Author Archives: Robert E Kelly

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About Robert E Kelly

I am a professor of political science at Pusan National University. I write mostly on international relations in East Asia.

Some IR Thoughts on the GOP Debate Marathon

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I guess if you speak a foreign language, you’re a traitor

Here were my first, domestic politics thoughts on the GOP debate-run, particularly the competitive, extreme position-taking forced onto the candidates by the audience reactions. But I thought the debates actually taught us very little directly on foreign policy (beyond bombast, or just watch the vid above you francophile, cheese-eating traitor to the heartland). Instead, most of my cues were indirect, such as audience reaction:

4. We (and the world) learned a lot from the audience behavior. I don’t think anyone anticipated this, but the GOP audience demographic (aging white evangelicals), plus its hoots and hollers (for torture, against the Palestinians, for executions, for war with Iran) communicated a lot of information in itself. It showed just how captured the GOP is now by a hard right Christianist ideology that comes off as more than just angry, but downright belligerent, if not scary. And for IR, this is important too. Foreigners will see this stuff and hardly believe that American hegemony is ‘benevolent’ or ‘benign.’ I’ve said this before, but this Tea Party radicalism is washing downstream to the rest of the world; a few years ago, my students here were asking me in amazement why Americans were comparing Obamacare to the Nazis, and I just ran out of lame excuses. Foreigners do pick up on this stuff, Fox News execs. You can’t talk like this and be a superpower at the same time. Foreigners do think we are fairly bonkers, and don’t even start with that ‘bound to lead’ schtick (more like unfit), when so many Americans muse that Obama might be the Antichrist or a Muslim non-citizen.

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Some Political Science Thoughts on the GOP Debate Marathon

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Here’s the last one is you haven’t seen it yet

 

So it looks like the GOP debating season is over. Wow. I don’t study American politics, but I can’t remember a marathon run of debates like that ever before. (Can anyone speak to that point, btw? This is something very new, right?) I think there will be much discussion in both parties about whether or not to run this sort of marathon schedule again in 4 years. Like most people I watched bits and pieces of them, and I concur that they should probably come with a drinking game like the State of the Union does. I zoned out a lot when it got (often) insider-y about who voted for which earmarks, but there were some good insights. On foreign policy, ironically the best insight is how little it interests Americans as measured by how how little it was discussed.

So here are some other political science-y thoughts after 6 months of these things:

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In Social Science, You’re always Under-read, so What do You do? (2)

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Here is part one, where I noted Walt, the Duck, and Walter Russell Mead as the IR blogs I read almost always despite the avalanche of international affairs blogs now. Here are a few more:

Martin Wolf: Here’s a grad school education in IPE, op-ed by op-ed, better day-to-day than either Krugman or the Economist. Not being an economist, but facing regular student questions for years about the Great Recession and the euro-zone crisis, I have found Wolf indispensible in explaining what happened in the last 5 years – and without that ‘bankers as masters of the universe’ schtick coming from CNBC, Bloomberg, and the WSJ. Wolf is a delight to read. Like Andrew Sullivan, he is measured, changes his mind when information dramatically changes, references theory but not as ideology or fundamentalism, and has a good touch for what can realistically be accomplished in actual democratic politics.

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In Social Science, You’re always Under-read, so What do You do? (1)

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nerds-nerd-reading-book-glasses-demotivational-posters-1314307098

If there is one constant to modern social science, it is that you are always under-read. There is always some critical book you missed, some article you never had time for, some classic of which you only read the first and last chapters in grad school. And this is just the modern work immediately relevant to your field. After college you all but gave up on reading the ‘great books’ in the Chicago sense – Plato, Augustine, Mill, Nietzsche, etc. That’s the stuff that really got you interested in social analysis – you’ve still got a marked up copy of Aristotle’s Politics somewhere – but if you cite these guys today, it’s usually just a lifted quote from someone else’s modern social science book that you are reading. Your own black-edged Penguin Classics are collecting dust. If it wouldn’t be so uncomfortable, it would be fascinating to hear what ‘obligatory’ international relations or Asia studies classics readers haven’t actually read and why not.

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Vietnam Political Science Impressions- 2

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Vietnam 013

Here is part one, where I noted how much the communist super-idolization of leaders like Ho and Mao weirds me out. Here are a few more social science impressions from our trip:

4. The Indo-Sinic collision in Vietnam makes the local art the most interesting I’ve seen yet in Asia. The national museum of fine art has (above) a wonderful serene Buddha, with his hands clasped and face placid (fairly typical) – plus 30 arms. Wow! That stopped me cold: Buddha + Vishnu = I have no idea. I can only imagine how the monks back in Korea (my wife is a Buddhist) would react. But it is truly unique, and I find Confucian art with all its rigid, formal wise men telling me to be a good son kinda boring. Bring on the wild Champa statuary with bodhisattvas who look like Hindu gurus and dancers with their legs backwardly touching their heads. Awesome.

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Even Uncle Ho’s Hand-Weights Contributed to the Revolution (1)

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Vietnam 064

Our social science faculty association organized a trip to Vietnam last week. It was pretty fascinating. It was my first trip, and I don’t speak the language, so obviously I am qualified to generalize wildly about it now. As Gabriel Almond once quipped, ‘you should never generalize about a country until you’ve at least flown over it. So guess I meet that test at least. Here are some anecdotal, political science-y impressions:

1. Communist hagiography really freaks me out. I have now been to the ‘holy-site’ tombs of Lenin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh, and they are some of the most bizarre human artefacts I’ve ever seen. (Kim Il Sung has one too.) If you’ve never seen a communist mausoleum, you should visit at least one, especially if you are a political scientist. Modeled on the Lenin tomb of Red Square, Ho’s is a large, raised rectangular box, designed in hideously ugly Soviet-esque grey concrete. Ho is inside in-state – even though he explicitly wanted to be cremated (Lenin too wanted to be buried). And yes, they do refer to him as Uncle Ho to your face. Accompanying the mausoleum are two museums – and a gift shop in which you can buy Ho Chi Minh keychains and playing cards. Wait, what?!

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China & Snyder’s “Myths of Empire” (2): Does the Model Fit China?

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I didn’t know the PLA likes Led Zeppelin…

Here is part one, where I argued that China reasonably fits the prerequisites for Jack Snyder’s theory from Myths of Empire. Here is an application of it to China to see how it works:

2. Contra Snyder, China’s modernization is being led by the state and the party, not as much by the military. That’s true. But clearly the PLA does have something of that ‘state within a state’ feel of Germany and Japan’s military early last century. The PLA’s budget has exploded over the last two decades, and like other second world militaries (Egypt, Pakistan), the PLA has lots of business interests (including casinos I’ve even heard) that suffer little state oversight.

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China & Snyder’s “Myths of Empire” (1): Theory

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MYTHSOFANEMPIRE

So I am re-reading Snyder’s Myths of Empire for an r&r. (Btw, not that this is bad book, but is anyone’s reading list in life now primarily driven by anonymous reviewers and the need to get in print for promotion? Sad smile) The book is theoretically complex (almost too many moving parts to my mind), and the cases are an exciting read. But when it was big in the 90s (when I first read it), no one really thought about China as fitting the argument. But today, it strikes me that China would be an interesting prediction case for the book. Certainly China looks a lot like the kind of expansionist state Snyder describes – rapid late developer, nationalist-militarist elites suspicious that the extant international system is keeping them down, growing factionalization, nationalist mass ideology, etc. In my grad school classes, one of the big criticisms was that the theory is not very generalizable. By Synder’s own admission in the book, it can’t explain pre-industrial empire (a pretty huge scope condition to my mind); he also has only one non-western case in the book (Japan – the others are Germany, GB, US, and USSR). But China fits a lot of the basics for the applicability of Snyder’s theory – it’s industrial, a great power, growing fast, faces possible encirclement, etc. – so here is a nice example of both theory extension – trying on a new case that ‘should’ fit – and even better, prediction. Prediction is the gold standard of social science, so what would Snyder’s Myths say about China’s future behavior? Can we test the book’s argument against China over the next decade or two?

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Retrenchment & Liberal Internationalism don’t really Fit Together (2): R2P

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Here is part one, where I argued that international relations as a field has become increasingly uncomfortable with the America’s post-Cold War hegemony and the level of force used in the GWoT, but…

2. We’re drifting toward R2P (the responsibility to protect)

Simultaneously, we are elated that the Libya operation worked, (against all odds given the Iraq experience and what we know about foreign intervention in LDCs generally). Lots of Duck writers supported the intervention. (I found Jon Western’s arguments last spring particularly persuasive; some of my writing on Libya is here and here.) Even if you didn’t support it, and worried that it meant more ‘empire,’ it still tugged at your heartstrings to see Libyans fighting and dying against a nasty tyrant. So you probably supported the NATO intervention even though you didn’t want to.

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Retrenchment & Liberal Internationalism don’t really Fit Together (1)

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RonPaulIsolationism

Taking Brian Rathbun’s advice, I was reading chapter 4 of Perception and Misperception, when it struck me that Jervis’ argument about values incongruity could be applied to the two most popular normative positions in IR today – that western power and international law can help reduce violence and nastiness in the world (R2P), and that a semi-imperial US is killing far too many people against a fairly minor threat and should retrench somewhat. But increasingly I think that retrenchment, which is traditionally associated with the left in IR (US ‘imperialism’), has become a realist position.

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