Monthly Archives: February 2011

Gaming Out NK’s post-Jong Il Future (2): A Likely Military Dictatorship

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On-the-spot guidance, because the Dear Leader is apparently a baking expert also…

Part one is here.

So in the last week, Wikistrat, a consulting service I work with, ran a scenario to game out a sudden death of Kim Jong-Il. (The website set-up for this is kinda cool; take a look.) I have written a lot about this stuff before (here, here, here), but this useful exercise forced me to go on record about what I think will happen. Given Kim Jong-Il’s poor health and absolute centrality to the regime, his rapid passing would certainly provoke a systemic crisis. Some of the other scenario-gamers were even predicting war, internal dissolution, or foreign invasion! So here is my counterfactual run-through on what would happen if Kim Jong-Il died abruptly:

(the helpful underlined topic headers come from Wikistrat)

Summary

Kim Jong-Un will ascend to the throne, but he will increasingly be a figurehead for a military happy to retain its privileges and avoid South Korean courts.

Scenario Outline

Kim Jong-Un will likely rise into his father’s shoes, but there will be a great deal of jockeying behind the scenes. The son doesn’t have the regime connections of his father, nor the charisma and legacy of his grandfather. So he is likely to be more ceremonial than real, yet this is valuable in itself to the regime’s most important actors: the Kim family and the military. Jong-Un provides a face to the public that maintains the Kim family aura central to DPRK legitimacy. If NK simply becomes yet another dictatorship like Syria or Burma, then what is the point of a separate NK anymore? So a Kim III is a valuable fig eaf; he will not be eliminated; the regime will neither fall nor implode.

The real consequence of Jong-Il’s death will be increasing factionalization in the NK elite. The current system is a messy balance of competing interests including party, state, industry, the police state apparatus, the military – much like the USSR in the 70s. Sitting on top of this fragile balancing act is the extended, decadent Kim family. Jong-Il had the ability to balance these subnational competitors; Jong-Un does not; he’s too inexperience and too unknown in the relevant circles. Expect post-Jong-Il Korea to look like China late in Mao’s life or the USSR in the 80s: disintegrated, erratic, badly factionalized, with frequent subnational capture of national policy, unable to forge a coherent general will because of incessant twilight infighting.

Regional Implications

NK will become yet harder for the neighbors to manage. Factionalization will generate inexplicable foreign policy behaviors that suit domestic actors while undermining further the coherence of the NK state. While this may accelerate eventual collapse, it also means more unprovoked outbursts like the Yeonpyeong shelling last year. China’s delicate position between N and SK will become yet harder. But for SK and Japan, it will be more of the same.

Global Implications

The new, more militarized regime will probably be more willing to bargain. Nuclear weapons have been Jong-Il’s signature achievement in an otherwise disastrous tenure; he cannot surrender them without undermining his legitimacy. This is why all the denuclearization talks go nowhere. With more generals and fewer Kims afterward though, it is more likely that the KPA (Korean People’s Army) will deal. Militaries tend to be a little less paranoid than long-standing dictators…

Opportunities

None that I can think of…

Risks

The earliest years of the transition will be the scariest. The new pecking order among the Kims, party officials, and the KPA will have to be worked out through nasty infighting, including likely purges. So the risks emanating from NK will initially get worse. The noveau regime is likely to pull some stunt in order to grab global attention, build domestic legitimacy (at least among the relevant Pyongyang elites), and shake down SK and Japan for yet more cash. But once the regime settles into its new SOP, its more militarized character will likely restrain the dangerous hijinks associated with past Kim family megalomania.

Probability

70%

I think a civil war is highly unlikely. While the elite will skirmish for rank in the new system, none of the power-brokers wants to risk state implosion. SK still has the death penalty. Post-unification courts will hang much of the top leadership. These guys don’t want to go out like Mussolini or Ceausescu. They like the highly luxurious lifestyle, and they are terrified of a ‘truth and reconciliation’ process post-unification.

Business as usual is unlikely because NK, like Mao’s China, is highly personalized around the two Kims. Yet the next Kim hardly has the weight of his predecessors, leaving a huge hole in the middle. Jockeying to fill that gap seems inevitable. If NK is effectively a ‘Kim-state’ built around a cult of personality, then when that personality dies, crisis and change is inevitable. Both the USSR and China changed dramatically when their god-leaders, Stalin and Mao, passed. It seems likely NK will evolve.

NK will not implode. We’ve been predicting this for years: after the Cold War ended (1990), after Kim Il Sung died (1994), after the famines (1998), after the Axis of Evil speech (2001), etc. It doesn’t happen. NK has turned out to be a lot more durable than anyone expected, probably because it is willing to tolerate barbaric levels of repression. This year, the Egyptian military ultimately proved unwilling to shoot its own people; the KPA has no such compunction. The big question that no one can answer now, is, will the next Kim be so thoroughly harsh as his predecessors; the regime in its current form depends on it.

Gaming Out NK’s post-Jong Il Future (1): Counterfactual North Korea?

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KIM-JONGIL

Kim Jong Il as Nietszchean Superman: Now you know who was Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer…

 Part 2 is here.

Regular readers will know that I joined the geopolitical consulting firm Wikistrat as a part-time analyst and blogger. They set up a big simulation this week based on fall-out from a sudden demise of NK leader Kim Jong Il. I think this is a great question and a timely one. This post is to solicit your input for my write-up in that scenario.

Jong-Il turned 70 this week. Most people think he had a stroke in 2008, and defectors have painted a picture of him as hard-drinking and -partying when he was younger. There is lots of speculation that he may have kidney or liver problems. Hence Kim’s death is imminent, and we need to start planning for it, because it will almost certainly be disruptive.

Any system as personalized as the DPRK will struggle when that person passes.However, it is not clear to me whether a protracted death process or a sudden one would be worse for NK. If Kim’s death is a protracted decline, like Brezhnev’s as leader of USSR, NK could slide for years into a grey  zone of factional stasis and drift, unable to make domestic choices or conduct foreign policy. The sort of political immobilism and stagnation that characterized the early 80s of the east bloc could leave Pyongyang inchoate, a fairly scary thought given NK nuke and missile programs that could easily be proliferated away in an environment of state decay.  Conversely, a rapid death, per this Wikistrat scenario, opens the possibility of sharp internal conflict, because the next Kim (Jong-Un) has not yet been properly groomed and trained. Jong-Il had 15 years to learn the ropes; his son will have at best a few years. A quick death would likely expose the many institutional, familial, and factional fault-lines that Jong-Il papers over.

Gaming out these sorts of ‘what if’ scenarios like this is what we call a counterfactual in social science: a thought experiment in which a small, important, and plausible historical change is made in order to reveal new facts. E.g., what if the Cuban Missile Crisis had provoked a nuclear war? Would the Europeans have held their NATO alliance commitment to the US as the missiles were flying over their heads? What would have happened to nonwhite emancipation in the Western Hemisphere if the South had won the American Civil War? This exercise on Kim’s death fits the counterfactual requirements quite well. Here is a bit of method to inform structure this scenario and any comments on a post-Kim NK:

1. Plausibility. A lot of counterfactuals in movies and airport thrillers are so implausible as to be ridiculous. It is reasonable to speculate about a North America after a Southern civil war victory. For the first two years, the South did remarkably well, and a few times it was really close. By contrast, I just finished reading the ridiculous DaVinci Code. It is all but impossible to imagine the Church keeping some super-conspiracy for 2000 years that would turn everything in Christianity upside down. In short, the variable being changed has to be credibly mutable. A counterfactual that posits a German victory in WWI is genuine heuristic device, because it was pretty close and so all the mechanisms to explain and learn from that would-be outcome are in place. By contrast, Dan Brown’s work is so far out that it taught us almost nothing about the Catholicism. Kim’s well-known poor health makes this plausible.

2. Small events. Counterfactuals become more and more ridiculous the more they must change. The best counterfactuals change as little as possible. Hence, counterfactuals usually change discrete events or policy choices by agents who could clearly have changed their mind. Counterfactuals that would undue massive structural characteristics like the discovery of agriculture or gunpowder are all but useless. This is why counterfactuals so frequently focus on the outcome of certain battles and assassinations: the battle could have gone the other way; the assassin might have missed. Probably the most famous to American readers is Oliver Stone’s JFK, which claims if Kennedy hadn’t been shot, the US would have pulled out of Vietnam. This logic is especially applicable to NK. In such cults of personality, the small decisions by all-powerful leaders have huge consequences. Had Hitler died in 1944 assassination attempt, Europe would be quite different. In the same way, when Kim Jong Il dies, an era will end in NK.

3. These small changes must still be important. The world is filled with data that vary, but most of it is irrelevant. It makes no difference if Napoleon liked tea or coffee. Counterfactuals must identify variables that are discrete and limited in scope (point 2), plausibly changeable (point 1), and yet still of major importance. If John Wilkes Booth had missed, what would Reconstruction have looked like? No one cares about his choice of boots, but his target practice played a catastrophic role in American history.

Gaming out Kim’s passing meets all these criterion. Kim’s sudden death is quite plausible, and his eventual death completely predictable. It is a small event – not for him of course – but it requires no re-imagining of the DPRK regime or its history. Finally, Kim’s lifestyle choices are in fact critical; one fear back in the 1990s was that an possibly alcoholic/drug-abusing Kim Jong Il would achieve nuclear power and start pushing buttons in a haze. No one cares if Kim would prefer opera to film, but his health is central. As morbid as it is to say it, it is almost certain that the sooner he passes, the happier NK will be.

My comments following these criteria will go up on Monday. Any previous feedback would be much appreciated.

Apocalypse in Asia (2): Yet Another Idiot Video Portrayal of Academia…

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No one in academia talks this way to undergraduates…

 

In this website’s continuing tradition of reducing difficult issues to ridiculous YouTube videos (here, here, here ), the above is a nice follow-up to my previous post on teaching the Apocalypse in Asia. Didn’t you know that American academics regularly berate their students’ beliefs, plot against Christians on campus, and openly criticize students’ parents to their faces? Enjoy the above for the ideology, but maybe the director should sit in on an actual class sometime…

Back in the 1990s, I worked for moderate Republicans and donated to GOP candidates; my 1996 vote for Bob Dole for president is still the most heartfelt vote I ever cast. So I still get the occasional right-wing email, and none better than this recent one pitching the movie above:

Fellow Patriot–

I wanted to forward this message about The Genesis Code, the conservative movie of the year! It deals with some important conservative issues that deserve to be discussed: the intersection of faith and science, the right to life, and discrimination against people of faith in American higher education.

When paleontology student Kerry Wells is told by an academic advisor that she’ll need to choose between her faith and her career in academia, she begins a search for truth that will touch the hearts and minds of everyone around her.

Despite the fact that university studies are purported to be a marketplace of intellectual diversity, Kerry’s constant inquiries in class and involvement in Christian campus ministry lead the faculty to consider her unfit for a life of science. Can her determination and academic talents overcome the department’s prejudice against religion?

For the actual website, try here. To be fair, I have not yet seen the film.

For Asian readers, I post this stuff once in awhile just so you have a sense of where the bizarre US stuff you see in the news comes from. I get lots of questions out here like, wth Palin is about, what is up with loopy Tea party, why do Americans think Obama is Hitler, etc. I have warned before that the American Right’s extreme reaction to Obama’s election is delegitimizing America’s global leadership. Why would anyone follow the US when 1 in 3 Americans think Obama is a Kenyan imposter or something? Not only is all the paranoia unnerving in itself, but it has real foreign policy consequences – namely that the rest of the world – which US conservatives claim we lead – thinks we are batty. The above vid is yet another demonstration of the kind of creationist idiocy that Asian science institutions simply would not tolerate.

I also feel compelled to note the unbelievably ridiculous portrait of academia yet again on display in film. That Chinese professor ad (plus Dr. Strangelove, Wargames, and Fail Safe) got people thinking we are fascists; network TV shows show us regularly sleeping with our students; Indiana Jones and Michael Crichton make us into skilled gunmen and adventurers; Bret Easton Ellis thinks we’re lazy druggies (also sleeping with our students); Michael Bay apparently thinks we can rant out authoritarian sexual innuendo without students/faculty noticing or caring;  the Social Network treats us as behind-the-curve prigs; in Animal House, we’re tedious ballonheads; Tom Clancy turns us into lefty traitors; and of course the absent-minded professor is a stock character across media. In the Christian apocalyptica genre, we are written in as postmodern stalinists responsible for tyrannizing our conservative students (while secreting pining to sleep with them presumably) and de-Christianizing America.

Yet none of this even close to accurate; I am still waiting for a movie with professors who actually look and talk like what I know. I’ve been in academia for more than decade and my father’s been in it for 40 years, and I can’t think of one good movie that actually shows what professors really do and how we really interact with our students. Sure, individual professors do dumb things, but I challenge anyone to find quantitative data to support the classical stereotypes listed above, much less the Christian right view that university is some kind of liberal concentration camp. The portrayal of the professor in the media is so routinely inaccurate, I feel compelled to say something, especially to the Christian righties who are convinced we’re tenured atheists stripping patriotism and faith from students. To see what we really do, in all its boring, nerdy scholasticism, take a look at the sort of dry, Tylenol-PM-in-print articles that fill the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The vast majority of our time is spent in fairly mundane office work – meetings, grading, research. Most of the professors I have known take this stuff reasonably seriously, and come to work on time and dressed properly to do their jobs with no more or less level of commitment than other knowledge workers. Yet almost no movie portrayals of academia actually show this; the most realistic portrait of higher education I have seen in the last few years in a film was in Knowing. I have never known a colleague who slept with a student or schemed against them, lost his a glasses on his forehead, got in wild adventures in the field, or fought ideological wars against student groups. The latter can get you in a lot of trouble, as students have grievance recourses the above vid clearly doesn’t show.

Very rarely do we get students coming to our office to simply to talk about ideas and life and what not; the Kerry character described in the third quoted paragraph is extremely rare. Far more common student behavior, and real issues that universities grapple with, are illustrated here or here. When students do come to see us, it is usually some need or grievance: grades (why did I get an F even though I never bought the book?), attendance (can I get the last 4 weeks of classnotes?), recommendation letters (how can I get into Yale on 2.5 GPA?). And we certainly don’t get into personal criticisms and harsh career counseling like in the vid above. The professor’s behavior is shockingly unprofessional, and I dare the director to find real evidence that this is common.

My point is that, yes, we are usually secularist, not Christian, and cosmopolitan, not nationalist. But students almost never come to our classes to fight for God and nation against us. Their needs and concerns are far more banal and everyday. Far more of our interaction with students is coaching them through hard material (I know you loathe the book, but Wikipedia is not really a substitute), trying to professionalize them (you can’t just cut class for a week or two and expect a bailout), begging and pleading with them to read (cliff notes are a high school gimmick you have to give up now), encouraging them to study and not just party away the four years (even though we did that too). It’s a lot more about management, mentoring and helping than about ideology. And if students raise their hand to discuss God and evolution, our response is to rejoice that students want to participate on a meaningful, exciting topic, not to stomp on them like some KGB of atheists.

So please, before yet another insulting, idiot, ideological, or conspiratorial portrayal of academia, someone make a movie that actually looks like college. That would be a real ‘revelation’…

Is Ban Ki-Moon the Antichrist? Teaching End-Times UN Hatred in Asia

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In teaching the UN this week, we discussed the issue of purposeful American defunding of the UN since the 1980s and the rocky US-UN relationship since the 1970s. For a good review of the ‘this-wordly’ issues go here. But then, inevitably, one must discuss the ‘theological’ complaints of US Christians. Something like 30-40% of Americans have had a born-again experience, in which Jesus purportedly intervenes personally in their life, former President Bush being the most prominent example. Koreans already find this to be pretty bizarre.  But then when you have to explain that lots of these people also believe the book of Revelation is a real prediction of future history (ie, Armageddon), then they just find it ridiculous. I tried as best I could to present it objectively, but I was genuinely embarrassed for the US to look so foolish. Most of my students were laughing out loud by the time I got to the end of the presentation. The same thing happened when I tried explain the Tea Party and those protestors with signs of Obama as Hitler. I don’t think American conservatives, who love the discourse of American exceptionalism, realize how much damage this kind of stuff does to foreigners’ impression of our ability and legitimacy to lead.

I struggled a bit on the details. In my Catholic grade school, we never read Revelations. The Church seemed to find it an embarrassment, and we spent most of our time on the Evangelists’ books. Most of my experience has come from watching the three Left Behind films (which I watched explicitly to get a handle on this material, although their unintentionally campiness is pretty hysterical). In that trilogy the UN Secretary-General (S-G) is the Antichrist. Speaking with a goofy pseudo-Transylvanian accent, he provokes a global war that inevitably includes an invasion of Israel. He assassinates people with impunity on the floor of the UN Security Council, and a shady Arab henchman organizes a global currency. The Rapture is there too of course (although not the fact that God would be thereby responsible for all the deaths from plane crashes due to raptured pilots). The demonic S-G, a slick Euro-bad guy, seduces the hot blonde  and builds a global tyranny from the UN, complete with a new unitarian-style religion. The American heroes have macho names like Buck and Steele. (Grrr!)

But all this strikes me as more American than Christian. First, it is Americans who have come up with this stuff, and I never met a European or Asian Christian who even knew about the Rapture and end-times wars, much less believed it. Second, it seems conveniently American that the US plays such a central role in these future histories, and that the UN, already disliked in the US, is the enemy yet again. Third, the movie bad guy looks and talks like the stock, ‘slick Euro’ character, whom Americans love to hate (like Alan Rickman in Die Hard). To be fair, I haven’t read the Left Behind novels though.

Teaching can be a great profession, and moments like this are real classics you will always remember in your career  (like the time I had a student ask me what OBL’s economic plan was for the caliphate after he re-united it). ‘Intercultural confusion’ would be the political correct expression, but honestly, the students just found it idiotic. Most East Asians come from a Buddhist-Confucian background (even the Christians, because Christianity is still pretty recent here). So most of my students had no context at all; indeed, for Americans who find this End-Times stuff ‘normal,’ nothing shows you just how absolutely absurd it is like trying to explain it to uninitiated foreigners. You want to convince Asians we aren’t fit to lead? Just let them watch Sarah Palin for awhile and then give a screening of Left Behind. Try explaining that it isn’t all anti-science, superstitious conspiracy theories. It’s just laughably implausible when taught as a straight ‘theory.’

First I had to lay the groundwork about the splintering of American Protestantism, because this eschatology is not mainline. Most Koreans are Catholics or Methodists. Korean Protestantism looks more like Europe than the US. Mega-churches built around one preacher don’t really exist. But they are coming. Indeed, one downside of the major US influence in Korea, because of the long alliance and commercial ties, is that US variants of charismatic-evangelical Protestant are coming, with an even greater stress on proselytization than in the US. Here, fundamentalists will stand at train stations and walk through subway cars holding big red crosses yelling (yes, yelling, not really preaching). Most Koreans resent them, so once I started discussing the details of evangelical end-times theology, my students were rolling their eyes immediately. That a Korean is the current UN S-G only raises their level of amazement and incredulity even faster. By the time I wrapped up, I was practically laughing myself – something I could never do in a US classroom, because there were always students who believed this stuff.

For all its absurdity, I do think teachers of IR should at least know the outlines of fundamentalist Protestant eschatology. It motivates UN hatred in the US far more than is acknowledged, and American ‘Christian Zionists’ – for whom Israel plays a role in the end-times wars – are far more important supporters of Israel than American Jews. This is a good IR article waiting to be written. I know of no serious investigation of the end-times version of world politics, despite its wide influence in the US electorate.

NB: I am just about positive that I will be ‘left behind,’ but thankfully the Tea Party is telling me how to  stock up for it…

Joining the Wikistrat Family

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I am happy to announce today that I am partnering with the international politics and economics consulting firm Wikistrat. Wikistrat provides geopolitical analysis, some of it at cost, but it is a good site for readers of this blog. Its foci and temperament are close to mine, so I am pleased to be an affiliate. I encourage you to take a look. Readers will find it more digestible and less theoretical than my writing here, as it is meant for policy-makers and corporate clients (i.e., regular people). So, mercifully, it is not formal IR theory. I will join the Wikistrat family of blogs and analysts that includes most notably Thomas Barnett.

Close readers will note that I cite Barnett probably around once a month here and that he is on my blogroll. I find him an excellent analyst especially of globalization, the US military, and China. His book The Pentagon’s New Map is an well-known interpretation the relationship between globalization and conflict after the Cold War. It has enough IR theory to satisfy the academic in you, while enough policy-relevance that laymen could read it too. Very nice. It was one of those books, like the The End of History or the World is Flat, that caught the zeitgeist well and gets cited all the time (including critically). I can comfortably recommend that book to to any reader of this website. I taught it in class, and the ‘core-gap’ map has become pretty famous.

Barnett is also a big China guy, so readers of this website will find his work and the material of the site generally useful. I am more worried about China’s rise than Barnett, who is most definitely of the ‘peaceful rise’ school. To mind the peaceful risers had a rough year last year, but Barnett is dead-on that the US air force and navy are almost certainly hyping the China threat for institutional-financial reasons, i.e., the Army and the Marines are carrying the costs of the GWoT, which means that the Navy and Air Force should carry the brunt of the coming US defense cuts. In any case, Asian security readers should be tuned into Barnett through Wikistrat.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Besides being a Wikistrat blog affiliate, I am a partner analyst as well, so this is a relationship I believe in. It should be said though that I do receive a small commission if readers click through on the Wikistrat advertisement on this website and then sign-up for its for-pay services. However, there is NO editorial control exerted. The Wiki folks are professional and committed enough to respect and solicit independent input.

Egyptian Revolution (2): The Egyptian Army’s Moral Superiority to China

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For part 1 of my thoughts on the Egyptian revolution, go here.

4. China shot its own people; Egypt has not. Much of the analysis has focused on possible parallels with Iran 1979. But another more recent parallel, especially relevant to this website, is Tiananmen Square 1989. In their moment of crisis, the Chinese turned their guns on themselves, and the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) will be forever stained by the blood of its own citizens en masse. This strikes me as major moment in the evolution of dictatorships. All dictatorships suffer from legitimacy problems, of course, but none want to openly rely on naked force. Militaries are usually the hidden albeit central prop in dictatorships, but they don’t actually want to do the dirty work themselves. That is for the paramilitary thugs and secret police. No officer wants to think the primary enemy of the a state’s military is its own people, not some foreign enemy. Their dignitary and right to rule is based on the whole idea that thy are defending the people, not massacring them; in fact this is the myth of 1952 Free Officers coup in Egypt itself. Hence the call by a dictator in dire straits to shoot the citizenry is a rubicon for any army that cannot be uncrossed. In 1989, the eastern European militaries balked; in China, the PLA did not. My sense is that the social costs to the PLA were lower though, because China is so big. The CCP purposefully brought in rural PLA units for whom Beijing was like another planet. But in small countries like Poland 1989 or Egypt today, army repression in the capital would immediately be felt and transmitted everywhere. So hear, hear to the Egyptian military (I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence). For all its corruption, despotism, and insulation, it still did the right thing when the chips were down. Did anyone imagine even a month ago that we’d be speaking of the moral superiority of the Egyptian military to the PLA?

5. Beyond this evident parallel to Beijing 1989, this is whole things isn’t really that relevant out here. The news media coverage has been thin. The current El Nina cold snap in Northeast Asia has gotten more press time regionally than that Egypt. Not surprisingly the Chinese haven’t discussed Egypt much, but I am disappointed the the Korean and Japanese press seems so disinterested. Initial Korean media coverage focused on the possible loss of ME export markets (groan). From this I would draw two conclusions. First, for all the talk about a flat world, cultural hurdles still matter a lot. The parties caught up in the war on terror (the West, Israel, the Arab/Muslim ME) are riveted by this, but East Asian’s just aren’t, sadly. My experience in East Asia is that locals don’t really care much about the developing world. It’s far away, the languages and religions seem unintelligible, and the societies look backward, especially to East Asians obsessed with development. East Asians worry a lot about the US, and some about Europe, but there is tremendous ignorance of places like Latin America or Africa. Second, I think this disinterest is as much political as it is cultural. Newly wealthy places like Korea or China demonstrate their earned, rightful place in the OECD through an almost purposeful disdain for the third world. Koreans love to demonstrate how worldly they are by spending a year in the US or West; I’ve never met a student or teacher who thought a year a in developing country would be vastly more interesting. (It is.) So Barnett’s ‘new core’ flaunts its new status by forgetting its roots in the third world: disinterest as a mark of superiority.

6. A comment about the commentary: Frank Rich is right that far too few people have any idea what to say on Egypt because so much of the commentary is really about the US (or Israel). This Amero-centrism is why so many are saying the US should do this or that: the working assumption is that that US guides the world and can easily direct events. This is no longer true, so the mountain of US, rather than Egypt, -focused commentary creates unrealistic expectations that we can direct this thing.

Rich also makes the excellent observation that if Americans could actually watch al Jazeera, they might actually learn something about Egypt itself. Instead the mainstream commentary has revealed the embarrassingly nativist ignorance of much of the punditocracy on anything beyond US borders. In general I was very pleased to see how well academics requited themselves in the blogosphere on this; I think especially Walt, Mead, Cole and the Duck of Minerva have been super.

But if you read the op-ed pages, you got recycled banality and the usual suspects: Friedman gave you his typical, ‘this-is-a-defining-moment-in-the-ME’ schtick; Bush neocons desperate for rehabilitation strove to take credit and somehow blame Obama for…what exactly?; Palin blithered; Parker told us that the big story was really about the US media and Cohen that it was about Israel; Colbert King forgot the rest of the world exists; and Beck, well, you already know – just watch the loopy video from part 1. Score yet another point for blogging.

Without the informed blogging voices of people who actually know something about Egypt and revolutions, you really wouldn’t learn much about the events at all. You’d have just gotten an endless series of stories from a royalist, uncosmopolitan press in which Washington was the real story, because that’s all the pundits know how to talk about.  Douthat, for example – and whom I think is a pretty good writer usually – clearly had nothing to say, so he just gave up and wrote about Obama yet again under the guise of Egypt. How easy; this is how the press for a nation of untraveled monolinguists infatuated with their own power evolves. Its all about us. By contrast, here is an example of a non-expert, trained in traditional Washington self-obsession, who nonetheless tried. 

__________________________

ADDENDA:

The Japan Security Watch (JSW) blog of the New Pacific Institute has taken to cross-posting some of my stuff.  JSW is a good review of Japan, and a nice a compliment to my over-focus on Korea and China. They do on a lot on the nuts-and-bolts of hardware and deployment. Mil-Tech junkies on Asia will love it. JSW and I are working on some cooperation in the future. I want to thank them and commend readers to take a look at their good website.

BusanHaps, the big expat newspaper for Busan, SK, has also reposted some of my stuff. I want to thank them too and commend their site. Busan readers almost certainly know it already, but non-local readers will find it a good window on the way expats live here.

Finally, I want to point out that a published version of my remarks on North Korean shelling of Yeonpyeong Island is now available here (RINSA 15) from the Korean National Defense University (KNDU). If you really want to get into the details of SK defense against N, KNDU is the place to go. I want to thank them for soliciting me and thank readers for all the helpful comments that went into the final product.

Egyptian Revolution (1):We should Support the Uprising

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Good lord, Beck really is insane…

 

Part 2 is here.

Like all of you in the last few weeks, I have been glued to CNN regarding Egypt. It is pretty inspiring, and I can only hope that Mubarak leaves and something more genuinely liberal and democratic takes his places. Here are a few thoughts.

1. Regarding the video selected above, I did plan to post a good pic from Egypt, but you’ve seen that a lot already, so that would not have added much new value. This you probably haven’t seen though, and it is ‘important’ for the sheer insanity about US conservatives’ foreign policy concerns in the ME it reveals. Apparently the Egyptian revolution is an islamist plot that will turn the Mediterranean into an Islamic lake, allow Russia to control Northern Europe, and China to control India and Pakistan. Don’t believe me? Beck’s sweeping hand movements will explain all…    h/t: Center for a New American Security.

2. This is one of those critical junctures when observers should to go on the record about what to do. If all this somehow goes wrong, everyone will blame Obama in 20/20 hindsight. That will inevitably be partisan and unfair, because the Obama administration is making decisions under huge uncertainty. Credibility requires one to go on record now, when information is limited and we all have to make our best guess.

That US conservatives are badly split signals this huge uncertainty. Absolute moral certainty is a central pose of the American right’s self-image (tax hikes are always bad, Iraq 2 was a good idea no matter what), so if even the Right –  which IMO takes foreign policy more seriously than domestic-focused US liberals – is divided, that tells you just how confused everyone really is. For the neo-con take that this really is about democracy, try Gerecht (excellent); for the gloomy realism that we should hew to the Egyptian military, try Krauthammer (depressing, but also good). And for the downright bizarre conspiratorial stuff, watch the above vid.

So here’s my line: I’ll say that Krauthammer and the realists are wrong. The Iran parallel is inaccurate; this will not lead to a Muslim Brothers’ dictatorship. Further, the support of democracy is, in itself, an important value. Even if there was a serious risk of an islamist takeover, we should still pressure Mubarak to get out, nor support a military oligarchy (Krauthammer). Who wants to look back in 10 years and say we supported yet another authoritarian in one of the worst governed places on earth, that we didn’t take the chance to push for something better, even if it was risky? How awful and embarrassing for the US; what a betrayal of all those heroic people we’ve seen on TV. And if they want islamists in the government, well, it is ultimately their country. So long as it remains a democracy (the difference between Turkey’s islamists’ participation, and Hamas’ budding oligarchy), then we have to allow them to disagree with us as is their right. Risking fanatics in government is part of democracy (witness, ahem, Sarah Palin). If we believe in it for ourselves, then we must be true to it for them. So, no, this is not a result of George Bush’s foreign policy, but we should support it anyway.

3. Israel should not drive our policy toward Egypt. Has anyone else noticed how much of this discussion has gotten hijacked by the ‘what-will-happen-to-Israel’ externality? (Try here, here, here, here, and here.) This is embarrassing and almost sycophantic. You can’t blame the Arabs for disbelieving we’re an honest broker when the fate of 6 million people in a different country outweighs the 85 million of the country that is actually the center of the story. Really? Should the US point of origin for yet another Middle East event be Israel’s benefit? We are two separate countries, right? Maybe we should care about the Egyptians themselves, right? Israel does have the finest military in the region, nuclear weapons, and a take-no-prisoners lobby in the US Congress, right? Don’t misunderstand me. I realize that Israel’s security is important for the US and that it is the only democracy in the region (although that is increasingly under question). I want Israel to be secure too; I’ve traveled there 3 times and unconditionally support its right to exist. If it would help, usher them into NATO or the EU, or extend formal US deterrence guarantees, even nuclear. But it’s long-overdue time that we break the habit looking over our shoulder to Israel on ME issues, and it’s extremely immoral to support continued Egyptian authoritarianism on the (likely correct) premise that a democratic Egypt will push Israel harder. That sells out the admirable sacrifice of 85 million for 6 million who voted for an openly provocative right-wing government.

American Dual Containment in Asia

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pet-containment-pen

Last month I published an article in Geopolitics entitled “American Dual Containment in Asia.” In brief, I argued that a double containment of both Islamic fundamentalism and of China is the likely US strategy in Asia in the coming decades. The containment of salafism in the Middle East is bound to be hard and violent (as it already is), because Al Qaeda and associated movements are so genuinely revolutionary and dangerous. The containment of China is likely to be soft until the Chinese decide just how much they wish to challenge the reigning liberal democratic order. In the last year, many seem to fear that China is ramping up in this direction. Hence my prediction that India will be a pivot in this containment line. It is a unique ally for the US, because it is worried about both China and Islamic fundamentalism, and because it is democratic. In this way, it is unique among American alliance choices. Here is abstract:

“US grand strategy after 9/11 turned from post-containment drift to preemption. But the costs are high – suspicion of American power, hedging by traditional allies, expensive, go-it-alone ventures like Iraq. Tried-and-true containment better reflects American values. While forward in the world, containment is also defensive. It reassures skittish partners and reflects liberal, anti-imperial US preferences. In Asia, containment would deter the primary contemporary challengers of US power – radical Islam and Chinese nationalism – without encouraging a Bush-style global backlash. In a reductive analysis of US alliance choices, this article predicts a medium-term Indo-American alliance. India uniquely shares both US liberal democratic values and the same two challengers; it is the likely pivot in a US-backed neo-containment architecture in Asia.”

Here are the relevant graphs that, I hope, make the argument clearer:

Graph 1. Contemporary Revisionists to the ‘American System’

 

 

 

 

Power

High

Low

Commitment

 

High

(Revolutionary)

 

Islamist-Jihadist Networks,

Iran ?

Low

(Dissatisfied)

China ?

Rogues (Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela)

 

 

The good news above is that just about everyone accepts the international status quo – roughly, the liberal international political economy led by the US (what Ikenberry calls “the American system”). While al Qaeda is clearly a scary revisionist – i.e., the they want to dramatically rewrite the international order by refounding the caliphate, e.g. – they are also pretty weak. The only powerful revisionist is China, and no one knows yet just how much she seeks to change things. This is good for the US, insofar as it backstops the international order, and it is also good for the many states in Asia and Europe that function within that order. Although the internal challenges to the liberal order are growing (i.e, the Great Recession), there is currently no powerful and revolutionary external challenger like the Nazis or USSR were.

 

 Graph 2. Contemporary US Alliance Picks

 

 

Competitors

Values

 

China

Islamist-

Jihadist

Networks

Great Britain/NATO

 

         X

               X

Russia

          X

          X

 

Japan/East Asia

          X

 

                X

Israel/Arab clients

 

           X

               X?

India

          X

           X

               X

 

This graph tries to reductively explain the appeal of India as an alliance partner. It uniquely shares the both the geopolitical interests of the US in Asia; that is, it is worried about both Islamism and China. And it shares our liberal democratic values. Russia is an obvious point on shared interests – the ultimate driver of alliances of course – but it is so erratic and semi-dictatorial, that is still distasteful despite the ‘reset.’

The most controversial part of this analysis is certainly my open claim that China will be a target of US soft containment, and maybe hard in the future. I should say here that I do not want this. I am very aware of the self-fulfilling prophecy problem; i.e., if we openly come out and say China is an enemy or threat, then by doing so, we make it into one. And certainly articles like mine are exactly what the Chinese declaim – a not-so-secret effort by US analysts to keep China down and such. And see Barnett on why I am completely wrong, if not dangerous, about China. But as an empirical prediction, I do think it holds. China’s growth and current values (populist nationalism, deep historical grievance, residual communism) are just too rapidly destabilizing, and I think Barnett doesn’t give nearly the necessary attention to the security dilemma problems China creates on its periphery. (IMO, Barnett overfocuses on China and G-2 coziness, while missing the nervousness in places like Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Indonesia.)   For my own writing on why I think the ‘China threat’ school is likely to win this debate, try here.

Finally, I should say in fairness that my own perception of China-as-threat has declined somewhat, in part because I visited the place. This strikes me as natural; closeness and exposure frequently breed understanding, and I like to think that all the nice Chinese scholars and hospitality I experience were in fact real. But the liberal values of academics exposed to new ideas and travel as a professional requirement hardly apply to populations and elites, especially those as nationalist as China and the US. The misperception likelihood is huge here; remember the Bush 2 administration came in ready to take on China until 9/11 happened. This will likely reassert itself as American dependence on Chinese financing grows and as the GWoT (hopefully) winds down. (Another problem here is the peer-review process. Articles take years to between the first inspired write-up and the end-point of publication. Reviewers send you back to the drawing board, and the pipeline effect means that even after final acceptance you may wait a year or more to see it in print.)

Chalmers Johnson, RIP — Wikileaks & NK

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Chalmers_Johnson

First, Chalmers Johnson has died. This happened in late November, but the Yeonpyeong shelling captured the attention of my blogging. But given how important he was to the study of East Asia in political science, this should be mentioned here. This is very sad for our field. Two years ago, when Samuel Huntington died, I felt the same way. These guys are what we all aspire to in political science. I can’t think of one thing I have written in my career that I would recommend over an article by someone like Johnson or Huntington. Every time I whine about Asian mercantilism, Johnson’s work is in the back of mind (as is Robert Wade’s). I read Johnson’s Asian political economy stuff in grad school, and I see it living in Asia all the time. That is what our field is supposed to produce – these sorts of durable, well-researched insights that make our world a little more understandable. Very nice, and a genuine loss. (This is why we have political science, by the way.)

To be sure, Johnson jumped the rails in the 2000s with Bush and the Iraq War. I read the Blowback trilogy after the Iraq invasion. The first one is the best, but by the time he gets to the last book and starts musing about a military takeover of the US, you’re wondering if this is the same guy who wrote path-breaking research on Asia. Johnson was in good company though. Lots of other good left-wing foreign policy writers were pushed over the edge by W also; Chomsky and Bacevich spring to mind. Read Michael Lind’s useful deconstruction of how the foreign policy left kinda lost its head over W. But still, I think this stuff is quite valuable. It is a useful check on US neo-con fantasies that unipolarity and American exceptionalism mean rules don’t apply as much to the US as to others. It is hard in retrospect to think the Bush presidency wasn’t a disaster for the US, and Johnson, corrected for overstatement, will tell you why on foreign policy. (For an example, of lefty criticism that maintained better perspective on the Bush years, try here.)

2. Living in Asia means I missed the full coverage of the Wikileaks flap. My sense generally is that they don’t tell us too much we didn’t already know. I think Carpenter gets it about right here, and Yadav gives an excellent IR take here. I would only add 2 things:

A. Occasional random revelations like this might actually serve a foreign policy purpose. They remind others in world politics that for all our diplomatic niceties, we can see right through them and know they are flim-flaming us. This brings a certain (inappropriate to be sure) pressure on these guys to get their act together. It is kinda nice to see the Russians reminded that we are under no illusions about Putin’s closet semi-dictatorship, or for the N Koreans to know that we are thinking about a world beyond their nasty, civilian-murdering slave state, or for Robert Mugabe to know that we basically think he’s bonkers. Secretary of State Clinton is absolutely correct that this stuff should not have been leaked, but didn’t anyone else find it refreshing to hear US diplomats speaking honestly and insightfully? Wasn’t it pleasing to hear US officials trenchantly blow off the world’s buffoons? I was pretty impressed actually at the quality of their off-the-cuff analyses, and pleased to see my tax payers dollars contributing to this work.

B. I worry about the long-term build-up of secrecy in the US government under the cloak of national security. Lefty writers like Johnson or Bacevich will even tell you we live in a National Security State now. A healthy democracy requires openness and transparency. Over time, stuff really should get declassified. It is the property, in the end, of the taxpayers and the voters, because it is our government. Assange himself seems to be drifting toward toward some bizarre hexagonal conspiracy theory stuff, but I am sympathetic to the general notion that the US is too secretive and that the presumptive prejudice in the US bureaucracy should be for declassification unless otherwise demonstrable and clear national security grounds can be established. An Economist blogger captures my concerns pretty well, and of course, the Bush administration, once again *sigh*, is responsible for much of the recent fear of secret government in the US. Greenwald, as usual, nails the hypocrisy of those defending spiralling classification.

3. This is unrelated, but if you haven’t read this description of the 30 worst pundits-turned-hacks in the US, you should. It is a great dissection of everything wrong with journalism masquerading as social science, too frequently in the service of ideology. It is left-biased, but so what. It is punchy, trenchant, humorous, and good warning to everyone with a blog (me too) to do you homework and not just recycle your prejudices. It illustrates one of the great benefits of the Internet – independent bloggers and others can fact check and hit back in real-time. It makes me worry that maybe I recycle stuff here…

Another Hysterical Video about the Bail-Outs of the Great Recession

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Don’t miss the Irish prime minister boozing at work…

 

This is pretty funny also. It is from the same company that made this one on China and the US.

A hat-tip once again to the Duck of Minerva.

I don’t know anything about the Chinese outfit that makes these, but it sure looks like the Chinese are getting a laugh out of our financial foolishness in the West. To be fair though, let them. They’ve earned their Schadenfreude, and we deserve the pain for our profligacy.