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.

More African Impressions

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This continues my just-off-the plane post from our return from Africa in late August. Further discussion with political science colleagues, commenters, and students got me thinking more:

1. Where are the Americans and Japanese? To my great surprise, we met very few Americans on the trip. Usually Americans are everywhere when one travels. Being a superpower with bases and businesses around the world, Americans are a fixture of the global tourism industry. So much that the term ‘ugly American’ came about – a vague caricature that we’re monolinguist rednecks, like Sheriff Pepper in the ‘Man with the Golden Gun.’ But I didn’t see too many. In fact, we scarcely saw any Americans. And we didn’t see any black American tourists at all. (I’m not quite sure what to make of that; all the western tourists were white.) Ditto for Japanese. 80% of the tourists we met were Europeans. There were 5 Koreans in our safari trip. And of course, we saw Chinese – not just from all the construction projects, but even tourists too. Chinese tourists, but no Japanese tourists? What a sea-change. Is this a sign of the bite of the Great Recession or disinterest, or what?

2. Africa Time/TIA (this is Africa)/‘It’s always Friday night in Mozambique.’ This was the hardest one to get used to, as you don’t know if it is a real ‘cultural attribute’ you should respect, or just a BS excuse for bad service, endless delays, and cold food.  The last expression came from our South African tour guide in Mozambique; the other 2 are ubiquitous. After a few weeks on the road in Africa, we started using them too. Africa time is the same thing as ‘Latin time,’ as a friend told me they say in Belize. The idea is the ‘we are slower here than you noxious, western city slickers. Life is pleasant, and we enjoy ourselves. So take a load off; drink a beer; and don’t worry. Your bus will show up some time, and you’ll get there eventually.’ TIA gets to the dysfunction of, well,  almost everything. When the bus you paid a lot of money to take breaks down, and you are standing around in the desert for 12 hours getting sunstroke (true story), or when the border guards rip you off for your visa (also true), or there is one clerk at immigration and a 2 hour line at midnight in the outdoor cold (also true), well, this is Africa. Get used to it. Don’t stress or try to fix it. You can’t. And inevitably, you do just give up and go with the flow. You plan that 5-10% of your expenses will be rip-offs where you are overcharged for stuff, because you’re a tourist. You get used to the fact that a sandwich and a Coke take 45 minutes to prepare in a restaurant. When our truck broke down for a whole day in South Africa, the recently-arrived European tourists on our trip got furious and impatient. But my wife and I, after 5 weeks already in-country, were just fine with it. We napped and read, and then watched Weird Al videos all day at the farm of a friend of our driver (yes, that’s true too). And no, the guide never even bothered to suggest that we be compensated for the whole lost day of the tour we paid for. Sigh. TIA…

3. Where is the developmentalism? This observation is as much a product of living in East Asia as it is of visiting Africa. In Korea, you see everywhere the dynamism and energy driving this place. Koreans are obsessed with catching up with the first world, joining modernity, being taken seriously in the G-20 and OECD, etc. To be sure, I was in Africa for only 6-7 weeks, but I didn’t see that vibe at all. I was amazed how much loitering about there was. In countries with 30-40% unemployment, this is inevitable. But the economist in me saw huge wasted labor potential. All those young men just standing around, looking for something to do,and then, inevitably, depressingly, trying to rip me off by changing money on the street with folded notes and other tricks, or harassing me to buy some shoddy overpriced souvenir. And there was so much obvious need for all that unused labor. Streets needed to be cleaned, trash picked up (the amount of litter in southern Africa is astonishing), decaying, half-finished building are everywhere. Nothing made me more sympathetic to the ‘Beijing consensus’ as this trip.

4. They still say ‘coloured.’ This was another big surprise as an American. Raised on strict US political correctness, where you can only say ‘colored’ if you say ‘NAACP,’ it was pretty striking to hear whites say this or that guy is coloured or black. I even heard ‘mulatto.’ But the blacks and ‘coloureds’ talk that way too, so you quickly realize the language of race is a lot more relaxed, and I have to say I kinda liked that. I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘colored;’ I used the more anodyne US ‘mixed.’ But still, compared to the verbal acrobatics Americans go through to talk about race – like ‘European-American,’ – this was kind of refreshing. I found it rather more mature.

Ground Zero Mosque & Koran-Burning: the Xian Right Learns ID Politics

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Just about anyone with a website has already commented on this. There is no doubt the Christian right has responded as predictably and disturbingly as one might expect. I have only a few thoughts.

1. The Ground Zero ‘Mosque’ is probably a bridge too far at this point. In his fumbling way, I think Obama got it right. The community center should be permitted legally as an expression of religious freedom, but so many Americans, especially Christians, find it uncomfortable at minimum, terrifying at worst, that it is probably not a good idea at the moment. It is clear misstep in a country still trying to come to grips with 9/11, Iraq, the GWoT, etc. And the hysterical reaction from the US right over it should be an obvious red-flag to Islam generally that it desperately needs to conciliate the rest of the world rather than insist maximally on its rights – an obvious lesson that should have been learned in Europe, India, or after Durban II. To many Americans, Ground Zero is practically holy ground (rightly or wrongly), and it is indisputable that its perpetrators acted in Islam’s name. It is also clear that the US is spending a great deal of blood and treasure pushing back on radical Islam, and that many Americans want to see a pleasant, conciliatory face on Islam before they can swallow something like this. So long as global Islam’s image is dominated by this guy, Muslims in American should really be working bottom-up outreach, demonstrating on 9/11 in solidarity with the victims rather than openly testing the patience of the majority culture, by blaming it on a few bad apples and dismissing the rest of the discussion as islamophobia.

American Muslims need to pick their battles just like any minority; civil rights movements for blacks and homosexuals have showed us that Americans will accommodate. Acceptance will come, but not by pursuing CAIR-style grievance politics that sees racism everywhere. I think most Americans are still waiting for the debate inside Islam on what caused 9/11; this would really prove that Islam accepts pluralism in its heart, not just when some firestorm occurs on CNN. But you only get that from americanized Muslims like Foud Ajami or Fareed Zakaria who are effectively isolated from the discussion. It is outsiders like Olivier Roy, Bernard Lewis, R M Gerecht, Ann Applebaum, or  Christopher Caldwell who have really exposed the pathologies behind 9/11 with no clear response from folks like Tariq Ramadan or Feisal Abdul Rauf, much less the reactionary clerical elites in Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. Instead, the critiques are just ignored, as were the Arab Human Development reports earlier this decade. Just like Germany had to examine the Holocaust eventually, Islam needs to look inside 9/11 for a good house-cleaning before westerners will really be comfortable. Consider this counterfactual: if CAIR had organized a ‘Solidarity with America’ march on 9/11 every year or some analogously Oprah-style outreach, then I can’t imagine anyone would care now. But instead of introspection and an admission that pathologies deeply rooted in Islam created 9/11, the response of the US Muslim community has been quiescence or CAIR-style identity politics. I criticize America’s Christian right paranoia regularly on this site, but it is also willful ignorance to pretend the US is not a Christian-majority country, and as the Koran-burners show, they have learned identity politics too. How ‘bout everyone cool it on the religion for awhile?

2. The Koran-burning is the revenge of identity politics on the left. They are loopy and dangerous, but they also teach you just how dangerous stoking identity politics is. And for this you must blame the Left in the end. Starting in 1970s, civil rights-era equality was out, and identity politics was in. Non-white minorities in America were trained in multiculturalism by US universities and told to press group-fashioned political claims built around race or gender. The result was political correctness, in which free speech was assailed as permitting ‘disrespect.’ And no concept is more abused by ethnic ideologues than ‘respect.’ What better way to embarrass and delegitimize your critics than to easily cast them as ignorantly disrespectful of your culture, which you can casually invoke by just your last name. If they are racist, then you hardly need to listen to them, a tactic first rolled out against Daniel Moynihan’s famous DoL report 45 years ago. ‘Respect’ is wonderfully indefinable and elastic, its lack implies racist, vulgar stupidity, and it provides an easy out from the hard criticism liberal free speech permits. Pretty quickly, Israel’s defenders learned this; there is no better way to discredit Israel critics than anti-semitism charges. And Islam learned this too at Durban II. Now at last, white Christian Americans are learning this language as well. Regularly assailed as redneck racists, the easy answer is to adopt the pose of the opponent and ‘discover’ prejudice in the liberal anti-Christian media, e.g. This is why Fox News has such a siege mentality tone to its reporting, like the ‘war’ on Christmas. Here is a nice summary of how religious groups get trained to frame their demands as ‘rights’ they deserve as ‘victims’ of never-ending ‘prejudice’,’ i.e., free speech. But to be fair to the US right, it only went down this route after the ‘ethnicization’ of left-wing politics in the US in the last three decades. And for that blame the explosion of ethnic identity studies on US campuses.

Korea is not such a bad Model for Iraq…

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I thought the Wednesday speech was quite good. Obama reached out to the right by repeatedly speaking of the armed forces’ sacrifice. Simultaneously, he made it clear what his priorities are – Afghanistan and domestic nation-building. At this late date, it is hard to argue with the wisdom of getting out of Iraq. It was such a misadventure, that it is probably best to get it over as soon as possible and move on.

On the other hand, I worry that the progress made at such expense might dissipate if the withdrawal is too hasty. The logic of sunk costs says that we should not ignore what progress there has been in Iraq, no matter how awful the decision-making up to this point. Future decisions need to be based on future projected costs, and I wonder if the costs in Iraq can’t be much lower than they were. I wonder if the end of next year is too rapid. This is why I liked Paul Wolfowitz’ op-ed last week arguing Korea as a model for Iraq. The American commitment to Korea paid off in the (very) long-rung, and lots of folks at the beginning thought it was a waste. Maybe this can be the case in Iraq. If the costs of an American stabilizing commitment in Iraq can be kept down and the footprint light, it might, just might, help create a positive pay-off for this wild ride…

Walt of course immediately went after him, and Walt is right to be skeptical of almost anything Wolfowitz says at this point – it’s as much CYA for the history books as commitment to Iraq for many neocons at this point. But I do think Wolfowitz was intellectually convinced of the benefit of the war, from the beginning. He wasn’t one of those Beck-Palin-types who is simply supported it because of raw, America-right-or-wrong patriotism and now can’t back out.

Korea is intriguing example for Wolfowitz to use because it does seem to have worked so well, which you will note that Walt does not question. Korea was a mess for the first decade of the US commitment and only slowly pulled itself together. Yet it undeniably did, and now it is clearly a boon to the US in a tough region. Simultaneously, the US commitment there has slowly decreased in cost, and as Korea got wealthier, it had been able to carry more of the cost. The problem was that this took 4 decades!

The Korean parallel holds for a little bit of Iraq. It is in an important region where the US lacks a good local ‘spoke.’ And the risks of Iraq backsliding are obvious, and it seems like the Iraqis are now worrying that the finally-occurring US withdrawal increases the likelihood of slippage. Iraq does have development potential, given its oil reserves and educated middle class.

But the risks are so high, that maybe Walt is right. It is a good question when a superpower should just give up. Bacevich bitingly says Iraq is just hopeless for the US, and there must be a time when we recognize the defeat is cheaper than victory. In Korea, it took decades for the return to show-up on the 1950-53 investment. That seems so far away, and the possibility that was unique and irreplicable in Iraq seems so high, that maybe Obama and Biden are right and we should just get out as soon as we can. I just don’t know…

Asia 21, or the IMF Comes Crawling Back to Asia…

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1. For an organization regularly accused of wrecking the world, the July IMF-Korea get-together was a lark. 13 years ago in the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC), the Fund pummeled emerging Asia with all sorts of tough but necessary reforms. And Korea, for an OECD economy, took a hell of beating at the time and never forgave the Fund. Never ones to admit they were wrong, Korean elites steadfastly refuse to recognize that the Fund’s advice was necessary and was the reason Korea bounced back so fast from what at the time observers thought was going to be a regional meltdown. And now, as the world’s money flows into Asia in the coming decades, the IMF has had to come crawling back. The irony of course is that Fund advice why the AFC lasted so briefly and why Asia returned to growth so quickly.

But no one EVER thanks the Fund, and now, with the Western powers traditionally supporting the Fund all bankrupt, the Fund desperately needs Asia. So after a 13 year mexican stand-off over the Fund’s AFC advice, the Fund has finally blinked. It has come back to ask to be let back in. For Korea this was a moment of triumph. Not one Korean speaker missed the opportunity to dredge up the old grievances, and not one IMF speaker had the professional courage to defend the Fund. Even Managing Director Strauss-Kahn (right above) didn’t have the backbone to defend the rescue package that saved Korea from default and an Argentine-style depression. Instead the MD told sob-stories about how the IMF refused to loan money to countries which included cuts in children’s services in their programs. See how nice the IMF is now! 15 years ago they were killing babies, now they are saving them from faceless bureaucrats. Make sure to blast-fax that to all the NGOs and the New York Times. Bleh. Strauss-Kahn has otherwise been a good MD after the last two forgettables. But he sounded so craven it was embarrassing.

But I suppose he had no choice. Asians so loathe the Fund that they are brink of building their own local version of it – the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI). 13 years ago the IMF was able to sink this idea, because Asia was broke and the US was the ‘indispensible nation.’ Now, the world’s cash is in Asia, and its debtors are in the West. The Fund can’t play so hard, and CMI represents a genuine threat to institutional relevance. Hence the peace offering at Asia 21.

2. The conference didn’t say too much you wouldn’t already know from reading the (required) FT and Economist, but at least Asians seem to be realizing the West won’t import as it did before and that the US stimulus was essentially sterilized by cuts in local, state, and consumer spending. This is progress. Two years ago, when the crisis started, the first instinct was to ignore the depth of the crisis in Asia’s major export markets and just wait for things to return to the 2000s status quo: massive overconsumption (and debt) in the US and much of the EU, coupled with a huge run-up in dollars reserves in Asia. Smart observers like Martin Wolf have been arguing since the start that an Asian buying binge is the fastest, safest way out of the crisis, but Asian elites would have none of that. Now at least, I had the impression that they realizing that the wild imbalances of the post-AFC pseudo-expansion are risky to even to them. But I still didn’t see a commitment to reverse the current account surpluses, only to lessen them somewhat. Not even this Great Recession can dent the Asian reflex for mercantilism.

3. There was a great deal of fear that Greece might spiral into a sovereign debt crisis throughout the OECD, and much hand-wringing about how the West could be moved toward structurally lower fiscal deficits. As a political scientist though, I found the answers to the latter curiously technocratic and formal. None of the speakers note what seems to me the obvious, cultural, answer – generational expectations. In the EU, the biggest problem for balance is not corruption, better tax-collecing, the Common Agricultural Program; it is the mindset that the work is ‘oppressive’ beyond 35 hours a week and 55 years of age. It is cultural or socio-political expectations that are the real limits on fiscal seriousness. A ‘social-democratized’ population taught that generous government is a right has made it all but impossible to get Europeans to live within their means. In the US, the primary problem with balance is analogous: an anti-tax commitment on the right that borders on paranoia. I can’t think of any serious economist who believes the US can balance its budget in the medium-term without tax increases – the deficit is now $1 trillion, so please tell me how to fix that without more tax revenue? – but taxes have achieved a totemic significance on the right that makes them nearly impossible to raise despite the obvious mathematical case for them.

By contrast, it seems that Asian populations are willing to pay their taxes and accept less social welfare redistribution. We say that the West needs to learn to live within its means, Asia has some good examples of that. South Koreans want low taxes and lots of goodies like anyone else, but I have never seen, in the press or my students or colleagues here, the suicidal drive to spend without taxing that has become the curse of the contemporary West.

4. A quick tip to the IMF guys at these big conferences: maybe you shouldn’t clique up so much and be unfriendly to everyone else; that is why people think you are a big conspiracy. I defend the IMF all the time, but really, the IMF does bring some of the conspiracy thinking on itself. A little people skills would go a long way – how about not giving the impression that the rest of us are wasting your time? I have been to many conferences with IMF types (I wrote my dissertation on the Fund), and again and again I have seen them tie-up together in little knots, where they whisper (yes, whisper) among themselves, and generally not talk with the others as much. Not only is it the royal blow-off to the rest of us, it creates among the suspicious the perception of a disinterested priesthood. I guess global domination means they don’t have time to talk with some lowly political scientist. Hah!

Unrising Sun – Japan as the Austro-Hungarian Empire

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Perhaps the biggest Asian security news of the summer is the high-profile marker of the shifting tectonic plates out here – China’s surpassing of Japan as the world’s second largest economy. You know your society is in real trouble when being displaced like this is termed a “relief” by a fellow citizen on the New York Times op-ed page. Is anyone in Japan really relieved that China has pushed it aside this way? China’s meteoric growth is nerve-racking enough, but who wants to live in a society that wants to be eclipsed? To boot, how should Japan’s allies/partners on the China question (US, Korea, India) respond to a society that is “shrugging” over its decline?

So this made me think of the fin-de-siecle Austro-Hungarian empire. Maybe there is something romantic in the twilight pessimism of fading greatness coupled with high culture? I remember Poindexter asked in Revenge of the Nerds, ‘would you rather live in a society during its rise or its decline?,’  and maybe there is something lush, overripe, decadent, boozy, and deliciously self-conscious about watching one’s own tragedy (think about the character of Hayward from Of Human Bondage). Contrast this with the regular hysteria that greets the bout of American declinism that besets the US every generation. Americans go into neurotic fits, and start talking about moonshots, new frontiers, mornings in America, new foundations (Obama), etc. By contrast, Kingston wisely asks after yet another dreadful summer for Japan, can anyone govern it anymore? Increasingly you don’t need to be a Japan expert to think the answer is not really…

The sociological questions for Japan broached by this are beyond my skills, but the international consequences can’t be good. This slow eclipse of liberal, democratic, modern Japan can’t make Asia anymore secure. It will only bait China more, scare Korea more toward a separate regional deal with China, and pull the US deeper into Northeast Asia at a time when we desperately need to constrain defense spending and commitments. India, for all its ‘emerging’ potential, still can’t really compete with China as Japan might. In effect, this cedes regional order building to China: Japan won’t try, the US can’t afford to it, and India is still to0 immature to contest it. Normally we think of rising challengers battling leaders to primacy – Wilhelmine Germany v. Britain, the USSR v. the US. But in Asia at least, China is taking the game as much by the failures of the rest as by its own abilities. Note also, that as China takes over Asian leadership by default, it becomes impossible to test its real intentions.  Much of the debate over China is whether or not it is prepared to use to force in the future to get its way. Increasingly, it looks like we won’t know because the democracies are simply abdicating the game to it.

So I’ll ask the same question Kingston does, what needs to happen to get Japan back in the game? Have they really just dropped out to become the Switzerland of Asia?

Back from Africa – Quick Impressions

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So I admit this has nothing to Asian security, but off we went to southern Africa for what is likely one-time exposure to some of the most dysfunctional countries on the planet. We visited South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Mozambique. Here are some political science observations:

1. Passport-stamping to reinforce sovereignty. In all my travels, I don’t think I ever got stamped, photographed, or ID’d as much I did in Africa. Mozambique alone made me pay $80 for a ridiculously garish and oversized tourist permit, plus entry and ext stamps that took up two pages. But it occurred to me that for many of these states, just being a functional state is pretty d— challenging. Mozambique’s HIV infection is 21% and Maputo looks like Baghdad. So one subtle way to reinforce your ‘stateness’ is elaborate border controls.

2. African streetnames as the last bastion of Marxism. Nothing beats a relaxing stroll down Maputo’s Kim Il Sung Avenue, poking between the proliferating trash and yawning potholes, except perhaps scurrying as fast as possible away from Windhoek’s cringe-inducing intersection of Fidel Castro and Robert Mugabe Avenues. I used to think the apartheid South African government’s line about Marxist revolutionaries in the black front-line states was just an excuse for its front-line destabilization policy. But not after visiting these capitals and their national museums. The national museum of Namibia in Windhoek is a Marxist-Cold War throwback in tone, and Mozambique so completely transplanted the East Bloc-model, it still feels today like East Germany in Africa – crumbing concrete everywhere, half-finished rusting buildings, brownouts, purposeful disdain of ancien regime architecture, and even a scary, commie-inspired national logo with a AK-47 on it! Having grown up in the 80s, there was something vaguely familiar to all this stuff, but for the world growing up on globalization and iPods, maybe its time to take down down those pictures of Erich Honecker, huh?

3. Please stop trying to rip me off. This was probably the most depressing part of the experience. Although you are traveling in genuinely third world countries, your sympathy quickly dissipates when you are confronted with routine and blatant efforts to scam you at almost every turn. As a foreigner you are seen as a min-gold mine by just about everyone and you become a magnet for noxious money changers and street hawkers determined to ruin your day. After a few weeks, it becomes a depressing reflex to rudely blow off almost anyone speaking to you on the street, because you know it is a time-wasting scam. Taxi drivers, hostel owners, waiters, street kids and dealers, clerks of almost every variety, airport porters, etc, etc. – all of them seek to charge outrageous prices for faux, nonservices like you showing you where your luggage arrives.

4. White enclavisation. The safari companies run from one ‘white’ enclave to another, in a depressing recognition that the most tourists don’t want to see the black parts of the country and that these are likely too dangerous for a group of ignorant, western newbies. One after another, we hit Swakopmund, Walvis Bay, Vilankulos, and places like that, and they just look liked western resorts. About the only thing ‘African’ was the guy serving you drinks in the disturbingly neocolonial dining experience you regularly have in Africa – that is, hordes of obese white tourists ordering game meat from black waiters in white-owned restaurants ‘safe’ for the companies to take you to. Creepy!

5. Nature tourism is about all there is to do. With only one world-class museum in all of southern Africa, and a cultural life far below what you get in wealthier societies, basically all the tourists go to the bush. It really hit me when one traveler said to me, ‘yeah, we did Botswana in about a week – we hit Chobe and Okavango, and that’s basically all there is to see there.’ In other words, the white people fly in, run around the bush looking at water, flora & fauna, and rock formations, and then take off. You spend more time talking to the other white people in your safari truck then you ever do talking to the native black population of any of the places you visit. Even creepier, the tour companies have realized that the western tourists don’t really want to do that anyway. That’s why the companies bounce you from one resort to another like a chain across the landscape. You are never too far away from a bar that offers Jack Daniels and western food.

6. The Afrikaners are even creepier than you thought; conversely black South African restraint is astonishing. Invictus does a good job showing you how restrained the black majority was in South Africa after 1994, but you don’t realize how extraordinarily generous South Africa’s blacks have been till you visit Pretoria. It is littered, still, with all the old monuments to white domination, topped off by the astonishingly racist Voortrekker Monument. The Voortrekkers were the Calvinist, Dutch-descended Boers who broke from British control of the southern cape and ‘trekked’ inland in search of their (slavery-practicing) ‘free states.’ All of this is presented in the most heroic terms, whitewashing (literally), 1) that the Boers broke from the British primarily because they wanted to continue to enslave Africans, not because of trumped-up British high-handedness, and 2) the massive cultural disruption the Boers brought to black tribes in their path – instead the museum literally says the “Voortrekkers brought the light of civilization to the interior.” The Battle of Blood River is portrayed, inevitably, as a triumph of Christianity and sturdy white rural folk – the marble imagery is brutally classical – and vindication of the civilizing mission.

Honestly, I found the presentation shocking, appalling. It was like some museum glorifying the Old South had somehow survived. Stunned, I asked our black tour guide what he thought. I told him that in Eastern Europe, after the revolution, they tore down all those statues of Lenin, and the Iraqis pulled down Saddam’s statue. But he was remarkably stoic about it. He genuinely seemed concerned that whites in South Africa feel like they belong. That was probably the most impressive sentiment I saw in our entire trip. If I were the president of South Africa, I would dynamite the Voortrekker Monument immediately, even if I weren’t black.

Summer Reading – We’re off to Africa – Back in August

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I have been blogging non-stop for a year and several months. I need a break for the summer. So we are off on safari to the southern cone of Africa. Too bad the State Department has a travel warning for Kenya, but Victoria Falls, the Serengeti, and Olduvai Gorge sound pretty great…

So here is some reading for you. The following is heavy beach stuff – i.e., it is not so dumb for the beach that it wastes your time, but it is not so serious that you need to read it with a pen and can’t take it to the beach to begin with.

1. Rising Sun, by Michael Crichton, 1992. This is the ‘best’ book I have read about Asia in the last year, in that I enjoyed it a lot for the sheer paranoia and camp value of it. If you want to read seriously about Asia, there are lots of good books out there, but nothing gets to Western paranoia about ‘rising Asia’ in such an entertaining way as this. I remember reading 20 years ago, when people actually believed it. It freaked me out then too, but now, it is just a laugh riot: Japanese cowboy-wannabees buying up the Great Plains, the Japanese businessmen ‘Tuesday meeting’ where they control the US economy, omnipresent surveillance at work, sell-out American pols. It’s all there, so much campy goodness. It’s like the Red Dawn-version of Asian business. Who can’t enjoy this nationalist feeding frenzy that, today, looks irresponsibly badly researched? And no, the movie can’t replace the sheer camp, japanophic paranoia of the book.

2. The Conservative Soul, by Andrew Sullivan, 2006. This is the best book on US conservatism I have read in a long time. I used to think of myself as a conservative in the 90s, but W was so bad, that I drifted. This is the best analysis of what happened. I see myself as conservative in temperament, but disgusted with the course of the Republican Party in the last decade. Bush was a nadir in the history of the presidency. Many serious conservatives know this. Sullivan and David Brooks particularly played a critical socratic gadfly role for the American right during the Bush years. Occasionally I watch Fox for an ‘ideology fix,’ and I leave consistently disturbed at what passes for conservative commentary on the right’s central media organ. But I left the book saddened. Sullivan’s image of the conservative as doubter and skeptic was accurate to my mind, but also enervating and tragic. It presents what Charles Lindblom famously called ‘muddling through’ – depressingly mundane enough – plus, a tragic eye thrown backward on what we have lost both in civilization and in our own personal lives. This vastly transcends the Fox-Palin variant that has taken over in the US with the Tea Party and such. It is as insightful as Lind or Phillips’ work, but much philosophically richer.

3. China Rising, by David Kang, 2008. Ok, this one is a little academic, but it is the best title I have read on Asia in awhile, and that is all I read these days. Way too much of the literature on Asia is journalistic and boosterish, with titles like ‘China will rule the world soon,’ or the ‘inevitable power shift.’ Too often, CNN-style trend-spotting substitutes for analysis, and I troll through far too much of that c— everyday in my daily reading. Yawn. I am sick of being told about power shifts, tectonic changes, new orders, etc. in an easy journalistic fashion (maybe that includes my blog…). How about some rigorous analysis for a change? Kang is one of the best Asian IR scholars, and I think this book gets a lot right, even if China worries me more than him.

4. Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond, 2005. If you haven’t read this, then you have missed one of the most important popular social science books in the last decade. The prose is elegant. The case work exciting, new, and reasonably convincing. But most importantly, it is good macro-theory, which is so rare these days. Macro-theory is easy; anyone can pose as Hegel or Marx and claim to ‘unlock’ world history, with just a few variables, but usually it is self-serving bunk (think religious fundamentalism, e.g.). Diamond actually does it convincingly, and he can reach the non-social scientist. You’ll never get a better explanation for the sad fate of so many indigenous peoples. It can be heart-breaking.

5. Civilization, by Kenneth Clarke, 1969. I am an amateur in art, but if I read the above stuff all day, my head would explode – so here is something that has absolutely nothing to do with Asian security or US foreign policy. Clark connects meaning to art in way that really helps you understand why so much art is ‘great’ when you really don’t know why yourself. You’ve heard the Mona Lisa is amazing your whole life, but it just looks like a smiling woman, right? I have this same problem, which is why I am a social scientist I imagine. But Clark will walk you through it, teach you what you don’t see in so much of what you have been told is a ‘classic.’ By the time you finish, you’ll think about just how pointless your profession really is compared to the timelessness of the something like Chartres or Guernica.

 

I will try to post a bit from the travels, but I imagine that will be hard. Check back again in August.  REK

The Chiang-Mai Initiative is Freaking Out the IMF

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For some basic details on the IMF’s relevance in this post-Great Recession world, try here. Or read the IMF’s own publication, Finance & Development, which obsessively navel-gazes over the IMF’s own role.

So last month, I was a selectee for an internal IMF research project on its continuing relevance in Asia. Yikes! That should set off alarm bells. Neither the cover letter nor the interviewer mentioned the Chiang-Mai Initiative (CMI), but it was clear as day if you know about Asian attitudes toward the IMF. In short they loathe it. In fact, they loathe it so much, they want to build their own local version. After the Asian financial crisis (AFC), Japan proposed an “Asian Monetary Fund” (AMF), which the US shot down. At the time, the US was the indispensible nation at the end of history. What all that ‘America-is-awesome’ rhetoric really meant was that we were the uncontested hegemon with our fiscus in order, so we could push the Washington Consensus pretty hard. Today though, the US is a mess, and Asia is feeling its oats. So here we are again.

It was pretty easy to see from the questions that the IMF is really nervous about this. CMI is basically the AMF warmed over, although no one wants to come out and say so. Asians want it, because when the AFC hit, the IMF conditions on the bail-outs were tough. But unsurprisingly they were necessary – really necessary actually. Asian economies are far too export-dependent, mercantilist, corrupt, and oligarchic, and the Fund helped somewhat loosen the death-grip of politically-connected conglomerates on the economies out here. As usual, the Fund was demonized for providing good advice that was necessary. One reason why the AFC was so short, and the region’s economies bounced back so fast, was the IMF’s necessary pain. But no one ever thanks the Fund. It’s far easier to blame it for domestic political point-scoring.

So this time, the Asians are going to create their own currency pool, with their own Asian rules – whatever that means. In a way, one could see as part of the Great Recession-inspired fantasy of ‘de-coupling.’ (Tell me how you decouple from globalization and not fall behind lightning fast?) But they say, Asia should look inward, with its own rules and such. The irony, of course, is that conflict has already erupted between the likely lenders (China and Japan) and the likely borrowers (ASEAN) over what the rules over the loans should be. It’s the clash over conditionality all over again – except far more demur and behind-closed-doors, because of ‘ASEAN Way’ sensitivities that Asian countries should not publically criticize each other (lest that open the door for Western lecturing and preening). Asian leaders love the CMI for the distance it creates from the West and the Fund, but the fight over rules-set will mirror those of the Fund. The other big benefit for Asia, or rather for its elites, is that an neo-AMF/CMI will be far kinder toward ‘state-capitalism’ – all the rage now, as it is supposedly superior to liberal economics. The CMI will provide bail-outs and conditionality which push Southeast ASEAN borrowers to modernize as Northeast Asian donors have – directed state investment, aggressive mercantilism, (semi-)closed politics.

This is unfortunate to my mind for two reasons:

1. Obviously, propping up authoritarians capitalism has an anti-democratic ring to it. The last thing, politically, that Southeast Asia needs is more cheerleading to concentrate political-economic power in a small, almost-closed elite. Insofar as the Fund promotes economic neoliberalism, there has always been an oblique pressure to openly politically therefore as well. This will now be lost, as the CMI is certain to follow the ‘ASEAN Way’ of no political commentary.

2. If you bracket this political concerns, there are clear economic worries. A CMI fractures the global financial system, just as the proliferation of free trade areas in Asia is fracturing the WTO universal trade system, and Chinese pressure increasingly threatens to regionalize the Internet. This year’s ‘multilateralization’ of the CMI means it is now a genuine systemic-institutional threat to the Fund. This is almost certainly the proximate cause of the worried IMF survey on its relevance.

So I felt bad for the Fund (who EVER says that?) All the questions from the interviewer were about the Fund’s continuing relevance, what its role in Asia should be, and perhaps most telling, should it have a role? That inspired real discomfort.  I can only imagine what interviewer heard from Koreans – who feel they were turned upside down by the IMF even though the bail-out probably prevented street rioting – and Indonesians- where the AFC did end in street rioting and government collapse. The prime minister of Malaysia at the time even said the AFC was caused by ‘Jewish speculators.’

I should only add in the Fund’s defense that when I talk with Koreans and other Asians, most have no good sense of what the IMF should do differently, because most have no grasp of what it actually does. All will tell you that it should reform, but like most of the anti-globalization protestors, their ideas are vague or indicate that they don’t understand the, albeit highly technical, IMF. (I even wrote my dissertation on this topic.) Most seem to think that the bailouts should come cost- and change-free, but all that does it move the costs somewhere else – to the OECD taxpayers providing the Fund’s bailout resources – nor does it help clear up the problems that created the crisis in the first place. The great irony is that although Asians loathe the Fund, they actually learned the appropriate lessons from it in 1997 and were much better able to withstand the next crisis in 2008, the Great Recession. Pity the Fund. It does its job pretty well, but everyone hates it anyway…

“Somebody’s Got To Stand Up to the Experts,” or Why US R&D Outsources to Asia

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Now that I have worked in Asian education for awhile, one question I field again and again from Americans concerns why Asians seem to test so much better than non-Asian Americans. (How much better?: “an Asian American student must score a whopping 450 points higher on the combined math and verbal sections of the SAT to have the same chance of being admitted as an African American applicant.”) But the difficulties of Asian education – conformism, authoritarianism, rote-learning – are well-known and should close the gap, right? Increasingly, I think the culture in which the system is nested matters, and here too much of the US is downright wacky: Christian paranoia increasingly makes it hard for US teachers to do their job.

Nothing channels your standard issue, Bush-era Christianist lunacy like the title quotation from the 2010 Texas school board’s resistance to evolution in state textbooks: "somebody’s got to stand up to experts." Hah! That’s just classic: an educator saying, ‘Boy, all the readin’ and writin’ done wrecked yoh mind…’ Here’s the link. So we have an educator warning against too much education, insofar as deep education makes one an feared ‘expert’ in some area, like, oh, biology or physics. The irony of an educator declaiming ‘too much’ education is so rich, it would be comic if it weren’t so disturbing…

It’s the decline of western civilization here, folks. You wanna know why biotech jobs flee to Singapore and South Korea? You wanna know Asians outscore Americans time and again in science?

Well, if you treat science as an Islamo-liberal conspiracy to hide Obama’s Kenyan communist plot to impose evolution through Nazi-health care on God-fearing patriots rooted in the good earth of the heartland, then there you go. You think the Chinese or Indians are having science-stunting debates in which elected officials, not licensed experts, decide what ‘science’ is? They’d laugh you out of the room over here if you tried that.

Or how about the picture above, available here from the Creation ‘Museum’ in Kentucky? (Sorry, but  I had to put museum in quotes. I visited it last year – at $20 a ticket! – and it’s basically US Protestant creationism. They couldn’t even be ecumenical enough to include Catholics. What a hoot!) Anyway, the above pic is a recreation of the Garden of Eden. Find on the bottom, about one-third in from left, a penguin. Yes, I couldn’t believe that either when I first saw it in the museum, and it sure takes guts to even include the ‘Garden of Eden penguin’ in the museum’s advertising. Penguins were running around Mesopotamia 6000 years ago; it’s all about the ideology, baby!

If that doesn’t answer your question about US decline, I don’t know what will…

Global Security in 7 Minutes! (3. Solutions)

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The following are from remarks I made in a lightning 7 minute whirlwind on global security threats. Part one is here; part two is here.

Let’s start with three institutional/multilateral solutions that aren’t:

1. The UN and regional organizations. Pity the UN. I want it to work as much as anyone. I used to belong to the UN Association of the USA, but one must be brutally honest that the UN is not a global security architecture that works. UN collective security has only been used twice (Korea, the Gulf War), and in Korea it happened only because the Soviets were boycotting the UNSC at the time. Never again would they make that mistake. But what has the UN done about Iran, terrorism, NK, or, arguably, Israel? The UN has no army; it cannot raise money independently. Its few military engagements have been ham-strung by the dual-key command problem. UN peacekeeping’s record is mixed at best. Robust missions are generally rejected; the blue-helmets never have the weapons, logistical support, or great power commitment to really be decisive. To be fair, the UN was designed to fail. The states wanted a weak body unable to infringe on their sovereignty and dependent on them for resources. You get what you (don’t) pay for. The same applies to regional bodies like the OAS or AU. Even NATO now is a joke. Does anyone really believe European members would war for islamizing Turkey, or that the US would rescue Lithuania from the Russians?

1.a. The greatest disappointment here must be the EU. It is the most robust international organization out there, so inevitably hopes for multilateralism as a security solution look to the EU. And what a lost opportunity! Nothing would improve freedom and democracy in the world so much as a second liberal superpower. That would take the US face off of democracy promotion. It would help the US climb down from its extreme GWoT overextension. But the EU just cannot seem to get its act together, and the Greek flap is just an embarrassment. There is no integrated military command, no united nuclear command, no common foreign policy voice, no single UNSC seat. I would trust the Korean military to be more professional and committed at this point than any EU military but France and Britain. This is simply pathetic. The EU is becoming greater Switzerland, unable to act meaningful to defend the values it so regularly espouses.

2. Denuclearization/Disarmament. This strikes me as a chimaera. First, the nuclear-haves not meaningful moved toward denuclearization, despite a 40 year NPT commitment to do so. This is why proliferation is a problem to begin with; the nuclear-haves brought this on themselves by cheating on their NPT requirement. Obama may be trying to earn his Nobel Prize with serious denuclearization, I’ll believe it when I see it. Cuts to zero by the great powers would not eliminate the technology, but simply open them to blackmail; this flies in the face of so much of our experience about IR. Second, nukes, lasers, tanks, etc. are all just technologies. As the NRA likes to say, people kill, not guns. Consider nukes in Korea. No one would care if SK has them; everyone cares that NK has them. Unless everyone could be verifiably disarmed, this is wishful thinking.

3. League of Democracies. This has been my great hope the last few years, but it seems like this is fading now. I really thought a close friendship and working partnership among the liberal democracies could really help stability by making clear to rogues (and China) that there was a common front, that you can’t pick off democracies here and there and play them against each other. But this has failed. The democracies just do not seem to be able or willing to work together on security. The EU is a mess; Japan and Korea can’t talk to each other. Consider the piracy issue – tailor made for liberal democratic cooperation, but it hasn’t really happened, and that is an easy issue compared to tough ones like Taiwan or NK.

So, call me totally unimaginative, but below is the best I’ve got:

4. National power: the US . The US is the clear backstop for security since the Gulf War. This worked for awhile in the 1990s. The US budget was improving, and others were content to free-ride on the US. Simultaneously, American exceptionalism has always provided ‘last best hope for mankind’ narrative of US power that justifies and glorifies the US use of force to Americans. In other words, Americans were tempted by empire, while others were content to let them reach for it (because it was cheaper). This system, of great power quiescence and superpower exertion could continue, but it requires the great powers start paying for the US to be the policeman. The US is broke now – $9T debt and $1T budget deficit. You just can’t be the colossus when your population won’t pay for it. In the context of Korea, I often tell my Korean students that the US is so broke now, that in the next few years, Korea can either choose to pay for almost all of USFK, or the US will probably retrench, because the money just isn’t there anymore. The same applies more broadly; if you want to keep the US globocop (because you don’t want to go to Afghanistan yourself), then you will probably have to start paying it. QUICK PREDICTION: No will accept this, and the US will eventually retrench. That includes the hollowing out of NATO, as well as the US withdrawal from Korea.

5. Economics: Globalization. Thomas Barnett has influence my thinking a lot here. He regularly argues, like Friedman, that trade brings with it all sorts of pacifying effects. He doesn’t think a war with China is likely, because globalization is remaking China by connecting it with the world. So there is a race here, can the world globalize enough to build common interests in stability for trade, before the US hegemon, currently backstopping the order, runs out of cash and energy to keep doing it? This is a great master’s thesis waiting to be written.

If you noticed the paucity of good ideas, it is true. I don’t really have any. I think the world is becoming more and more complex, because of globalization and rising middle powers with a big prestige grudge toward the West. The Kantian-Europhilic vision of an international order that maintains peace through collective security is bogus. It is really premised on US power. Without the US, there would have been no UN involvement in Bosnia, the Gulf, Korea, etc. You can dress up US power in blue-helmets and euros, but ultimately, it is the US nation-state, not some collaborative/cooperative/mutual security organization that has done the organizational work and most of the fighting when it came to it. Given how much trouble the US has now (its deficit is the same size as its national security spending), I think retrenchment is coming. Such ‘multipolarity’ may feel more ‘just’ and less ‘imperialist’ to the risers, but it will almost certainly be more chaotic – as it already is if you compare the 1990s to the 2000.