Over the break, I see that John Mearsheimer got the glowing Robert D. Kaplan treatment in The Atlantic.  Kaplan is a master of this genre, writing my favorite profile of Samuel Huntington a little more than a decade ago.  In his Atlantic essay, Kaplan smartly observes that John's real intellectual legacy should be his 2001 masterwork The Tragedy of Great Power Politics: 

The best grand theories tend to be written no earlier than middle age, when the writer has life experience and mistakes behind him to draw upon. Morgenthau’s 1948 classic, Politics Among Nations, was published when he was 44, Fukuyama’s The End of History was published as a book when he was 40, and Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations as a book when he was 69. Mearsheimer began writing The Tragedy of Great Power Politics when he was in his mid-40s, after working on it for a decade. Published just before 9/11, the book intimates the need for America to avoid strategic distractions and concentrate on confronting China. A decade later, with the growth of China’s military might vastly more apparent than it was in 2001, and following the debacles of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, its clairvoyance is breathtaking.

Note to self:  start outlining awesome, earth-moving grand theory now. [Note to Drezner:  sorry, but you already dug your own grave when it comes to intellectual legacy--ed.]

It's not surprising that Kaplan, a geopolitics wonk, loves Tragedy, with its emphasis on the "stopping power of water" and all.  The essay is worth reading in full -- but seeing as how I'm quoted without attribution I've done a bit of research on realism, I can't let this casual assertion go by without some pushback: 

[I]n a country that has always been hostile to what realism signifies, [Mearsheimer] wears his “realist” label as a badge of honor. “To realism!” he says as he raises his wineglass to me in a toast at a local restaurant. As Ashley J. Tellis, Mearsheimer’s former student and now, after a stint in the Bush administration, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, later tells me: “Realism is alien to the American tradition. It is consciously amoral, focused as it is on interests rather than on values in a debased world. But realism never dies, because it accurately reflects how states actually behave, behind the façade of their values-based rhetoric.”...

For Mearsheimer, academia’s hostility to realism is evident in the fact that Harvard, which aims to recruit the top scholars in every field, never tried to hire the two most important realist thinkers of the 20th century, Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz. But at Chicago, a realist like Mearsheimer, who loves teaching and never had ambitions for government service, can propound theories and unpopular ideas, and revel in the uproar they cause. Whatever the latest group-think happens to be, Mearsheimer almost always instinctively wants to oppose it—especially if it emanates from Washington.

This notion of realism being alien to the United States has been a recurring theme of realists, since, well, realism asserted itself in the American academy.  It's impossible to have a conversation with John Mearsheimer longer than 15 minutes without him bringing up this point. 

The thing is, it's a sloppy argument lacking in empirical foundation.  Just for starters, even realists acknowledge that Ron Paul's campaign is doing well because it's sympatico with the realist critique of American foreign policy.  More substantively, this canard is why I researched and wrote "The Realist Tradition in American Public Opinion" a few years ago.  My principal conclusion from that essay: 

Americans do hold some liberal aspirations for their conduct across the globe, and believe that morality should play a role in foreign affairs—in the abstract. However, surveys about foreign policy world views and priorities, the use of force, and foreign economic policies all reveal a strong realist bent among the mass American public. The overwhelming majority of Americans possess a Hobbesian world view of international relations. Americans consistently place realist foreign policy objectives— the securing of energy supplies, homeland security—as top foreign policy priorities. Objectives associated with liberal internationalism—strengthening the United Nations, promoting democracy and human rights—rank near the bottom of the list. On the uses of force, experimental surveys reveal that Americans think like intuitive neorealists; they prefer balancing against aggressive and rising powers while remaining leery about liberal-style interventions. On foreign economic policy, Americans think of trade through a relative gains prism, particularly if the trading partner is viewed as a rising economic power. Surveys and polling do suggest that Americans like multilateral institutions, but they appear to like them for realist reasons—they are viewed as mechanisms for burden-sharing.

It is somewhat more accurate to say that America's foreign policy elites are more hostile to realpolitik -- though even here, things can be exaggerated.  The recent TRIP survey, for example, revealed that realism might not be the most popular paradigm among IR scholars, but it still commands a healthy fraction of academics, and commands an even greater fraction of attention in international relations courses.  

This might seem like a small point, but it's an important one -- because to be honest I'm fed up with realists whining that everyone is against them.  If there is one thing that academic realists have in common, it's a strong, cultivated sense of victimhood.  "Our field despises us! Americans don't like us!  The foreign policy community hates us!" 

Cut it out already.  There is a long intellectual lineage in the American academy -- starting with Hans Morgenthau and continuing with Mearsheimer and his students -- that evinces realist principles.  There is an equally strong intellectual lineage of policy principals -- starting with George Kennan and continuing with Brent Scowcroft and his acolytes -- that walk the realist walk.  Realists advocate a doctrine that genuinely resonates with a large swath of the American mass public.  If realists fail to popularize their own ideas, then perhaps they should look in the mirror before invoking the "everyone hates us so we must be right" card.

Ben Smith's story in Politico today focuses on the emergence of a more critical stance on Israel from Media Matters and the Center for American Progress.  Or, as neoconservatve Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin interprets it, Smith  "blows the cover off the anti-Israel left and the Democrats’ favorite think tank, the Center for American Progress, which harbors many of its shrillest voices."

What's interesting about Smith's story is his evidence for this tonal shift at CAP and Media Matters -- namely, tweets and blog posts. 

The daily battle is waged in Media Matters’ emails, on CAP’s blogs, Middle East Progress and ThinkProgress and most of all on Twitter, where a Media Mattters official, MJ Rosenberg, regularly heaps vitriol on those who disagree as “Iraq war neocon liar” (the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg) or having “dual loyalties” to the U.S. and Israel (the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin). And while the Center for American Progress tends to walk a more careful line, warm words for Israel can be hard to find on its blogs....

CAP officials have told angry allies that the bloggers don’t speak for the organization, and senior fellow Brian Katulis – whose work is more standard Clinton-Democrat fare – stressed that in an email.

“I think there are different voices on the Think Progress blog and some individual analysts - and some of that work, especially the blog, is I think aimed at reporting on and reflecting one aspect of the diversity of the views among the broad progressive community,” he said. “But what one blogger or analyst may write isn’t necessarily indicative of what our policy recommendations are for the administration or Congress when I’m doing meetings with our friends in government.”

The director of CAP’s national security program, Ken Gude, also drew a distinction between the blog, which is CAP’s loudest megaphone, and its less confrontational policy work.

“There’s a distinction here that we have between the policy work that we do and the blogging work that we do,” he said. Middle East Progress “is clearly a progressive blog and it does respond to arguments that are made most forcefully by conservatives and it responds in that way.”....

But the fact remains that the Center’s most audible voices on the Middle East aren’t the former Clinton staffers who populate much of the organization, and they come from different foreign policy traditions. Duss, a confrontational presence on Twitter but typically a more careful blogger, places himself in what’s sometimes called the “realist” stream of American foreign policy (emphasis added). 

So, to sum up Smith's observations, what's driving this story is that when it comes to Israel, some of CAP and Media Matters analysts are really harsh on Twitter and pretty harsh on the blogs -- but the more substantive, traditional  policy work doesn't look like that at all, so it's being overblown. 

Rubin is having none of that: 

[T]he scandal here is that CAP houses and provides a blog for such sentiments....

CAP is promoting this and is responsible for the venomous output on its blogs.

The excuse that these voices don’t represent CAP’s views and aren’t attributable to CAP is ludicrous....

Imagine if the bloggers were writing about the inferiority of a racial group. They’d be gone in a nanosecond. In fact, those who fancy themselves as respectable think tankers and loyal Democrats are enablers of the scourge of anti-Semitic filth that flows through the hard left. CAP has a choice: Clean out the sewer or be prepared to take the approbation that goes with the association with Israel haters and those who peddle in anti-Semitic tripe.

I don't agree with Rubin's characterizations of the content -- the material in question is not anti-Semitic (though it's problematic and borderline offensive) and CAP ain't "hard left."  That said, she raises an interesting and valid point about what, exactly, is the output of a think tank.  Is it the more traditional policy analysis?  The blogs?  The individual Twitter feeds of its denizens?  In a Web 2.0 world, I have to wonder if the latter matters at least as much as the former (of course, the significance of tweets, etc., would have to apply to Rubin as well.  Her own ombudsman, for example, blasted her for re-tweeing a link to "reprehensible" blog post containing "incendiary rhetoric"). 

There's a lot to consider here -- how a think tank brands itself, whether policy analysts can freely express themselves without being associated with their day job, and exactly how policy analysis is crafted.  If, for example, someone develops a policy position in a path-dependent manner from instant tweet to somewhat-less-instant blog post to a memo/testimony that reifies those original statements, then Web 2.0 really matters.  If, however, time leads one to modify or recalibrate the initial response -- as the statement of Duss suggests -- then Web 2.0 still matters, but in a different way.  It matters only insomuch as the foreign policy community thinks that tweets and blog posts capture more attention and bandwidth than more conventional forms of policy analysis.

What do you think? 

The Weekly Standard's Daniel Halper reads through the fine print of a G-20 pool report: 

President Obama] entered the room at 1:15 and took to his left, heading to Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. They chatted for a few seconds before British Prime minister David Cameron joined them. Hard to understand what they were saying amid the cameras noise. POTUS then took a stroll to Australian Premier Julia Gillard who got a hug as European president Herman van Rompuy, European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso and Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan were watching. Eventually the Europeans got a handshake but Erdogan got the hug treatment....

Isn't this whole scene pretty standard for President Obama? The Europeans get a handshake and the Islamist Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan gets a hug (emphasis by Halper).

Michael Goldfarb -- Halper's colleague at the Weekly Standard -- goes further, tweeting this anecdote as an example of Obama "hugging enemies, abandoning allies." 

Yeah, I can't believe that Obama is hugging the personification of an America enemy like, like... a NATO treaty ally's head of government.  The same country that helped to bankroll the Libya anti-Gadhafi movement and is now creating an enclave for the Free Syrian Army. 

Yes, Erdogan has clearly made life difficult for another ally -- Israel. On the other hand, lots of America's allies make life difficult for other American allies (see: Gibraltar). That doesn't mean Turkey automatically gets its ally label revoked. If you look at the larger balance sheet of American interests, Turkey under Erdogan has been neither an enemy like Iran nor a frenemy like Pakistan.  It's been occasonally aggravating, but really, when it comes to the global political economy, western European leaders like Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy have been way more aggravatiing. 

So, yes, Michael Goldfarb has clearly gone Vizzini on the word "enemy." 

To take a step back here, however, Goldfarb's language raises an some interesting observations.  first, there's an awful lot of "friend/enemy" distinctions being made among GOP foreign policy commentators.  That's the one takeaway from Herman Cain's foreign policy statements to date.  The distinction sometimes useful -- from an American perspective, India is a friend but not an ally, while Pakistan is the reverse.  Still, by and large, friends and allies do overlap a lot.  Does this kind if language indicate a new GOP embrace of Carl Schmitt's worldview? 

Second, to be blunt about it, is Israel now America's ally uber alles?  If other countries disagree with Israel, does that mean, in Goldfarb's eyes, that they no longer qualify as either friend or ally?  Are there any other of America's friends that fall into this super-special status?  I really want to know. 

My FP colleague Steve Walt has responded to my Obama-praising blog post with a long litany of Obama foreign policy failures.  He includes climate change, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, the global economy, North Korea, failing to cure cancer.... you get the drift. 

Walt closes with the following observation: 

Where Dan and I agree, however, is the crucial role of domestic politics. For if you look at the failures listed above, what is striking is that most of them are heavily shaped by domestic constraints. Doing something serious about climate change would have real consequences for business and consumers, and that wasn't going to happen when we are teetering on the brink of another recession. Making progress on Israel-Palestine or on Iran would require bringing in a new Middle East team and taking on the Israel lobby (including the Christianist wing of the GOP), and Obama abandoned that course after the Cairo speech in June 2009. His decisions to escalate in Afghanistan and to try to stay in Iraq were clearly shaped by domestic political concerns, and especially the perennial Democratic fear of being perceived as "weak" on national security. Trade liberalization is always a contentious issue here at home, and especially tough to tackle with a weak economy.

In short, Dan's broader point about Obama's foreign policy successes is insightful: the president has done well in those relatively minor areas where domestic politics do not loom large and where he can exercise unilateral authority. But on the more important and more difficult issues where you would have to convince the American people to follow a new path, he's come up mostly empty.

Steve raises some interesting issues, and as I noted in my initial post, I absolutely agree that Obama's foreign policy has had flaws.  That said, I have a few quarrels with Walt's claims. 

First, in some cases, what Walt would consider a "success" might not be what others consider a success.  On Iran, for example, Walt laments that "the administration [has not] managed to think outside the box and try a different approach."  Beyond the Leveretts, however (and Ron Paul), I'm not sure anyone else would agree with Steve in that assessment.  Furthermore, to be fair, I think there's some pretty strong evidence that the administration did think outside the box in handling the nuclear issue.

Second, part of the issue here is how one defines a "success" in foreign policy. For example, Walt says the following on Libya as to why it's a failure:

[D]idn't the "Mission Accomplished" moment in 2003 in Iraq teach us about the dangers of declaring victory prematurely? We can all hope that the Libyan revolution fulfills its idealistic hopes and avoids the various pitfalls that lie ahead, but it is way too early to start bragging about it, or declaring it the model for future interventions. And if Libya does go south, enthusiasm for the "Obama Doctrine" will fade faster than watercolors in the Libyan sun.

Walt's observation is eminently sensible -- there are many ways in which Libya could evolve in a direction unfriendly to American interests. This gets to a deeper issue, which is how one defines "success" in politics vs. political science. Afghanistan looked like a success in 2001; Iraq looked like a success in 2003. Obviously, over time, these situations changed. As political scientists, we need to keep tabs on these developments.

In politics, however, voters tend not to do all that much updating, particularly in terms of foreign policy. It takes high-profile events for new information to filter down to candidates who read one whole page of foreign news almost every day the American public. It will be interesting to see how Libya (and Egypt, and Tunisia, and Syria, etc.) play out over the next few decades. My post was about the next year, however -- and Obama will be able to claim credit if it looks like things are going well, and fall back on "we didn't play that big of a role" if things fall apart. From a policy perspective, that's a very cynical way of looking at things -- but it makes sense from a political perspective.

Third, in many of the cases that Walt cites as failures, the problem isn't necessarily the domestic politics of the United States but the domestic politics of other countries.  On climate change, Israel, Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq, it's impossible to discuss the outcomes without recognizing the domestic political constraints/chaos in these countries.  While each of them possesses elements willing to cooperate with the United States, there are spoilers aplenty in all of these countries. This is a problem that Bush faced when he was in office, Obama has faced now, and will be a bigger problem over time.  It's a sign that the degree of difficulty in conducting American foreign policy has gone up. 

This brings me to my final cavil.  I'd really like the Steve Walt of this blog post to reconcile his arguments with... the Steve Walt who just published "The End of the American Era" in The National Interest. See, that Steve Walt views American decline as both inevitable and structural, which implies that these outcomes aren't a function of Obama's leadership per se but impersonal forces of history. Many of the cases Walt cites as Obama "failures" in his blog post are treated as ineluctable outcomes of relative American decline in his TNI essay.  Which is it?    

With the passing of APSA and the dawning of Labor Day, it's time for people to go back to school and Think Deep Thoughts.  In the realm of international relations theory, Thanassis Cambanis' essay in the Sunday Boston Globe Ideas section is a great starter course for thinking about the way the world works.  His basic thesis:

Instead of a flurry of new thinking at the highest echelons of the foreign policy establishment, the major decisions of the past two administrations have been generated from the same tool kit of foreign policy ideas that have dominated the world for decades. Washington’s strategic debates - between neoconservatives and liberals, between interventionists and realists - are essentially struggles among ideas and strategies held over from the era when nation-states were the only significant actors on the world stage. As ideas, none of them were designed to deal effectively with a world in which states are grappling with powerful entities that operate beyond their control....

As yet, no major new theory has taken root in the most influential policy circles to explain how America should act in this kind of world, in which Wikileaks has made a mockery of the diplomatic pouch and Silicon Valley rivals Washington for cultural influence. But there are at least some signs that people in power are starting to try in earnest. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has openly integrated the search for a new paradigm into her policy making. In universities, think tanks, and the government, thinkers trying to grapple with this fluid world structure are finally getting attention in the circles where their ideas could shape policy.

Read the whole, provocative thing -- if you agree with Cambanis' arguments, then it certainly represents a data point in favor of Anne-Marie Slauighter's vision of how world politics operates. 

My onlytweak of Cambanis' essay is that he repeatedly stresses the need for a new generation of strategic concepts and international relations theories to guide U.S. grand strategy, and then lists as examples the following: 

Joseph Nye, a Harvard political scientist who served in the Carter and Clinton administrations and has advised Secretary of State Clinton, was one of the pioneers. In the 1990s, he coined the term “soft power,” arguing that sometimes the most effective way for America to promote its interests would be through influencing global health and the environment, or culture and education. His latest book, “The Future of Power,” counsels that America can preserve its influence if it reconceives its institutions and priorities to deal with a world where the energy is shifting from the West to the East, as well as from states to non-state actors. Michael Doyle at Columbia University, a seminal theorist whose idea of a “democratic peace” in the 1990s crucially inflected policy with the belief that democracies don’t fight each other, now talks about the notion of an age of the “empowered individual,” where lone actors can alter the trajectory of states and of history as never before. Stephen Walt, also at Harvard, argues that in the new era America simply needs to start by acknowledging its limits: that with less muscle and less extra money, the first step will be to streamline its goals in a way that so far politicians have been loath to do.

No offense to Joseph Nye, Michael Doyle, and Steve Walt -- these are Great Men of interntional relaions thought.  The notions that Cambanis lists here, however, are not "new" in any sense.  Which leads me to wonder whether Cambanis has defined the problem correctly.  Is it that international relations theory has gone stale... or is it simply that the wrong set of existing theories are in vogue today? 

What do you think? 

Over at Abu Muqawana, Andrew Exum and Erin Simpson provide a useful breakdown of the choices available for those misbegotten fools young people thinking about getting a graduate degree in international affairs of some kind.  Not surprisingly, the choice is highly contingent on a) your level of patience; and b) what you want to do with the degree afte you graduate. 

Besides the criminal omission of The Greatest International Affairs Program in the World, I have only one cavil to their analysis.  When they discuss getting a Ph.D. in the first place, they note: 

[H]ere’s the dirty secret about DC. Everybody wants to hire PhDs, but most people don’t know anything about them. They won’t read your dissertation, they aren’t going to call your advisor (thank goodness), and most won’t know until it’s too late whether you’ve actually been trained in anything useful. So if you just want the credential, stop reading now and just find the cheapest, quickest program and git ‘er done.

And here I must dissent on one minor point and one major point.   First, a small correction:  if you're trying to get a job in DC and you're a newly-minted Ph.D., damn straight your advisor will get a phone call.  This doesn't always happen, but it's more likely than not.  I've been on the receiving end of several of these since arriving at Fletcher.  True, one could always try not to list your advisor as a reference.  The thing is, that is a massive red flag signaling that your advisor doesn't think all that much of you. 

Now, the major point:  if your goal is to just get the Ph.D. credential, do not "find the cheapest, quickest program and git ‘er done."  Instead, just run away -- run away as fast as you can. 

I've said this before and I'll say it again -- there is no such thing as grinding out a Ph.D.  People who think that can "gut out" a dissertation will never finish it.  Unless you love whatever it is you're writing about, you'll never finish.  You'll hate the topic at some point -- and without the love, you'll find other ways to occupy your time than dissertating.  This is particularly true at lower-ranked Ph.D.-granting institutions, because all of them aspire to be higher-ranked Ph.D.-granting institutions and believe the only way to do that is to "tool up" their students to within an inch of their lives. 

This is one way in which a Ph.D. is different from a JD, an MBA or an MA.  Coursework can be gutted out, as can exams.  Writing 75,000 words on a topic requires something else, and anyone who tells you differently is selling you something. 

Because most traditional Ph.D. programs start out with coursework, I'll understand, dear readers, if you don't believe me.  To take advantage of the pedagogical tools of the Internet, however, here's the best video I know that captures this decision: 

And, just to be clear, aspiring Ph.D. students:  I'm the guy with the weird Scottish accent, the bunny is the Ph.D. program, and all y'all are the ones suffering from the blood and gore. 

Unless you really want to kill that bunny, just walk away. 

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? 

The Official Blog Son and I were lucky enough to catch Team USA's thrilling come-from-behind victory over Brazil in the FIFA Women's World Cup. It was a great and controversial game, sure to be replayed on ESPN Classic for years to come. It also got me to thinking about how prominent thinkers and writers about world politics would use the game as a hook for their foreign affairs columns and op-eds this week. Here are their opening paragraphs:

Tom Friedman:

I was quaffing hearty German pilsners with FIFA President Sepp Blatter in a luxury box in Dresden's Glücksgas Stadium (try the bratwurst!!) when he said something that hit me like a thunderbolt: "I can't understand why there's so much demand for video replay in soccer. You know, there is no instant replay in the real world." And really, that's what the global economy is like -- a fast-speed, arcing bullet of a free kick with no time to press the pause button. You have to use every part of your being -- your legs, your head, though admittedly not your arms -- just to keep pace.

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

Watching the thrilling run of the Americans leading up to Abby Wambach's header, I was struck by the complex, free-flowing sequence of passes that got the ball from the American end to Megan Rapinoe's left foot. It was such a seamless, interlaced network of exchanges -- dare I call it a web of them? -- that moved the ball forward. As the passes moved from one player to another, I bet social networking technologies moved even faster, alerting Americans that a Big Moment was about to happen. In winning, the United States showed the power of webbed networks -- or is it networked webs? -- yet again.

Kishore Mahbubani:

All of the Western media will focus on the "theatrics" of the USA-Brazil game, but it doesn't matter. This was an intramural match between Western Hemisphere teams, which means it was irrelevant. Japan's stunning upset of host Germany in the quarterfinals is the real story of this World Cup, yet another signal of how the one remaining Asian team will leave the three "Western" teams still alive in the dust.

Charles Krauthammer:

This was an example of American exceptionalism and American will to power at its finest. Battling a set of rules and referees that were clearly anti-American in their effect, the noble U.S. side displayed dogged determination and grit, vanquishing their Brazilian counterparts. The only black mark on the U.S. side was the timidity of the U.S. coach Pia Sundhage in obeying FIFA's absurd and corrupt rules. Sundhage, from that socialist bastion of meek multilateralism that is Sweden, adhered to the letter of FIFA law in pulling Rachel Buehler after she was "red-carded." A true American coach would have instead followed the spirit of the law and sent an 11th player onto the pitch in place of the unjustly accused Buehler.

Glenn Greenwald:

Americans will thump their chests, display their brassy jingoism, and bray to the heavens about how the refereeing in this game was "unfair" or "ridiculous." They'll claim that the referee's red card of Buehler and mandated do-over of the penalty kick during regular time was "anti-American." They'll overlook the fact that the Australian ref could have midfielder Carli Lloyd off the field for a flagrant, deliberate handball but didn't. They'll overlook the granting of a re-kick for U.S. player Shannon Boxx during the penalty kick phase. They'll overlook the aesthetic beauty of Brazilian star Marta's soccer artistry. They'll overlook the arrogance of U.S. goalkeeper Hope Solo -- a perfect American name if there ever was one -- as she had the audacity to question the ref (if the officials weren't so obviously in Corporate America's back pocket, Solo would have been red-carded). They'll overlook the fact that the extra half-hour of play insidiously stacked the deck for the Americans, rewarding their better conditioning against the poorer and put-upon Brazilians. They'll overlook the 158 other things that I will now lay out in excruciating detail. Only when WikiLeaks focuses its might on FIFA will the soccer world be more just.

Robert D. Kaplan:

The sweltering heat in Dresden clearly began to affect the crowd. They booed the Brazilian star Marta with all of her touches. You could sense a growing danger as the boos grew louder. The German fans, upset at seeing their own team get knocked out, had clearly decided to side with their tribal allies. It is likely that only Wambach's header prevented what would have been an unruly German/American riot, breaking down the tenuous social fabric. The riot would have started in the heart of Europe, but I have every confidence that, before long, the unrest would have spread to Halford MacKinder's heartland in the middle of Eurasia.

Gideon Rachman

This match crystallized both the promise and the peril of the rising BRIC powers as they assume more responsibilities in global governance. The game put FIFA's many problems -- bad decision-making, a lack of transparency about the bad decision-making -- on full display. Even after the match, FIFA never explained why Brazil was awarded a re-kick following Solo's block of Christina's penalty kick. Instead of constructively seeking reform, however, the Brazilian side tried to free-ride off of FIFA's flaws. Marta constantly whined to the refs about the lack of Brazilian free kicks. Defender Erkia flopped onto the pitch in a transparent effort to stall play. Unless and until the BRIC countries learn to play cooperatively with the fading West, global governance will look as effective as FIFA's efforts to block corruption. Which is to say, not effective at all.

Readers are warmly encouraged to offer their own suggestions in the comments.

The combination of President Obama's Afghanistan speech, recent congressional votes on Libya, and the tenor of the GOP presidential debate have prompted gnashing of teeth from the usual suspects about the rise of isolationism and the decline of America.  This is good -- a robust debate should be had about balancing America's role abroad with fiscal demands at home, what it means for the United States to have a robust overseas presence, and so forth. 

Please, however, for the love of God, can this debate take place without Niall Ferguson? 

I ask because his latest essay for Newsweek contains the laziest paragraph I will read today.  In this column, Ferguson strains to displace Tom Friedman as The Creator of Inane Metaphors.  He coins "IOU-solationism"  to descibe the instinct to retrench because of domestic difficulties.  There's a pedestrian description of rising sentiment for retrenchment.  Then we get to the lazy paragraph, which happens to be the only one in his column that provides a justification for why defense cuts are a bad idea: 

The United States certainly needs to get its fiscal house in order. But any serious analysis of the benefits of defense cuts needs to consider the potential costs of walking away from countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. If radical Islamism is a declining force around the world, I hadn’t noticed.

A few thoughts: 

1)  Psst... Niall.... just because you haven't noticed does not mean that radical Islamist movements haven't declined.  Last I checked, groups like Al Qaeda were waning in popularity among Muslim populations (to the point where Osama bin Laden mused about renaming Al Qaeda).  Oh, and if you failed to notice, you should know that Osama bin Laden is still dead. 

I understand that not every assertion can be backed up in an 800 word column.  Really, I get that.  It's perfectly fine to assert  "the U.S. economy is weak" or "China is rising"  or "Salma Hayek is hot" without providing any supporting evidence -- these stylized facts represent common knowledge.  The rising power of radical Islam does not fall into this category, however.  Seriously, this might be the worst paragraph I've seen in a published column this year.  It's all casual assertion and no evidence. 

2)  There is a difference between radical Islamist groups that wish to control their own territory and groups like Al Qaeda that want to target the rest of the world.  I'm not the biggest fan of the former groups, but Ferguson presumes that U.S. military force should be directed at them.  This strikes me as a great way to globalize local conflicts, amping up the threats to the United States rather than tamping them down.  I suspect Ferguson disagrees -- but he provides no counterargument. 

3)  Ferguson alludes to recent developments in Yemen as a reason to be concerned about Al Qaeda and its affiliates exploiting the Arab Spring, which is a fair point.  Here's a key question, however -- does having large numbers of American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq help or hinder a policy response in other vulnerable countries?  And when is the use of force not the best allocation of resources for this policy conundrum?  

I'm not the only one to notice Ferguson's recent bloviations.  Last month Michael Lind wrote a broadside against Ferguson in Salon.  Lind paints Ferguson as someone who's always been a hack, which is unfair -- he produced some genuinely interesting economic history back in the day.  Still, it's genuinely sad to witness the odd decline of Ferguson from premier economic historian to hack commentator.  Financially, he's much richer from this move, but his writing has become so impoverished over the past decade that he's writing his way out of the foreign policy conversation. 

I've frequently bemoaned the ignorance of economic history and foreign economic policy in debates about international relations.  Because of this, I must mourn the passing of Ferguson's ability to make informed contributions to important policy debates.  The opportunity cost of reading his current hackwork, however, has become way too high.   

In honor of President Obama's Afghan drawdown plans to be announced today tomorrow, David Brooks' column on Afghanistan that opens and closes as follows:

So far, few politicians have embraced my plan for a Marshall Plan Tax. The idea is that every time a think-tanker, op-ed writer or retired senator calls for a new Marshall Plan or a moonshot-type initiative to solve a social problem, they would have to pay a tax of $50. Within a few months, we’d have enough money to pay for an actual new Marshall Plan.

The problem with my proposal is this: Do Marshall Plans work? If this country really did galvanize its best minds and billions of dollars to alleviate poverty somewhere or to solve some complicated problem, could we actually do it?

Well, the U.S. has been engaged in a new Marshall Plan for most of the past decade. Between 2002 and 2010, the U.S. spent roughly $19 billion to promote development in Afghanistan. Many other nations have also sent thousands of aid workers and billions of dollars....

This experience should have a chastening influence on the advocates of smart power. When she became secretary of state, Hillary Clinton sketched out a very attractive foreign policy vision that would use “the full range of tools at our disposal: diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal and cultural.” But it could be that cultural and economic development works on a different timetable than traditional foreign policy.

Perhaps we don’t know enough, can’t plan enough, can’t implement effectively enough to coordinate nation building with national security objectives.  

Brooks looks at development in Afghanistan and safely concludes we haven't gotten much bang for the buck. 

Brooks' points on Afghanistan seem on the mark, but my problem is with his framing.  First of all, it's not like the foreign policy community is clamoring for more Marshall Plans.  Given the current U.S. budgetary picture, I think it's safe to say that foreign aid will be the first thing that will be cut in any fiscal deal.  Indeed, here's thje Google Trends analysis of the term: 

Second, as Tom Maguire points out, Brooks "misses a blindingly obvious point," which is that, "the original Marshall Plan we were re-building Europe, not building it." 

Third, and most important, the Marshall Plan was implemented in an environment in which traditional security has already been secured.  It's one thing to promost economic development in a place in which security is assumed.  Trying to promote economic development, peace and statebuilding at the same time is a hell of a lot harder. 

Brooks is right to highlight the massive problems with statebuilding in Afghanistan.  His attempt to generalize from that woebegotten, landlocked Central Asian battle zone to the rest of U.S. foreign aid is a serious analogy foul, however. 

My post earlier this week on the role of public opinion in the Big Policy Decisions of the past decade has triggered some interesting responses from the international political economy wing of the blogosphere.  See, in order, Kindred Winecoff,  Henry Farrell, Dan Nexon, Winecoff again, and then Phil Arena. 

Farrell's post in particular connects this contretemps with larger scholarly questions in global political economy and foreign policy decisionmaking:

International political economy scholarship tends to have an extremely stripped down, and bluntly unrealistic account of how policy is made. Typically, modelers in this field either assume that the “median voter” plays an important role in determining national preferences, or that various stylized economic interests (which they try to capture using Stolper-Samuelson, Ricardo-Viner and other approaches borrowed from economic theory) determine policy, perhaps as filtered through a very simple representation of legislative-executive relations.

However, actual work on how policy gets made suggests that this doesn’t work. On many important policy issues, the public has no preferences whatsoever. On others, it has preferences that largely maps onto partisan identifications rather than actual interests, and that reflect claims made by political elites (e.g. global warming). On others yet, the public has a set of contradictory preferences that politicians can pick and choose from. In some broad sense, public opinion does provide a brake on elite policy making – but the boundaries are both relatively loose and weakly defined. Policy elites can get away with a hell of a lot if they want to.

The result is that the relevant literature on policy making (located largely within comparative political economy and a growing debate within American politics) argues that elites play a very strong role in creating policies.

These are fair points -- indeed, Benjamin Page wrote a whole book about the ways in which foreign policy elites in the United States have pursued policies at vatiance with American public opinion. 

So, yes, policy elites matter.  However, I would issue a few qualifiers and questions to Farrell's points. 

1)  Who are we talking about when we talk about "elites"?  The word "elites" can cover an awful lot of individuals.  Many conservatives, for example, snorted at the notion of Krugman scolding elites, since there's no way one can define Krugman as anything but a member of the policy elite.  So... who is part of the elite?  Does it include powerful interest group lobbies, or only policy mandarins? 

In his blog post Farrell seems to imply the latter, which does makes the term more precise.  That said, interest groups are a pretty powerful animal, and they will not get confused by elite policy rhetoric.  Farrell lumps interest group and public opinion stories together in his blog post, and I'm not sure that's right.  When are policy elites simply doing the work of interest groups, and when are they pushing back?  I've seen examples of both, but I haven't seen a generalizable theory explaining when one dynamic trumps the other. 

2)  When does issue salience matter?  Part of the reason I pushed back against Krugman was that two of the three policy choices he stressed (tax cuts, Iraq) were very high-profile, publicly debated issues.  One would assume that public opinion would form a more powerful brake on high-profile issues than low-profile ones.  This is why I didn't push back against Krugman's financial deregulation story. 

Now, Farrell might argue that elites can still manipulate a heck of a lot even on high-profile policies.  This is probably true on some issues, but on others the public can act as an ex ante or ex post brake on policies.  TARP was a bipartisan vote, for example, and a successful policy to boot -- and yet the public backlash against it clearly constrained the Obama administration's policy options in 2009.  Despite Obama's election mandate and majorities in both houses of Congress, the administration scaled back its fiscal policy stimulus below the $1 trillion mark, partly because of fears of how the public would respond. 

3)  When will policy elites split?   The word "elite" tends to assume an undifferentiated group of privileged policymakers, and anyone who has spent time inside the Beltway knows that partisanship matters a wee bit.  When will the foreign policy community (or economic policy community) reach consensus, and when will there be significant opposition? 

Consider Operation Iraqi Freedom, for example.  A commonly-made argument (at least in blog comments) is that the public went along with the war because the Bush administration cranked up its PR machine and shaped mass public attitudes.  OK, but one of the things us political scientists know is that had the Democrats vociferously opposed the invasion of Iraq, public support for it might have dropped.  OK, but now we get to the key questuion -- why didn't Democrats oppose the war with greater vigor?  Part of it might be that a lot of Democratic liberal internationalists agreed with Republican neoconservatives taking out Saddam Hussein.  Part of it, however, is that Democrats feared looking soft on security during the 2002 midterm elections.  Because of that fear, Democratic policymaking elites were not unified -- thereby bolstering public support for the war. 

Now, in this narrative, is public opinion a cause or an effect of the debate that played out among policy elites?  A little of both, I suspect.  I raise this, however, because one of the difficulties with talking about the role of public opinion as a policy constraint (or a policy enabler) is that its role is sometimes buried beneath the more proximate causes.

This is a good blog conversation to have, because it highlights how difficult it is to develop clear and generalizable models of national policy preferences, and the ways in which the fields of international political economy and foreign policy analysis struggle to cope with this complexity. 

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. 

There's one other nugget from Ryan Lizza's New Yorker essay that I didn't get around to yesterday.  In chronicling Barack Obama's foreign policy education, he damns him with faint praise:

[T]here was no mistaking the lightness of [Obama's foreign affairs] résumé. Just a year before coming to Washington, State Senator Obama was not immersed in the dangers of nuclear Pakistan or an ascendant China; as a provincial legislator, he was investigating the dangers of a toy known as the Yo-Yo Water Ball. (He tried, unsuccessfully, to have it banned.)

Obama had always read widely, and now he was determined to get a deeper education. He read popular books on foreign affairs by Fareed Zakaria and Thomas Friedman.

Gasp!! 

That last sentence provoked a lot of titters on Twitter among the foreign policy community.  It's only a slight exaggeration to say that Tom Friedman's recent books have the same status among foreign policy wonks that John Grisham novels have in literary circles. 

This raises an interesting question, however -- if a newly-minted U.S. Senator did want to seriously bone up on foreign affairs, what books should he or she read? 

This is a harder question to answer that you might think.  Here is a rank ordering of what a typical Senator cares about:

1)  Getting re-elected;

2) Getting re-elected;

3)  Establishing a domestic policy niche in order to claim credit... in order to get re-elected;

4)  Starving the media of any opportunity to write a profile of their private lives... in order to get re-elected. 

5)  Foreign affairs

 There's a reason foreign  affairs is at the bottom -- in the post-Cold War world, the American public doesn't care and doesn't know much about international relations.  Short of the presidential level, developing expertise or interest in that area does nothing for a politician's electoral chances -- and even at the presidential leve it's a mixed bag. 

With this kind of mindset, giving a Senator a copy of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and assuming they'll get really hooked on the story is faintly absurd.  Many of my academic brethren might proffer up one of the more recent classics in international relations theory.  To which I say, "BWA HA HA HA HA!!!!"  Neither Kenneth Waltz nor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita would last as long in a politicians' hands as Thucydides. 

No, if you're educating a politician from scratch, you need something relatively pithy, accessible, relevant to current events, and America-centric.  Given those criteria, Friedman's oeuvre makes some kind of inuitive sense, no matter how wrong or ripe for satire it is.  I mean, what's the alternative -- Three Cups of Tea? 

Aspiring leaders of America can and should do better than Friedman, however.  I therefore call upon the readers of this blog to proffer up their suggestions -- 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? 

I have my own thoughts on the matter, but I'll hold off until Friday to post my selections.  My choices are hardy written in stone, so I'll be reading this comment thread with great interest. 

I'm starting to read Dani Rodrik's provocative book The Globalization Paradox, which is well-written, accessible, and (so far, at least) quite fair-minded with respect to the various economic debates over the costs and benefits of globalization.  It's also, really, a book of political economy, so it's nice to see that, based on his footnotes, Rodrik has more than a passing familiarity with political science in general and global political economy in particular. 

I'll blog more about Rodrik's substantive arguments once I've  finished the book, but I wanted to take this opportunity to offer a mild dissent from an early point he makes about the social sciences.  In his introduction (p. xx), Rodrik argues that the ideas of economists are very powerful -- more powerrful than the other social sciences.  Why?: 

It is perhaps natural for an economist like me to think that ideas--and economists' ideas in particular--matter a whole lot.  But I think it is hard to overestate the influence that these ideas have hadf in molding our understanding of the world around us, shaping the conversation among politicians and other decisionmakers, and constraining as well as expanding our choices.  Political scientists, sociologists, historians, and others would no doubt claim equal credit for their professions.  Policy choices are surely constrained by special interests and their political organization, by deeper societal trends, and by historical conditions.  But by virtue of its technical wizardry and appearance of certitude, economic science has had the upper hand since at least the end of World War II.  It has provided the language with which we discuss public policy and shaped the topology of our collective mental map (emphasis added).

Now, Rodrik is correct up to a point.  Economists have been viewed as being at the head of the ssocial sciences for quite some time, and their unity of method probably has something to do with it.  That said, this explanation only goes so far.  As many have lamented, the field of international relations has increasingly embraced the tools of economics to develop and test theories, and yet the foreign policy community has not displayed an equal eagerness to have the topology of their mental maps shaped by this kind of analysis.  Rodrik does not explain why economic policymakers decided to accept these methods as a valid basis to form policy. 

To repeat a point I made a few months ago: 

[T]he 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.... 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.

I had this observation confirmed in conversations I had with a political scientist working for the current administratioon who shall remain nameless.  Whenever this person attempted to discuss generic political science observations in a staff meeting, the inevitable response by someone in the room was, "well, that sounds nice in theory, but it doesn't apply to this concrete situation."  I guarantee you that no one has ever said anything like that to Ben Bernanke in a policy setting. 

So, to sum up:  when economists use formal models, it's technical wizardry.  When political scientists do the same, it's hidebound scholasticism. 

There's a supply side and a demand-side to the interactions between academics and policymakers.  Both economists and political scientists have supplied copious amounts of high-quality research, much of it relying on formal models and statistical tests.  On the demand side, however, only one group of policymakers has embraced this research with open arms. 

Am I missing anything?