Monthly Archives: April 2009

Give Hillary a Break Already on ‘Fashion’ – Who Really Cares?!

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In an otherwise intelligent article on Turko-US relations, Yigal Schleifer makes the following wholly unnecessary remark: “Clinton appeared on a popular television chat show, Haydi Gel Bizimle Ol (Come and Join Us), similar to the popular American talk show The View. On the program, Clinton opened up to the four hosts about her family life and her challenged sense of fashion.”

Wth? Why? What is the possible value to the article of this remark? I can’t possibly understand why anyone really gives a d— about HRC’s clothes. If I were a woman, this is exactly the kind of pointless aside that would drive me up the wall and tell me there is still sexism in the world. For something like 20 years, Hillary’s clothes and hairstyles have been an on-again, off-again topic of conversation. What is the possible relevance of any of that to anything meaningful at all in her political interests? It’s so thoroughly pointless and vapid, and, given it endless repetition, vaguely chauvinistic.

I will admit that I know little about ‘fashion’ (‘nice clothes’ to me means Brooks Brothers),  but its not as if HRC dresses in t-shirts or jeans or otherwise unprofessionally. So give her break, because, really, why do you care so much? Aren’t your concerns about politics deeper than women politicians’ color schemes? (If you think I am exaggerating, read Maureen Dowd’s fawningly sycophantic coverage of Michelle Obama, especially here.)

This reminds me of an oft-repeated and similarly pointless pseudo-criticism of Al Gore in 2000. He was supposedly a poor candidate because he was too wonky and dorky, and he looked stiff when he gave Tipper ‘the kiss.’ GAH!! Who really cares? Must we be so embarrassingly insipid? Who cares what the E! Network or whatever thinks of Gore’s kissing ability? Don’t we want politicians who are a little nerdy and overread and don’t worry excessively about matching their jewelry or something ? I’ll take Hillary over Mrs. Sarkozy’s fluff, or Gore over the incurious W any day.

And for good measure, when HRC came to SK last month, she gave a good talk to a women’s college in Seoul. She said good stuff to young women about empowerment and advancement in a male-dominated society. And to its credit, no one in the SK media mentioned her clothes, style, etc. By contrast, I can only imagine HRC rightfully grinding her teeth on the Turkish View as some product of plastic surgey half her age asked her why she wore those shoes at that dinner in the 1990s. Awful…

Careful with that ‘Decline of the West’ Riff – We’ve Heard It Before

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The conventional wisdom on the financial crisis is that it symbolizes or accelerates a transfer of power from West to East, from the US and EU to China and India. I think this is wildly overrated.

1. We have heard this before – and not just in the 20th century, but the West has proven extremely (frustratingly, if you’re from somewhere else) tenacious in leading the world pack since its breakout in the 16th century. Here are a just a few examples. Long before bin Laden, Islam was supposed to replace errant western Christianity, but failed at Vienna in 1683. Politically, Islam has never properly recovered. In the 19th C, the Chinese thought the western marauders a troublesome nuisance who would eventually recognize the superiority of the Middle Kingdom. It took 50 years of humiliation for that fantasy to finally fade. At the same time, pan-Orthodox/pan-Slavic Russians like Dostoyevsky and Alexander II thought the West would sink under its own corruption and decadence; instead that happened to the Romanovs. 1917 ignited the communist revolutionary wave (‘we will bury you’) that was supposed end capitalism and imperialism. After 75 years of unparalleled effort and bloodletting, it failed practically and morally. 1929 too supposedly revealed the inanity and shallowness of gilded age capitalism which macho fascist vitalism would sweep away. Despite exhaustion and disillusionment from WWI, western democratic capitalism hung on again, emerging stronger than ever, arguably, in 1945. By the 1960s, the new non-western future was supposedly in decolonization. The huge populations of the third world would modernize and turn the global system upside down. Instead they fell into Huntington’s decay and begged for debt relief. In the 1970s, the US failure in Vietnam and stagflation supposedly made the world multipolar, helped the Soviets to parity, and sparked a New International Economic Order. Reagan ended that sham. In the 1980s, came the declinism of Paul Kennedy and Walter LaFeber, this time based on massive US trade and budget deficits. The wholly unanticipated Clinton-dotcom boom put that fiction to rest too. And 9/11 of course was to spark an umma-wide uprising to humiliate the US as jihad had humbled the USSR in Afghanistan. Inside it pulled the US even more deeply into the Middle East.

2. China and India have huge hurdles before they even approach US/western power. They have massive internal structural problems – corruption, stifling bureaucracy, poor courts, bad information (propaganda and lack of disclosure), mediocre education systems for generating human capital, irregular treatment of foreigners and FDI. Development-at-all-costs too has resulted in enormous environmental liabilities that are now affecting lifespans. Do superpowers really have to spray-paint their grass green before an Olympics? They also lack the cultural software of entrepeneurialism and individualism that encourage the ‘animal spirits’ to take chances (worse in Confucian China than more liberal India). And finally, China is not democratic yet, which means a wrenching and usually expensive transition still has to come (think SK in the 80s, plus Indonesia in the late 90s, plus the end of the USSR all rolled into one). This will include restive provinces that will inevitably try to take advantage of the transition to push for autonomy. India of course is already, thankfully, liberal democratic, but it has found embracing wealth-generating capitalism extraordinarily difficult. There is no national consensus for it; all those tech companies that fixed Y2K have to keep redundant energy generators on-site in case there is a power failure. Finally both are still extraordinarily poor by OECD standards (to which neither belong). Between them both they account for half the world’s poorest people (most of the rest are in Africa). Don’t let Thomas Friedman’s stories about a zillion IT engineers in Bangalore or individual Chinese cities just focused on the production of cardigans or baseballs mask the reality that India and China together have something like 800 million people living in subsistence agriculture. Both economies are wildly unbalanced with relatively weak currencies, semi-dysfunctional politics, terrible corruption, and huge unresolved social resentment and poverty. That is not the future, at least not yet.

3. I think the best analysis of the geopolitical fallout of the crisis is here. Walter Russell Mead argues that actually the crisis will encourage states only tepidly committed to capitalism to once again turn toward statist, populist alternatives (think Chavez). Predatory elites will use the crisis as cover to resist liberalization. This will only continue the economic stagnation and political confusion of the Middle East, Russia/central Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The question is whether the Asian rimland states will go this way too. (I don’t think they will.)

So geopolitically, it is better to think of the crisis as a deck-clearing exercise, a shake-out of weak players and also-rans that will reinforce the leaders rather than damage them relatively. The leaders will slide, but the weakest will slide even more. As an analogy, think of how the dotcom bust killed off lots of wannabes on the internet. Only the strong survived that bloodbath. And my guess is that will be the real effect here. The crisis will reinforce the value of those very qualities that have catapulted the West to the top – market pricing, clean courts and banks, transparency, a free press (to spotlight failure), democracy (to insure the peaceful aggregation of conflicting interests and citizen grievance), etc, etc.

The Tragicomedy of US Soft Power: Exporting Banality to Korea (1)

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The term soft power seems to have a acquired a good amount of play in the last few years. Nye of course is the major exponent, but the EU openly uses the term and the Obama people seem to have picked up it too. (The IR scholar in me, of course, is green with envy over the extra-academic success of Nye’s work; that is how you get the real dollars, cool gigs, and policy relevance in this field. And Nye is a great scholar to boot. Very nice.)

Basically, the soft power argument is: hard power coercion is expensive. Militaries costs money, violence destroys lives and economies. Isn’t it much better if we re-make others ideologically to want what we want? This is actually a social constructivist, 3rd face of power argument. If we can reshape their preferences, then our interests will align, not collide. So the US should broadcast its exciting, fun, liberal-democratic, modernist, universalist cultural tropes to the world. Others will see the attractions, and a secret lifestyle yearning will arise. Frictions with the allies will decline as they ‘Americanize.’ And if those living in repressive authoritarian or traditional societies can pick up this stuff up too (and it is awfully hard to be isolated in the globalized world), then there will be a slow grassroots revolution of rising expectations that pressure the state’s elites to soften toward the US. My own sense is this theoretic logic is basically correct.

Consequences from this argument include:

1. Liberals like soft power, because it suggests it might be substitute for hard power (especially attractive if you don’t want to pay for a military). Hence one can be a ‘civilian superpower’ (EU, Japan). NK, the Georgian war, 9/11, etc. have disproved this idea, but the EU doesn’t seem to have gotten the message.

2. Diplomats and academics like soft power. a) It means that diplomacy isn’t just gabbing, but can serve a national security purpose (trying to open closed states so that western/American culture can get in), and it keep things like Voice of America and al-Arabiya alive. b) Maybe our academic work means something! Someone on the other side might read it and be influenced by it, and then maybe bring those new preferences to the state. This is the idea that Gorby’s reformers read US IR, realized that we weren’t so bad and didn’t want to invade the SU, and therefore winding down the Cold War would not destroy the USSR.

3. American Conservatives like it because it lionizes the US way-of-life as the envy of everyone else and confirms that immovable and deeply-held US belief that everyone else really, secretly, in their heart-of-hearts wishes they were like us. (They they just won’t admit it to our faces – those damn French.)  Specifically, it reinforces post-Cold War liberal-democratic triumphalism. There’s a ‘we-won-the-Cold-War-and-that’s-a-helluva-good-thing’ feel to it that American exceptionalists and nationalists (basically, most of the country) just love. It’s pretty cool when an esteemed liberal academic tells you that we really are the last best hope for mankind living in a city on the hill in the greatest country on earth at the end of history.

4. There is a nice inevitability to soft power’s triumph over tyranny. As T Friedman would say, closed systems fall behind rapidly, because technology improves and diffusion ensures wide adoption. This puts authoritarian systems in a terrible dilemma. Opening up risks exposure to soft power forces like the influx of West German or SK TV shows. But perpetual closure means decay and irrelevance. Cuba and NK opted for decay. The USSR tried opening, but so late, that it blew up. The PRC too is trying opening, but no ones knows if it can avoid a Velvet Revolution-style popular revolt. And there does seem to be growing empirical evidence that soft power can work in long ideologcal stalemates. Liberals have generally argued that the CW ended not because Reagan spent the SU into the round, but because the Helsinki accords opened a chink in the Iron Curtain, through which flowed lots of liberalism. Or think about the painful opening of NK civil society and growing paranoia of the DPRK because of the flood of SK VHS from China after the introduction of DVDs in SK in the 1990s. Consider also the slow burn of the youth movement in Iran, desperate to connect to modernity.

5, But no one seems to pay much attention to a) the internal colonialist dimension of soft power, or b) the possibility of blowback from those who resist. 

a. I agree that it is cheaper for us to get our way if ‘they’ are like ‘us.’ (I think Nye is correct.) But isn’t it culturally imperialist to make them like us and to baldly say that this is a US foreign policy goal? Should they be like us? Do they want to be? Shouldn’t we care about that? It is astonishing hubris and arrogance to say we should try ‘remake’ others to be like us. That’s Americanism on steroids. And just how much Americanism do we want them to share? How far down should this Americanization go? Is it enough that they are liberal, democratic and capitalist, or do they have to share other US values like individualism, wide social tolerance of minorities, protestantized religiosity, consumerism, sports, food, Pimp My Ride, etc, etc? Just how totalist is this project? Whenever I hear liberals praise soft power, I always think of 1) the song “America, F— Yeah!” from Team America: World Police, and 2) that colonel in Full Metal Jacket who says, ‘we are fighting this war, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out.’ How different is the logic?

b. Also, what if they really actually don’t want to be like us (contrary to point 3 above)? Won’t there be blowback? I am thinking here of the Arab-Muslim Middle East and the Islamic revival ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to al Qaeda. Remember that Sayyad Qutb went to the US and came home convinced that the Middle East should absolutely NOT become like the US. The intellectual descent from Qutb to bin Laden is very clear. If the Iranians set up the ‘Voice of Shiite Islam’ in Toronto and beamed it into the US with declared intent of converting Americans in order to improve US-Iranian relations, we would flip out. Foreingers will be a lot more recpetive to American cultural inputs if those inputs seem casually available and selected by the conusmer. If transmission of our lifestyle looks like a brainwashing plot to reduce friction to US power in the world, they will be far more resistant. And shouldn’t they be?

Next, I want to look at the South Korean case as a study of US soft power.

That ‘Significant’ EU-Korea Relationship – Yawn…

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Last week I attended the opening of a study center on the European Union at my university. The EU apparently opens these things all over the world at universities. The irony is just how weak the relationship between Korea and the EU actually is.

Consider:

1. The EU ambassador to Korea doesn’t speak Korean. (By contrast the US consul in Busan can.) He spoke in English to a room with less than 10 westerners, and 100+ Koreans. Nor did he bow before speaking, nor even say ‘hello’ or ‘thank you’ in Korean (even I have learned that stuff). Come on already.

2. He told us about the ‘significance’ of the EU-Korea relationship, but two days later the EU-Korea FTA collapsed. I quietly laughed at that one…

3. These sorts of speeches usually reel off a list of statistics about how much such-and-such western state trades with Korea and vice versa. I am guilty too, but at least when Americans talk, we can expand on combined defense, shared values, a long-standing alliance. (I try to.) The EU ambassador, to his credit, didn’t even bother, because the EU just isn’t even trying out here anymore. After a few perfunctory words about the EU’s ‘commitment’ to peace on the Korean peninsula, it was all just economics and trade (how ‘bout those Samsung TVs?). If the significant relationship is just utilitarian, then the relationship with SK is not much different than that with Iran with whom European firms trade also.

4. The ambassador couldn’t even cough up a few words of solidarity over the imminent NK missile launch. That was a pretty glaring and sad omission.

All this made me think about my previous post about EU’s slow self-neutering of its hard power capability and its growing propensity to navel gaze. A few European states fought in the UN coalition of the war, but today it is all an American show. Does anyone really expect the Europeans do do anything to help SK if things get really hairy with the North, or worse, with China? The South Koreans surely don’t.

All this is a pretty disappointing commentary on the EU, its posturing about soft power, and its language of human rights and multilateralism against cowboy aggressiveness. Liberated from the Soviet threat, the EU can’t seem to find a few good words about another democracy threatened by the last bastion of stalinism. Liberalism in Korea is a philosophical transplant of European values. This is high praise for Europe’s heritage, as Confucian societies have struggled a good deal with the pluralism liberalism implies. How about a little Enlightenment solidarity with one of its strongest outposts in Asia?  

Where are those European Troops for Afghanistan already?

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For years under W, I understood the European desire to avoid American military adventures. We were openly contemptuous (‘Old Europe’) and simply ignored them (Iraq) when it was useful. I remember reading a paper by William Wohlforth once, where he noted how revolutionary it was that the Bush administration simply ignored the allies because the transaction costs of corralling them to do anything were higher than the benefits to be gained! And living here in SK, it is easy to see the benefits of those good alliances Obama and Biden want to restore. The ROKA is first class military, and if it weren’t for NK sitting right on top of it, I have the feeling it would be a more reliable allied military force than some of the European allied militaries.

So what is it with the European militaries and deployments anyway?

1. Sarkozy was supposed to bring France back to the game with the military reintegration. He certainly talks big, so where’s the beef? Sure, its nice that France is back in the military integration, but if they won’t go in the field, then what’s the point? It has one of the few power-projectable militaries in the alliance. And reintegration should not let NATO become ideological cover for French illusions of a semi-militarized loose Francophonie alliance [gang?] in Western Africa.

2. If reintegration is supposed to be the big story from the 60th anniversary this week, then the Europeans really are insular. None of the members in North America, Eastern Europe, or Turkey really gives a hoot about that. Nor do they much care for the greying symbolism of Franco-German enmity overcome. That’s nice, but at this point, continuing to celebrate it so really represents Western European navel-gazing and self-importance.  If I were the new eastern members, I’d be pretty miffed at having to constantly genuflect at this relic, when the real action was on my doorstep. DeGaulle and Adenauer are almost 50 years past, the Wall has been gone 20 years now, and both Germany and France have aging, welfare-state-coddled populations hardly willing to engage in peacekeeping in the Balkans, much less attack each other. France and Germany are an old story now, one that is well-known and not that interesting anymore. Let’s get to what really matters – out-of-area operations, the Balkans, Russia, Afghanistan, the ME. Kagan really nails it when he notes how few NATO states actually meet their required defense spending minimums, and how parochial their publics are about hard power capabilities. I cringe at his assessment that Europeans are from ‘Venus,’ but Obama has removed the W excuse. If they don’t seriously burden-share sometime soon, the US can hardly be blamed for going around them.

3. At what point is the alliance just a sham if they can’t provide for a force that is even authorized under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty? That is crucial here. Iraq was our show, but after 9/11, NATO voted that an attack on a member had occurred. The Europeans are treaty-obligated to at least try to do something in Afghanistan.

5 Things I Like about Korea

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I guess it was inevitable that I post this sort of list. Just about every expat blogger in Korea does. Frequently this degenerates into blather and mawkish navel gazing, but then I have found that Koreans seem to like this sort of ‘tell us what you think about us, foreigner?’ stuff more than we do. Yakking about Korean culture is a cottage industry for Koreans, and the breadth of the cultural gap means the westerners here usually have lots to say too.

As for my qualifications to pass judgment, they are – of course – pathetic. I have only been in country 7 months. I don’t speak Korean. Most of my time has been spent in Busan, Seoul, and Pyongtaek (where Korean friends live). On the upside, I have a Korean girlfriend, and I work with and teach Koreans regularly.

1. The Food

This was pretty unexpected. Like most Americans, I think, my sense of Asian food was Chinese (mediocre take-out usually) and Japanese (cool steakhouses and sushi). I had a sense that Vietnamese food was distinct, but not Korean. I don’t think I ever saw a Korean restaurant in Ohio, where I lived most of my life in the US. What a surprise when I got here and learned that Korean food is pretty unique. Given how culturally close Korea is to China, this surprised me. And the food is quite good too. But like most westerners here, I think I have begun to overdose on rice and kimchi with every meal.

2. Bustling Cities/Nightlife

Too many American cities lack a good street life because of crime, suburbanization, bad downtown parking, whatever. But Korean residence patterns (ie, the lack wide sprawling suburbs) insure that large numbers of people live in close urban contact. Korean communitarianism (IMO, see point 5) keeps crime down and the streets safe (see point 3). Finally, Koreans seem to love hanging out after work in bars, clubs, salon rooms (bangs), etc., so there is always a mass of people to go mix and move with. Its fun.

3. Safety

I find Korea mercifully, blessedly safe. I have seen 8 year old girls prancing down the street alone (although aren’t parents worried about accidents?), or young women alone at 2 am in short skirts and heels walk by me on a darkened street without even throwing a glance. Also, I told friend how nice I found the lack of a serious drug problem in Korea. He asked me if I meant marijuana. Of course, I had in mind the meth explosion in the US, ecstasy which is all over American campuses, the heroin and coke problems that are driving Mexico to disaster, but if Koreans think marijuana is hard drug, that’s fine with me.

4. Quality Public Transportation

Like the Europeans, Koreans have got the bug for good public transportation (even if they promptly waste it by buying so many large cars and causing traffic jams all over the place). And the intercity fast trains (KTX) are better than the French TGV or DB ICE. In another experience of ‘why-can’t-this-stuff-work-so-well-at-home?,’ I find Korean urban transportation safe, clean, cheap, and timely. Nice.

5. Communitarianism

Contrary to America’s usual individualist leaning on the communitarian-liberal split, I must say I like Korea’s community cohesiveness. Koreans I know who dislike it, say that Korean is collectivist. I think that is an exaggeration. It is disturbing that this seems based mostly in shared ethnic-linguistic tradition. It makes it tough for outsiders to join, and Koreans seem to overreact to minor foreign crime. But still, it is admirable to watch Koreans think more collectively about national welfare than we do.

Bonus Banalities I Refuse List:

I tried to be concrete in this list, because usually these exercises degenerate into third-rate sociological bathos. So here is the usual trite cultural mawkishness we all know shouldn’t pass as insight. The usual banalities offered to foreigners on arrival anywhere include: We are very friendly, warm, and hospitable. Our culture is great, unique, old, rich. Our heritage is respected worldwide (cue UNESCO). Our grandmothers are the pillar of our culture and the repository of social wisdom. We are multilateralists and global citizens who love foreign guests. Our technology is cutting edge and that means we are modern and building bridges to the world. We are a regional cultural/economic ‘hub.’ Bonus snarky potshot if you are lucky and a US foreigner: we are nicer than you because George Bush ruined the world.

None of this flim-flam applies to Korea (nor anywhere else, as it is just cheesy pop multiculturalism). Every state community is unique of course, but usually in ways that aren’t that mind-blowing. So yes, Korean grandmothers are salt of the earth, but so are Russian babushkas. I don’t think Koreans are anymore friendly or charming (or rude) than any of the other non-Americans I have met. That doesn’t mean they aren’t nice, but that there is nothing particular about Korean hospitality that sets them aside. Nor do Koreans seem to possess any more gnostic wisdom on the secrets of the good life than any other culture I have experienced. Nor are they any more globalized and less nationalized. In short, their ‘culture’,’ like everyone else’s, is malleable and differentiated enough that these mindless ‘culture studies’ generalizations are just propaganda easily turned to fit your likes/dislikes. All in all, I find Korea a good place to live – a pleasant, (farirly) green/clean, wealthy, liberal democracy tolerant of social pluralism while trying to maintain a national integrity. That should be enough for anybody.

Russian Paranoia Update: Stalin Saved the Earth from Alien Invasion

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This video takes the cake for sheer goofiness and bizarreness as a cultural marker of Russia’s decline from superpowerdom to paranoia and dysfunction. Sure American videogames have used the USSR in similarly ridiculous ways (especially the uber-campy Red Alert series), but Russia is a far more controlled society than the US. It seems reasonable to assume that video games, as media, are informally censored along with the serious press. So why not make a video game lionizing Stalin!

Just make sure you watch the trailer. Watching Stalin dance to vanilla techno will be the surreal moment of your day. Enjoy!

Medvedev & Russia’s Hankering to be a ‘Player’

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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev wrote an op-ed in yesterday’s WaPo on the so-called reset on relations with Russia. It wasn’t ground-breaking but at least he tried. As best I can remember, Putin never even bothered to try to solicit western opinion with something like this.

Most of it is boilerplate, but a few remarks stood out.

1. Medvedev is, rightfully, worried about American treaty behavior. Thank W for this unhelpful legacy. One quick and easy change Obama could make would be to firm up the US general commitment to abide by its treaty obligations and to generally look to make such deals where they work in the national interest and accord with our values. Differently put, the Constitution requires that treaty obligations supercede US law. Everyone knows this. So let’s get back to honoring the required commitments already. Further, there are a number of easy treaties to clinch with the Russians, especially on conventional forces in Europe and nukes. Let’s get to it already.

2. The op-ed smacks of a hankering for the US to take Russia seriously. Perhaps the most important line in the piece was the oblique reference to lost status by invoking concern for ‘all influential players’ to help on Afghanistan. Like France, Russia seems obsessed with lost ‘relevance.’ The importance of prestige and stature is know in IR theory, but not as well researched as it probably should be. (Maybe because it seems more about psychology than interest.) It is tough to be a power in decline, or otherwise demoted from great to middle power status. It must be humiliating to hope that the US, China, India, the EU, and other states we look to for the future of the global economy, increasingly ignore Russian opinion, unless the Russians make a fuss. So hijinks like the Georgian war, gas-shut-offs, and nose-tweaking on Iran steal the stage from more constructive Russia foreign policy needs – like peace with its Muslim periphery,  WTO membership and more FDI, export markets beyond oil and weapons, etc. Like the Soviet Union, Russia would rather be poor and relevant than rich and normalized. Korea is a good contrast. Koreans for the most part seem to realize that, even after unification, they will never be more than a middle power, and they have made their peace with that. China too seems to realize that being ‘a player’ means growth, prosperity, some seriousness in foreign policy (although the Chinese are likely to free-ride as long as they can – see below), etc. But Medvedev made sure to include a pointless reference to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – a club of dictators like the old OAU – to suggest Russian weight on Afghanistan. There is a dark irony in the loser of the last Afghan war counseling others how to win there. And he must know that no one in the US really cares much about or thinks much of the SCO. Even the Chinese hardly mention it. And for good measure, he threw in remarks about a new reserve currency and the even stranger “diplomatic support provided by Russia to the United States at critical points of America’s development.” I must say I haven’t the slightest clue what that means. Did some czar once say something nice about the US, or does he mean the turnover of Alaska?

3. The flap over the Chinese interest in another reserve currency is echoed here. Medvedev even talks about regional reserve currencies. But again, who takes this seriously from Russians? The ruble is far too unstable to play such a role, even regionally. It is not counted in the SDR basket, and Russia is a partially dollarized economy anyway. When they Chinese say such things, people will listen, but the Russians? And, by the way, what is a regional reserve currency anyway? The whole idea of a reserve currency is its role as a shadow global currency. Regional reserve currencies would be nearly impossible in a thickening global economy. Inevitably, global trade would push toward one standard. So serious regional currencies really would mean regionalization of the global economy. Maybe that is a route to the multipolarity the French and Russians seem to want to so much.

Recommendation: Missile defense is a white-elephant that doesn’t work. Trade it for something we need – help with Iran would best. But on a lot of the rest of the portfolio, the Russians want to play old-style great power politics that Obama should eschew. Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states are desperate for western interest and protection against Russian neo-imperialism. It would be a great shame if the west sold out Ukraine over gas contracts, and there will be blowback when eventually those areas claw their way out from under Russian power.

Prediction: The re-set will go nowhere. The Russians will overplay their hand by pushing the US all over EEurope and the Middle East – human rights, Ukraine, Iran, Georgia. Call it a redux of Kruschev’s contempt for Kennedy. Obama will get annoyed and push-back. US-Russian relations will return to the stalemate of the Bush years. And this is not such a bad thing actually. The Putin regime in charge has made it pretty clear they aren’t interested in liberalism and democracy, so right now there isn’t to much middle ground that doesn’t seriously compromise western values.