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound… Bush, a former oilman, bore only somewhat less blame than Exxon.

Jump to 2009-10: The Troubled Asset Relief Program and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, otherwise known as the stimulus, are seen by many Americans as bailouts, not legitimate attempts to stave off economic catastrophe. (TARP was created by the George W. Bush administration, but according to recent polls two-thirds of Americans attribute it to Obama.) Obama, who has arrived in office with the hopes of foreign leaders and populations riding high, wants to redefine relations with, most of all, the Muslim world, but before he has the chance there are protests, and then violent crackdowns, in Tehran. (Unlike the crisis Carter faced in 1979, this was not a revolution, and the Iranian government was in no danger of crumbling.) He is criticized for not expressing enough support for the protestors, criticism that pales in comparison to that of his handling of the BP oil spill.

George H. W. Bush came into office facing what many economists called the worst economic downturn since the Depression, accompanied by a collapse in the real estate market and a Wall Street racked by scandal and stock market decline. He succeeded a president, Ronald Reagan, who staked his reputation on limited government while expanding it in certain costly areas, particularly the military, leaving record deficits…

Twenty years later, Obama followed on the heels of a self-proclaimed Reagan Republican whose tenure ended in straits like those Reagan's had…

I really don't think this holds up terribly well for a number of reasons. I don't know which economists called the 1989 "downturn" the worst since the Great Depression, but I'm sure they were smoking something not looking at all of the data. That downturn wasn't even the worst one of the 1980's -- the 1982 recession was far more severe in its effects. Plus, beginning with the fall of 1989 the Bush administration started reaping unparalleled foreign policy developments -- the collapse of Eastern European communism, the release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, the cresting of the third wave of democratization, yada, yada, yada.

Still, Verini's essay points to the ways in which humans can't help but search for historical analogies to try to explain the present day. We're hard-wired to look for patterns like this, even if they are exaggerated. Indeed, I've just spent a week of conferencing about the future of the global political economy in which various historical analogies were deployed to explain the current moment. It's possible that I contributed to this analogy-fest just as much as I consumed others.

I'll get to those historical analogies in a later post, but for now, I'll leave it to readers -- which past U.S. president do you think Barack Obama evokes?

The post-mortems on the political journalism and political science APSA panel have been pouring forth like the body count in The Expendables.  There's one thread in particulat that has piqued my interest, however.  It starts with this Rob Farley observation: 

By and large, IR and comparative haven’t had the same impact on the journalist community in either their quantitative or qualitative forms.  I think that several major concepts/grand theories from both comparative and IR have found their way into the general policy conversation (deterrence theory, for example) but it’s more difficult to find uses of clear, sound political science research.  IPE might be an exception to this.  The immense political science literature on ethnic conflict seems utterly detached from the way that ethnic conflict is treated in the popular media.

To which, Matthew Yglesias responds:

I think you find almost no journalistic interest in comparative politics scholarship as just part and parcel of the overall solipsism of American popular political debates which take place in a kind of comparison-free void. The IR scholarship issue is quite different, since there’s tons and tons of journalistic work on subject matter to which scholarly IR research is plainly present. And the issue here, I think, is really primarily one of politics. The kinds of policy approaches that find support in the IR literature or can be usefully illuminated through it are just too far off the center of the American political consensus.

To which, William Winecoff responds with, er, some urgency:

There are all kinds of problems with this. To begin with, [Yglesias] basically starts by admitting that journalists really couldn't care less about educating their readers, at least if the prerequisite of that is having a basic familiarity with the subject they are covering. Instead, all journalists care about are the "bounds of the DC debate", not stupid boring messy things like facts or scientific inquiry. No, those get in the way of "catastrophically misguided" right-wing policies that Democrats supported, dammit! Better to have a purely insult-based foreign policy discussion, completely void of theory or substance....

I would be surprised if Yglesias could outline more than one or two "scholarly controversies" in IR in any detail, much less describe how foreign policy has no interaction with those arguments. Bush 43's entire foreign policy was based on a mutation of democratic peace theory, which is hotly contested in the academy and elsewhere. Clinton's foreign policy was the largest experiment in neoliberal institutionalism that the world has ever seen, and it too was vehemently debated in the scholarly circles, and still is. The whole Cold War was practically a petri dish for IR theory. In all cases American foreign policy was engineered in part or full by IR scholars. What on earth is Yglesias waiting for?

In other words, it's just not true that scholarly debates have nothing to say about political controversies, or that they are "too far off the center of American political consensus". Every foreign policy decision that governments make has been discussed and analyzed, however imperfectly, by IR scholars and has been adopted or denied by politicians and ideologues. Yglesias just hasn't done his homework. Which is sad, because "homework" in this case basically entails e-mailing Drezner. Or even me.

Boys, boys!!  Everyone in a neutral corner please!! 

There are a few things to unpack here.  In essence, I have to take issue with all of these excerpts.  Part of the problem is that the panel that inspired this whole discussion in the first place was dominated by people who blog/write/care a hell of a lot more about American politics than world politics.    Not that there's anything wrong with that -- but it's dangerous to tease out implications from such a group. 

As someone who has consumed and interacted with foreign affairs journalists from time to time, here are my observations: 

1)  The big mismatch between American journalists and IR academics is that when journalists are writing about international relations, they're likely focusing on a single event or episode -- a crisis with China, a disaster in Pakistan, sanctions against Iran, etc.  International relations scholars, on the other hand, tend to think in more abstract terms that involve multiple observations:  great power relations, humanitarian disasters, or sanctions episodes.  Because journalists are far more interested in the particulars of individual narratives, however, the skill set does not always match up.  Journalists writing about a particular case are understandably not fond of stating the average probability of policy success in a generic class of events.  Doing so eliminates the particularities and idiosyncracies of the individual event -- i.e., the very value-added provided by the journalist. 

This doesn't mean that IR scholars are completely ignored -- I find I get calls/queries when journalists are writing their "news analysis" pieces that take stock of a particular policy.  It does mean that our research is not likely to appear in the first wave of stories about an event, however -- and that wave has a way of framing the subsequent narrative.

2)  To be honest, I suspect that this state of affairs bothers IR scholars all that much, for two reasons.  First, as I suggested at the panel (and Yglesias blogged), there are a lot of professional reasons why political scientists don't want their work to break through to the public sphere.  Second, good IR scholars care less about access to journalists because they have better access to the actors they really care about -- the policymakers themselves.  There is a decent amount of interaction between mid-ranking officials and IR academics, and those channels can influence policy a lot more than talking to journalists.  Of course, this contributes to gaps between public opinion and foreign policy elites, but that's been going on for many a decade already. 

3)  To be honest, I'm not sure what Yglesias is talking about with respect to IR scholarship and political partisanship.  It might be that the IR paradigms don't map neatly onto political cleavages.  Realist and liberal approaches can be found in the mainstream of both party's foreign policy communities.  More broadly, rational choice thinking is shot through the foreign policy mainstream.  There are some schools of thought -- constructivism, feminism, etc. -- that might be thought of as outside the mainstream.  On the other hand, these approaches aren't exactly mainstreamed within the scholarly community either. 

Scholars who advocate policy positions out of favor with the current administratio n have opportunities to exercise their voice, through op-eds, congressional testimony, etc.  Once they've done that, political journalists can find them to get critical quotes, etc. 

4)  Drezner to Yglesias:  please call Winecoff before calling me.  My cup, it runneth over right now. 

Am I missing anything? 

Both the Guardian and the New York Times have stories today suggesting that the Sino-American relationship is on the mend.  Last night Barack Obama and Hu Jintao spoke on the phone for, like, a whole hour.  It was such a good chat that Air Force One sat on the tarmac at Andrew Air Force base for ten minutes so Obama could finish the call. 

There has been an appreciable shift in the past week.  Hu pledged to attend the Obama's nuclear proliferation summit a few weeks from now.  U.S. oficials sound confident that China is on board for another round of United Nations sanctions against Iran -- though the  negotiations for that could take a while.  It also appears that China has not followed through on sanctions against U.S. companies for arms sales to Taiwan.  On the American side, at a minimum, the Treasury Department has deferred submitting its report to Congress on Chinese currency manipulation practices for a little while.  The headline for this Vikas Bajaj story suggests that Hu's visit "may signal easing by China on currency," though there's no actual evidence in the story backing up that asserrtion. 

So, no new Cold War then?  The Financial Times' Gideon Rachman urges readers to ignore the ephemeral and pay attention to structural factors:

1) Economic tensions. Tim Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary, has just publicly expressed his concern about the very high levels of US unemployment and many American economists, including in the administration, blame America’s problems in large part on “Chinese mercantalism”. If the Chinese refuse to let the RMB appreciate, or even allow only a modest appreciation, then a clash will eventually happen.

2) Climate change: Remember Copenhagen? There is no sign that the two nations are going to move any closer on this most divisive issue.

3) Iran - A new pacakge of sanctions could head this one off. But they are unlikely to be strong enough to satisfy the US or - let us not forget - to achieve their objective.

4) The mega-trend in the background is the rise of China and the relative decline of the US - and the expression of this will be the gradual challenge to American military hegemony in the Pacific. This will not be a comfortable process.

So look beyond today’s headlines. I can assure you, the Chinese do.

Well..... let's think about this for a second.  The first three issues are all about more than the bilateral Sino-American relationship.  On the economic front, there's evidence that China has ticked off other countries beyond the United States.  On Iran, the U.S. was careful to line up support on sanctions from the Britain, France and Russia, leaving China as the sole P-5 holdout.  And on climate change, at a minimum, China came out of Copenhagen looking like something of a bully. 

My take of the past six months is that the Chinese overplayed their hand very badly across an array of issues, irking not just the United States but other significant countries.  In response, the U.S. has been able to exploit multilateral resentment as a way of teaching Beijing about the security dilemma putting subtle pressure on China to moderate its tone and actions.  As for the mega-trend, well, that's happening, but it's still quite a ways off. 

Rachman still makes some decent points.  There are fundamental conflicts of interest.  Going beyond the issues Rachman mentions, there's also minor stuff like the fact that China and America's domestic regimes look a wee bit different. 

For now, however, much of China's recent bluster turned out to be self-defeating.  What will be interesting to see is how both Washington and Beijing will learn from the recent spot of unpleasantness. 

UPDATE:  Hmm.... this Financial Times story by Jamil Anderlini and Alan Beattie is very interesting: 

Beijing may adjust its policy of pegging its currency to the dollar provided a visit this month by Chinese President Hu Jintao to Washington goes smoothly, according to a top adviser to China’s central bank.

Li Daokui, a professor at Tsinghua university and a member of China’s central bank monetary policy committee, said as long as the US respected China’s “core interests” the currency disagreement could be easily solved.

Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart talked for an hour on Thursday evening, during which Mr Hu stressed that the “proper handling of Taiwan and Tibet” was the biggest factor in Sino-US ties, according to China’s state media.

“As long as this is understood, everything else will be easy to handle and we will find the key to unlock the exchange rate problem,” Mr Li told the Financial Times.

Developing....

Over at Politico, Laura Rozen posts about the subtle efforts by the United States to moderate the United Nations Human Rights Council's behavior. These efforts have yielded... well, let's see what Rozen's got: 

“We have started to shake things up,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations Suzanne Nossel told POLITICO, although she added, change is “incremental and slower than we would like.”

For the last eleven years, the UN human rights body has run a resolution that bans defamation of religion. The resolution is aimed at preventing the publication of for instance the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that enraged many in the Muslim world.

The resolution, opposed by advocates of freedom of expression, passed again last week at the Geneva body, but this time by its smallest margin ever, with 20 countries voting for the resolution, 17 against, and with 8 abstentions.

"It is encouraging that more states are starting to stand up against initiatives that threaten to undermine human rights," Human Rights Watch’s Julie de Rivero said. "Countries such as Zambia and Argentina that voted against the ‘defamation of religions' resolution are demonstrating positive leadership at the Human Rights Council."

The U.S. has been trying to push member countries instead towards an alternative resolution that would counter racial and religious intolerance, such as Switzerland’s minaret ban, while protecting freedom of speech.

“We achieved a consensus resolution that halted efforts towards a binding treaty that would infringe on freedom of speech," Nossel said, explaining that it was a neutral procedural resolution, with no language about banning defamation or new binding protocols.

That, plus a new U.S.-backed resolution on human rights in Guinea following the September 2009 massacre and stronger resolutions on the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burma and North Korea mark what Nossel described as accomplishments on the long road toward the U.S.’s objective of turning the Council into a more credible and effective force on behalf of human rights globally.

Hmmm... in terms of measuring progress, I think I would translate Nossel's "incremental and slower than we would like" to mean "slower than continental drift" in plain English. 

My point here is not to suggest that Nossel and her compatriots are doing a bad job -- far from it. They have made some inroads into the so-ridiculous-it's-easy-to-lampoon-it nature of the Human Rights Council. 

But these are ridiculously small inroads, and extremely difficult to sell politically. Rozen's a sympathetic reporter on this issue, but the intrinsic silliness of the Human Rights Council remains largely undisturbed after reading this story. The Obama administration's engagement strategy with the institution have yielded nonzero but meager returns. 

A politically sustainable strategy of patient multilateralism requires the occasional tangible success to point to by its boosters. I doubt the Human Rights Council will be producing any of those deliverables anytime soon. 

I can't believe I watched the whole thing -- the 2010 Academy Awards show made Avatar seem tightly paced.  Seriously, the show went downhill the moment Neil Patrick Harris left the stage. To be fair, there were no real surprises among the actual winners, draining any suspense from the proceedings.

Of course, this is a Foreign Policy blog -- so are there any lessons that can be drawn about world politics from such a pop culture phenomenon?  Actually, yes: 

1)  Clearly, security studies trumps international political economy when it comes to the Academy Awards.  I noted yesterday that Avatar, The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds were all about war and resistance.  Those films received ten academy awards.  The only nominated film that addressed IPE was Up in The Air, and it got shut out. 

2)  That said, the awards also suggest that in Hollywood, Thucydides' dictum that "the strong do what they can, the weak do what they must" does not entirely hold.  Despite being the highest grossing picture in history, Avatar got clobbered by The Hurt Locker. So much for financial power translating into prestige. That said, I'm pretty sure Kathryn Bigelow could take James Cameron in a fight, so maybe there was a different kind of power at work here. 

3)  Hey, that was some hard-core bargaining going on between Disney and Cablevision as the awards show was beginning. 

4)  The person with the greatest amount of "soft power" in Hollywood?  Tina Fey. The woman could be paired with an eggplant and she'd get the eggplant some laughs.   

5)  Clearly, the Academy Awards has problems dealing with asymmetric threats. How else do you explain a three-minute homage to horror films in which the entire zombie genre gets less than a second of screen time??!!! Hello?!  Chucky from Child's Play got a longer shot, for crying out loud! 

Fools -- they clearly haven't thought this through. I mean, based on the John Hughes tribute, Judd Nelson is already a member of the living dead. 

One final thought:  if there was any justice in the world, the Best Visual Effects Oscar would have been a tie between Demi Moore and Michelle Pfeiffer. In general, I found a rough but direct correlation between age and fashion sense. The older the actress, the more chic they looked. 

Post your own thoughts in the comments.

As promised, it's time for the 2009 Albies -- the best writing on the global political economy this past year.  My focus was on accessible work that focused on the here and now as opposed to more ahistorical, theoretical efforts (which is the norm in my little corner of the academic universe). 

Given the convulsions of the past year, there was a bounty of good material -- I couldn't condense this list down to just five articles.  So, instead, below are the ten articles and arguments that I couldn't shake.

In chronological order of their appearance: 

1.  Michael Mastanduno, "System Maker and Privilege Taker: U.S. Power and the International Political Economy," World Politics, January 2009.  A concise and prescient explanation for why this crisis is different from the crises of the past sixty years.  Mastanduno's primary reason:  the U.S. doesn't have the same ability to deflect and displace the costs of adjustment that it did in the past.  A concise explanation for how state power affects the contours of the global political economy. 

2.  Justin Fox, The Myth of the Rational Market, Harper Collins.  Fox traces the intellectual arc of the efficient markets hypothesis, and shows how it evolved into a caricature of itself by the time the 2008 financial crisis hit. 

3.  Mathew J. Burrows and Jennifer Harris, "Revisiting the Future:  Geopolitical Effects of the Financial Crisis," The Washington Quarterly, April 2009.  Some of the primary authotrs of the National Intelligence Council's 2025 report offers an addendum to consider how the 2008 financial crisis will affect long term strategic trends. 

4.  Simon Johnson, "The Quiet Coup," The Atlantic, May 2009.  Johnson's argument is pretty simple -- politicians in the United States are acting under the powerrful influence of the financial sector.  This argument is derivative of past work (see Jeffry Frieden, Charles Lindblom, and some guy named Karl), but Johnson still packs a powerful gut punch.  The comparison between the U.S. now and the financial wrecks bailed out by the IMF is disturbing.  I'm not convinced by Johnson's argument -- but I can't shake it either. 

5.  Stephen Roach, "Manchurian Paradox," The National Interest, May/June 2009.  In many ways, this is the Chinese doppelgänger to Johnson's essay on the United States.  Roach explains quite clearly how the leadership in Beijing is refusing to acknowledge that it's growth model is not sustainable, and the costs to the global economy of those failures of recognition.  Michael Pettis, Eswar Prasad, and Martin Wolf have also made this argument -- but Roach's essay is accessible to all. 

6.  Joshua Kurlantzick, "The World is Bumpy," The New Republic, July 15, 2009.  A well-researched essay on the ways in which the Great Recession has triggered "de-globalization" -- and the costs that this has exacted on those small developing countries that have staked the most on global economic openness.

7.  Barry Eichengreen, "The Dollar Dilemma," Foreign Affairs, September/October 2009.  During a moment when anxiety about the dollar's status as a reserve currency was at its peak, Eichengreen was able to explain precisely why the dollar is going to be around for quite some time. 

8.  Clive Cookson, Gillian Tett and Chris Cook, "Organic Mechanics," Financial Times, November 26, 2009.  If efficient market approaches fail to explain the boom/bust nature of financial markets, trhen what can?  This article doesn't provide a definitive answer, but it does explore the ways in which economic thought might prosper if it borrowed from a science other than physics. 

9.  Jason Reitman, "Up in the Air," Paramount, December 2009.  Maybe this is cheating -- Up in the Air is a work of fiction, not a nonfiction essay -- and it's an imperfect film at that.  However, the scenes in which the protagonists visit the places where they have to engage in mass layoffs is quite affecting.  For me, there was a simple five-second shot of an office floor that demonstrated the dramatic contraction some firms have encountered in the post-bubble era.  Those five seconds are a far more graphic way of explaining the past year in the economy than anything else I've seen. 

10.  Mark Lynas, "How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room," The Guardian, December 22, 2009.  I'm not sure what to make of Lynas' account of how China scuppered a more ambitious cimate change deal at Copenhagen.  I suspect it's the truth but not the whole truth.  What's interesting about this essay, however, is the ways in which it suggests China's strategy of lying low and maintaining developing country solidarity on matters of global economic governance is not going to work any more. 

OK, dear readers, did I miss anything important? 

So, how should you interpret the first round of P5 +1 negotiations with Iran that took place yesterday? 

The hard-working staff here at drezner.foreignpolicy.com would never want its readers to view material outside their ideological comfort zone -- that would be crazy talk.  Therefore, please go down this list of different ideological approaches to Iran and read only the one that fits you. 

Liberal internationalism:  An excellent first round of talks.  At a minimum, the Iranian pledge to permit IAEA inspectors into its Qom facility, and the agreement to have fuel encriched outside of Iran, help to lessen fears of a breakout capability.  This shows how a multilateral approach, linked to the threat of sanctions, can successfully bring Iran into a cooperative relationship with the West.

Neoconservatism:  These talks were a feckless and futile exercise.  Iran agreed "in principle" -- which means that it will likely not honor its pledges. This also covers part of the uranium that we know about, and only the facilities that we know about.  Anyone who thinks that this lying, odious, anti-Semitic regime is showing all of its cards on the nuclear question is deluding themselves.  The only thing these talks will accomplish is sapping the will of Americans to use any means necessary to overthrow the regime. 

Realism:  Iran's concessions reinforce the point that this regime a perfectly rational actor that is worthy of even deeper engagement.  We still have no evidence that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, so we should not go looking for red herrings that do not exist.  A deal can be made with this government once we are able to ignore how its rulers treats its own citizenry.  Any failure from here on in is entirely the fault of Israel and the Israel Lobby in the United States. 

So, did I miss anything?