Category Archives: Foreign Policy

Just How Hard Will Afghanistan Be?: ‘We Issue Pens to Afghan Soldiers’

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Robert Kaplan has a nice new piece on Afghanistan over at the Atlantic. As usual, it is worth your time. Kaplan travels to places most of us in IR could only dream of visiting, so his work’s got a verite feel that our modeling and endless quotations of one another never do. (This is why people read him, not us.) Unfortunately Kaplan repeats the same motifs again and again, so its not clear if we are reading about Afghanistan, or just Kaplan’s expansive Americanist ideology again. In this way, he is becoming like the Kagans. You already know his answer: geography is a huge constraint on international action; America’s NCOs and infantrymen are kick-a—; we should win the GWoT at even huge expense; and US empire is probably good for the world, even if others resent it.

This time around, Kaplan lays the groundwork for Stanley McChrystal’s presidential bid. What is it with conservatives and the lionization of generals? Just read Kaplan’s purple prose. No one doubts Petraeus or McChrystal’s military talents, but I am pretty sure the US right’s cult of personality tendency for military machismo is unhealthy for the democratic process. Also, is it really admirable that McChrystal only sleeps four hours a day? How many of us could make good decisions living that way regularly? That told me less that McChrystal is super-committed, and more that he is overworked, under-resourced, and under-staffed. That sounds like the Bush-era GWoT all right…

But the money quote from Kaplan’s piece has go to be this from a NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) interviewee:

The recruits may not know how to read, but they are incredibly street-smart. They’re survivalists. Basic soldiering here does not require literacy. We give them a course in how to read and issue them pens afterwards. They take tremendous pride in that. In Afghanistan, a pen in a shirt pocket is a sign of literacy.

Note the use of the military verb ‘issue.’ Yes, the $.50 plastic pen you forgot in the coffee room yesterday is a formally issued piece of military hardware that signals prestige in the wider Afghan society. WOW.

Consider all the information that short anecdote conveys to you about education, poverty, and governance in Afghanistan:

1. Afghans are so poor, they can’t afford pens. ISAF has to issue them, and only qualified soldiers get them.

2. Afghans are so illiterate, no one really needs them.

3. Widespread illiteracy and poverty means the Afghan state, even down into the local level, cannot meaningfully connect to the citizenry.

If illiteracy is so widespread that pens are a mark of social prestige, then Afghanistan can hardly be expected to have complex institutions or national centralization. If you can’t write bills or receipts, what kind of markets will you have? If you can’t read laws from Kabul, much less correspond with state organs, how do you know what the rules are, where to pay taxes, etc? If education is that non-existent, how can you build an army, infrastructure, courts, etc?

None of this means the US and other wealthy states should not help Afghanistan. Indeed, your heart should break when you read that Afghans are issued pens. Nor is this a verdict on the utility of ISAF; maybe we should still go, despite the huge hurdles this very revealing anecdote makes clear.

But this anecdote told me more about how hard the Afghan operation really will be, than Obama’s surge speech last year, or any of the other fearless, ‘we-can-do-it’ prose of Kaplan’s piece. This is way beyond Iraq. Afghanistan doesn’t just need counter-terrorism/insurgency, it needs nation-building on an order that took the US two centuries to achieve.

Obama didn’t include anecdotes this revealing in his Afghan surge address last year. Did he white lie by not showing us just how high the slope is? It kinda seems like it…

Does US Health Care Reform Have Any Diplomatic Impact?

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It’s well known that domestic political failures/successes impact foreign policy-making ‘capital.’ This is especially so for the US president, because the US foreign policy-making process includes the legislative branch far more than in other democracies (much less in dictatorships). In other words, the US Congress intervenes a lot more in US foreign policy-making than the parliaments of other countries do, so presidents need more than the usual amount of congressional support to act overseas. You see this in lots of ways: Congress routinely derails trade deals, intervenes in US aid planning (to avoid abortion funding, or to support Israel, eg), pushes unsought weapons-systems on the Pentagon, demands recognition for preferred foreign constituencies (Armenians, Cuban exiles, Christians in China and the Middle East), etc. So the connection between ObamaCare’s passage and the general ability of Obama to push Congress to follow him later on foreign policy is real.

(Addendum: In European and Asian democracies, the legislature is rather deeply excluded; the executive branch runs the whole show. The logic is that when the country acts abroad, it should speak with one voice, and only the executive branch – the president or prime minister –can actually aggregate all the diverse interests in the country into that one voice.  Parliaments cannot do this realistically, as they are so fragmented among competing parties and egos.)

Mead argues that ObamaCare’s failure would have ‘crippled his presidency.’

1. Not really. Health care is such an overwhelmingly internal, domestic issue, I don’t think the specific foreign policy benefits are that high. States pursue all sorts of different health care strategies, and their linkage with specific foreign policy issues is minimal. ObamaCare won’t provide any dividends abroad on the burning immediate issues of US foreign policy, like Israeli settlements, Afghan or Mexican corruption, China’s currency, Iraqi elections, etc.

But it does send some oblique signals:

2. It does bring the US into line with the OECD norm that when countries get rich enough, they are supposed to provide near-universal health care as a basic gesture of ‘social justice.’ One in six Americans didn’t have health insurance, and any American travelling abroad has probably tried, awkwardly, to explain that one away to skeptical interlocutors from other OECD states.

So in this way ObamaCare pulls the US toward the global normative consensus of what a good society looks like; it helps make the US look ‘civilized.’ It aids Obama’s stated goal to return the US to moral authority after W and restock its soft power. It therefore helps the US shame and criticize illiberal states more effectively, because it is less vulnerable to hypocrisy charges. (The US embrace of gun ownership and the death penalty, e.g., make the US a less compelling advocate of the rule of law and state restraint. The US move toward torture similarly undermines the US as an opponent of it.)

3. It does signal that the US will have a harder and harder time maintaining a huge defense posture. The more the welfare state grows, however noble the cause, the more its spending will eat into defense and diplomacy spending

4. It does improve Obama’s domestic political capital and general standing as a powerful POTUS who can get things done. This will increase his leverage in Congress, and perhaps with democratic leaders overseas too. He should be able to more successfully push controversial foreign policy initiatives through Congress, like the Korean-US trade deal or a tougher line on Israel. Reputation and prestige matter in IR, and looking like a winner helps bluff others.

Revaluation Downside: Low-Cost Chinese Goods Help America’s Poorest

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My big concern is that all the focus is on the negative side of China’s undervalued currency. Krugman (above) and others, correctly, complain that it artificially reduces US competitiveness. If the yuan floated, the price of US goods in China would slide dramatically. Rationalist Chinese consumers would move toward suddenly cheaper US goods, and that gets you the export boom Obama talked up in the State of the Union. (Although Asian buyers are stubbornly nationalistic. The home country bias here is extreme, so don’t get your hopes up for some big US export surge to Asia. You’ve never seen as many Korean cars as you will in Korea…)

The downside of course is that the poorest Americans benefit most from the undervalued yuan, and their unorganized, underprivileged, and non-corporate voice is completely unheard in this debate. The poorer you are, the more it matters to you that Chinese imports at Walmart are super-cheap. By definition, the tighter your family budget constraint, the proportionally more valuable low consumer prices are. The undervalued Chinese currency ensures that all that consumer stuff imported from China and sold at the big box stores like Walmart and Target helps the poor stretch the dollars. The purchasing power of their fewer dollars goes farther when Chinese imports cost so little.

1. So the poorest benefit the most proportionally from the undervaluation. Why doesn’t that make the news? Because the poorest are also the least political organized, and consumer interests are generally far less well-organized than business interests. So US exporters, who would benefit from a weak dollar, scream, and Congress listens. US consumers benefit enormously from a strong, especially overvalued, dollar. But their voice is disaggregated and diffused across the country, compared to the concentrated corporate power of exporters. Consumer gains from a cheaper Chinese-Walmart stuff is far smaller and diffused than the steep and concentrated pain of exporters suffering from a strong dollar. This is a classic protectionist response: gains are diffused, hard to see, and enjoyed by the weakest, while pain is concentrated, easy to indentify, and felt by the politically privileged.

None of this means that the yuan isn’t overvalued. It is, and the world’s largest economies clearly have a systemic responsibility to let their currencies float. The distortions coming from China’s currency are downright bizarre, with China’s foreign exchange reserves at levels never seen in the history of finance before. But if you wonder why DVD players that used to cost $20 at Walmart suddenly cost $30, now you’ll know. And while you, the middle class reader, might not care because that is within your disposable income range, recall that the poorer you are, the more that extra $10 means. The more overvalued the US dollar, the more America’s poorest are helped.

2. The temperature is rising on China’s currency. The US Congress is starting to seriously pressure the US Treasury to formally label China a ‘currency speculator.’ DoT must once again decide in mid-April. Krugman (above) got the ball rolling on the argument that the US should finally come out and openly accuse China of manipulation for its nationalist/mercantilist trade purposes. And just about everybody seems to agree that the yuan is overvalued. Just how undervalued is the yuan? 49% (!!) according to the Economist and 40% according to the Peterson IIE. For what it’s worth, I certainly agree with these estimates. I don’t think anyone really believes the dollar currently reflects its real purchasing power in Asia. US goods are ridiculously expensive in Korea; a fifth of Jack Daniels costs about $40!

3. All these Asian countries want their currencies undervalued because of the nasty lesson they learned in the Asian financial crisis. Most Americans don’t know this at all, it seems. 15 years ago, Asians did not have the dollar reserves to defend their currencies and when capital flight hit, these economies were turned upside down. Indonesia’s government collapsed into anarchy, Thailand lost something like 1/3 of its GDP, and South Korean couples were donating their wedding rings for gold to the government to pay its foreign debts! In short, the region got turned upside down/inside out, and everybody out here remembers this, while Americans just missed it altogether. So afterwards, the Asians did exactly what the DoT and the IMF told them to – they balanced their books and stocked up dollars in case there would be another crisis.

4. Here is good background on the conflict; try this too. To place the China currency evaluation in the global context, read this excellent introduction to the current problems of the global economy, specifically the problem of ‘imbalances.’ In brief, the US and Mediterranean countries are spendthrifts now carrying huge piles of debt, while Germany, China, and other Asians are overthrifty supersavers. So the broke Americans have no more money to spend to prime the global economy, and the supersaver Asians should fill in the gap by buying a lot. The more stuff they buy, the more people will be hired to make all that stuff they are buying. This will reduce unemployment. So the supersavers are the key to getting global unemployment down, because they have the cash to go on a spending spree.

Korea’s Slow Boiling Demographic Crisis

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Year Total fertility rate Rank Percent Change Date of Information
2003 1.56 193 2003 est.
2004 1.26 218 -19.23% 2004 est.
2005 1.26 214 0.00% 2005 est.
2006 1.27 213 0.79% 2006 est.
2007 1.28 205 0.79% 2007 est.
2008 1.2 216 -6.25% 2008 est.
2009 1.21 217 0.83% 2009 est.

 

This week on the radio, I talked about the rapidly aging population of Korea and its effects on Korea’s foreign relations. Please see the transcript below.

The above chart is available here; it is based on CIA data available here. ‘Total Fertility Rate’ means an average Korean female’s total number of children in her lifetime. ‘Rank’ indicates where the ROK fits among the 223 states and entities ranked by the CIA in terms of total children per female. Korea has one of the lowest replacement rates in the world. Note that even North Korea’s replacement rate is higher!

You hardly need to a be a political scientist to see the impact of population. Most of the time, people think of overpopulation as the great issue. In the 70s of course, we talked about a ‘population bomb,’ and Charelton Heston told us that Soylent Green is made of people. For the ur-classic in this area, read Malthus (the Norton Critical is superb). But for wealthy countries, the big deal is the opposite – aging and slow depopulation. (For a good introduction to the “Demographic Transition,” try ch. 19 of this.)

For IR the ramifications link directly to national power. Korea has very clear aspirations to great powerdom. It desperately wants to catch up to the weakest, flagging great powers like Japan, Russia or France. And it might; particularly if it can unify successfully sometime soon. But without people this  is simply impossible, and the collapse of Korean fertility portends all sorts of problems, not least of which is the slow loss of ability to climb the G-20 ranks. To see just how bad depopulation can ravage national power, look at Russia, which is literally imploding. Look here, at the chart at the bottom, to compare the ROK’s population trends to its big neighbors.

Dramatic population contraction will halt Korea’s otherwise successful rise the up the G-20 ranks, and provoke a nasty, divisive ‘culture war’-style domestic debate on immigration (somewhere Glenn Beck is smiling). Korea is one of the world’s most ethnically homogenous countries; only about 2% of the resident population is foreign. Immigration here is mostly a work-value and bride-importing affair. Very few (like me) actually reside permanently here.

All this is going to have to change though if Korea really wants to be a great power. Unless Korean women can be dramatically re-incentived (discussed in the transcript) to child-bear, and a lot, Korea will either have to become a multicultural society with sustained immigration (most likely from Southeast Asia), or content itself to stagnation and perhaps even decline. Japan is interesting case here, as it faced exactly the same choice in this generation. It selected decline and cultural integrity over growth and cultural pluralism. Japan’s population growth has ground to a halt; its average age is rising fast; and Russian-style de-population may have already begun (Wiki has a nice entry on this.) This dilemma is Korea’s future too; my guess is that Korea will choose the cultural integrity and decline route like Japan. I don’t think Koreans will be ready for awhile, if ever, to endorse the mass immigration that sustains US superpowerdom.

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TRANSCRIPT – DR. ROBERT E. KELLY, PUSAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

BUSAN E-FM: “MORNING WAVE”

MONDAYS, 8 AM

March 22, 2010

BeFM:

Professor Kelly comes to us each Monday to talk about big issues in Korean foreign affairs. And this week we are going to discuss Korea’s declining birth rate and its impact on Korean foreign policy. Hi, Dr. Kelly. This is not a topic we normally think of when discussing foreign relations.

REK:

That’s right, but Korea’s demography is changing so much and so fast, that it is in fact having an unanticipated impact on Korean foreign relations. You may have noticed that last week the government of Cambodia legally prohibited its nationals from marrying Koreans. I have never heard of such a law before, and it made headlines here too.

BeFM:

Yeah, I did see that. I was fairly surprised also. What was that all about? Who bans marriage?

REK:

The Cambodian government is worried that Koreans are ‘bride-hunting’ for poor women in Cambodia, and fears that this is a cover for human trafficking. So in this way, we see the rapidly contracting birth rate of native Koreans impacting diplomacy. Most Koreans are aware that the average Korean woman produces around 1.2 children. There is an emerging baby gap.

BeFM:

Right. But so what? If women and families don’t want to have a lot of children, why is that a problem? Why do people call this a crisis?

REK:

You said it exactly. The declining birth rate is in fact a marker that Korea is a freer place. Korean women are more in control of their reproductive decisions than before, which is certainly a good thing. However, for fairly obvious reasons, some children are still necessary, if only to be sure that the country still exists in a hundred years. And here is where the low birth rate is a collective or national problem, even if it reflects an individual good. It is a tough dilemma.

BeFM:

So how many children does Korea actually need?

REK:

Well, in the study of population, or demography, the traditional figure required to maintain a population over time is 2.2 children per female. This is called the replacement rate. The female must replace both herself, and the males in her society. Her husband obviously cannot have children. So that is two children right there. But other people also do not replace themselves, so the average women must actually have 2.2, not just 2, children. For example, permanently unmarried singles, children who die young, or homosexuals are also not replacing themselves.

BeFM:

I see. So why aren’t Korean women replacing at that rate anymore?

REK:

For fairly common reasons connected to modernization. As countries get wealthier and more liberal, women become more empowered. As they do, they delay marriage until later in life, and they have fewer children when they do. Child-bearing of course gets more risky as one ages. This is a pattern we have seen across wealthy countries. Italy too, for example, has a birth rate well-below replacement, and faces a similar slow-boiling demographic crisis.

BeFM:

This sounds like you are blaming women. That seems kind of unfair.

REK:

It certainly looks that way, but women by definition carry the greater, biological burden of reproduction. That in itself is unfair, I suppose. But Korea can make it easier for women to raise children. Other countries have experimented with flexible work hours for new mothers, as well as child-care facilities at work, so that woman can stay in the workforce. That last idea is partic-ularly effective, as parents are deeply uncomfortable with physically distant day-care services. New mothers especially want their children nearby. Quality daycare at work boosts birthrates by reducing the difficult trade-off between work and motherhood that is so common in Korea.

BeFM:

Ok. I get it. So what does this have to do with foreign policy?

REK:

Well, another way fill the gap of missing Koreans is to import people from other countries and koreanize them. So if you can’t birth more Koreans, then how about asking people to come and join your polity? In other words, immigration. The US, for example, has kept its average national age low basically by importing people. As in Korea, Americans with wealth and education have fewer children, but the ensuing baby gap is filled by immigrants. By contrast Koreans are deeply unsure about immigration. What immigration there has been, is frequently so focused on the birth-rate problem that it is more properly called bride-importing than immigration.

BeFM:

So immigration is probably a big coming issue in Korea foreign policy?

REK:

I think so. The treatment of foreign brides in Korea and their multicultural children is clearly growing into a major political issue now. It’s in the newspapers a lot, and the debate on multiculturalism more generally is firing up. My own university, Pusan National, is going to have its first major conference on this in a few months. But obviously immigration raises all sorts of diplomatic questions. Home countries are likely to worry about their immigrants, as Cambodia’s decision last week showed. And immigrants usually keep old ties for at least a few generations. Now, most immigration into Korea comes from Southeast Asia, and immigrant treatment, particularly if there is abuse of foreign brides, is likely to provoke diplomatic tension.

BeFM:

Ok. Well, are there any other effects of Korea’s demography on its foreign policy?

REK:

One big one – national power. Strong countries need growing, young populations. Russia today is a good example of the slow erosion of national status if your population implodes. Russia’s population shrinks by 700,000 people a year. You can’t be a great power unless you have the sheer numbers to really compete. Japan has the same problem; its population has been stuck around 130 million for the last 20 years. By contrast the US grows by something like 2% a year. So if Korea really wants to climb the ranks of the G-20 and compete against the likes of Britain, France, and Japan, it needs a young and growing population. This is not the case right now.

BeFM:

So what should we do?

REK:

One thing Korea should not do is blame its women. I saw a commercial on Arirang TV the other day telling women that it is their national duty is to have children, not just pursue financial security. Such divisive, male-oriented rhetoric will only provoke unnecessary gender conflict with Korea’s modernized women. Much better would be work rules to ease the work-children trade-off potential mothers dislike so much, especially on-site child-care. Also a major national discussion on immigration would help. Perhaps Koreans would prefer a declining birth rate to serious immigration; Japan does. This will slowly reduce Korea’s G-20 role. But that is price Japan prefers, because it fears immigration will be very culturally disruptive. Koreans may think the same way. We just don’t know Korea’s preference yet, because the issue is so new and the national debate has not really begun.

There’s No US-Israel ‘Crisis’ — It’s just Regular Old Alliance Politics

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I can’t be the only one who thinks this whole got quickly overbaked – one small step in a well-established, well-publicized endeavor leads to the biggest crisis among friends in decades? Regardless of your opinion of Israeli West Bank behavior, settlement/colonization is a very widely-known and long-standing policy, so there’s little new here.

So this is less about Israel itself, and more about the changed US debate on Israel since the release of The Israel Lobby three years ago. Neocons who are nervous that elite opinion in the US is shifting against Israel saw an opportunity to push back before things go to far. And those pushing for more distance between the US and Israel saw an opportunity to push the issue into  mainstream credibility. But little of this impacts the real depth of the US-Israeli alliance (shared anti-Islamism, liberal democracy, fear of Iran). The whole thing smacks of inside-the-Beltway navel-gazing by people paid to hyperventilate. To rework Rahm Emanuel, never pass up an opportunity to manufacture a crisis.

1. Sure, Biden got snubbed. But ‘alliance politics’ are old hat. At least since the 70s, the US has been complaining that its allies don’t listen to it, that they don’t pay enough for their defense, that they freelance without asking the US for permission. Israel is just doing what lots of US allies have already done (which doesn’t mean it’s right, only that’s fairly typical). Consider that only two or three NATO allies now spend on defense what they they are treaty-obligated to spend (at least 2% of GDP). That includes really big ones like Germany, Italy and Canada. European allies have a pathetic 3 aircraft carriers between them. Or consider that the Europeans don’t want to go to Afghanistan, even thought they are treaty-obligated to do that too. Do we flip out about this every year? No. (Should we? Yes.) Or consider Mexico. Our closest ally in Latin America (since NAFTA)  has illegally exported 10-20 million of its poorest people to the US in the last generation, yet somehow we can’t get them take border security seriously. So why single out Israel so much for its bad behavior? Indeed, this has always been the biggest problem I have had with the Walt/Mearshiemer take on Israel (although I’m sure it’s not because of the idiot charge that they’re anti-semitic).

2. If you want America’s allies to behave better, then stop reaching for hegemony and start playing hard to get (Walt’s own idea btw, thereby increasing my confusion). US hegemony, or more specifically, our relentless celebration of it as America’s right because we are so awesome, tells allies that we love the top-dog slot so much, that we’ll never pull back from more involvement, more force, more shadow world government. This is my biggest beef with the Kagans, Robert Kaplan, Irving Kristol and the neocon persuasion generally. Just how much more do we have to spend on defense? How many more bases do we have to build? Kaplan even admitted that the US mission in Afghanistan is bleeding us white and better serves China than the US; but then he says we must go anyway! How can you possibly convince the allies to help if you say you’ll commit suicide before withdrawing…

This sort of attitude says that being the king-dog, lone superpower isn’t just good for US security or economy. Now it’s a part of our very identity. After three generations have been raised on the post-1940 National Security State, globe-spanning American exceptionalism is a part of who we are now (“God’s special mission for America,” to quote George W. Bush). Besides being exactly the forerunner of domestic tyranny the Anti-Federalists warned about way back in the 1780s, it also tells the world that the US will never abandon allies. Hence we cannot credibly threaten them.

3. Not only does this incentivize free-riding (Germany, Mexico), it also encourages misbehavior (Israel), because the US will never abandon its global role, because it loves it so much. This is (one) fatal flaw of the neo-con argument for US expansion. (The other is that we can’t afford hegemony much longer). Walt makes this argument regularly: if you want the allies to actually do what we tell them, then you have to be willing to cut them off once in awhile, to punish them for misbehavior. But given that NO ONE has the guts to cut Israeli aid on Capitol Hill, then the regular expectation should be Netanyahu-style misbehavior, not compliance. Think of Joe Lieberman and John McCain as enabling an alcoholic: why would Israel possibly stop if the consequences are absolutely zero? Ditto on Germany and defense spending.

Korea is a good comparison case here. US threats of alliance abandonment are far more believable here, because they are real. The size of US Forces in Korea (USFK) is in long-term decline. USFK is not tied into a larger multilateral framework like NATO, which would make it harder for the US to leave. Most Americans don’t know as much about Korea as they do our more culturally western allies, and if they do, they think rich Samsung-land should be able to defend itself. All these reasons cast doubt on the US guarantee to Korea. Koreans know this, and they know how much they need the US. As such, Korea is a far less troublesome ally to the US than most. By contrast, the Israelis or Germans know we aren’t going anywhere; too much of America’s self-identity as a totally awesome superpower is tied up a forward US presence in Europe and the Middle East. (Maybe there is a measurable relationship between cultural distance and credible threats of alliance abandonment; someone write that master’s thesis.)

4. The long-term structure of US foreign policy makes it all but impossible for individual initiatives, even from the POTUS himself, to change allied behavior. We tell Israel to be nice to the Palestinians once in awhile, while we simultaneously deepen our long-term position in the greater Middle East. Do you really think we can credibly threaten Israel with abandonment (a sanction for misbehavior) while US force structure so obviously say we won’t? As we build a huge string of bases that tells everyone – Jew, Muslim, Arab, Afghan, Persian – that we’ll be here for a long time? If you want the allies to burden share and follow orders, then stop enabling them through the endlessly sprawling national security state and endlessly expanding defense budget.

Can Walter Russell Mead Walk the US Right Back from Torture?

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Walter Russell Mead is an exceptional blogger in IR. If you don’t read him, you should. He can somehow write lengthy, intellectually rich, and sharply incisive posts on foreign policy almost everyday, while at the same time being one of the best diplomatic historians in the US. (Start here.) I am baffled, because my best posts take hours to write, and there is no way I could do my job well and simultaneously blog well every day. Even more amazing for a social science writer, some of his posts are genuinely moving, like this and especially the one I discuss below. Do these guys ever see their families, write even on Christmas morning, go to the movies? I just don’t know where the time comes from…

Perhaps most important politically is his conservatism. Quality conservative punditry was simply decimated by the Bush era. The rise of the Ann Coulter-Rush Limbaugh-Michelle Malkin-Glenn Beck-Sean Hannity set has done terrible damage. Glenn Greenwald has built an entire career just around lampooning and deconstructing this stuff, it’s so prevalent. And Fox News – so relentlessly craven before GOP power, so desirous of  grievance and anger, so aggressively loathesome of academia and learning – has just pushed me over the edge. As an example of the collapse of the intellectually rich conservative movement into partisan hackery, look at the great work of Irving Kristol – one the writers that thrilled my mind and pulled me into the conservative movement back in the 1990s. Then look at how low the son – once so promising as the founder of the Weekly Standard (WS) – has fallen, accusing the Justice Department last week of being the ‘Department of Jihad.’ I remember reading National Review in college, WS when I worked for a GOP congressman in the 90s, and then even Commentary after 9/11. I remember when WS was supposed to be the Right’s equivalent of the New Republic – smart, rooted in learning, not so partisan as to prevent re-consideration and flexibility. I scarcely look at that stuff anymore…

Given the right-wing echo chamber, built around Fox, talk radio, and shock-jock set, Mead plays a critical role, and I hope the pro-torture Right in the US will carefully read this. Money quotes:

The KGB undertook a ruthless and savage repression in Lithuania.  The old Gestapo prison came in handy; the communists tortured and murdered thousands of Lithuanians in padded, soundproofed cells just a few blocks from the city’s cathedral

Today the solitary confinement cells, the cells where prisoners were forced to stand in icy water and beaten brutally when they fell, the holding cells for the condemned and the execution ground are all open for visitors.  Garish and clunky Soviet high tech phones and communications devices are still in the guardrooms. [I am] standing in the cellar of the KGB prison, admiring the ingenuously designed torture cells, retracing the final steps of the prisoners on their journey from the condemned cells to the execution yard.

Visiting places like Lithuania, and seeing sights like the KGB/Gestapo HQ reminds me what the stakes are in American foreign policy.

What we do matters.  Developing American power and reinforcing its economic foundations at home, building alliances, promoting democracy, deterring aggressors: when we do these things well, people thrive.  When we fail, they die miserably, and in droves.

Hear, hear to the notion that US power is generally good for the world! I certainly agree. But maybe the Right will listen to Mead about why the US is a morally good power. It’s not some vague Hegelian metaphysics of ‘American exceptionalism’; it’s because of what we do and not do – like not torturing people like the Gestapo or KGB did, like giving people trials, even though we loathe them. Only willful blindness will allow you to feel the moral power of Mead’s description but not simultaneous sadness over Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo.

Mead’s salvo may be oblique, but it’s important, because he writes for the American Interest. Please tell the Right that torture is not some punchline, but an inversion of America’s moral identity.

The Big Annual US-Korean Military Exercise this Month

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This month is the big annual joint exercise between US Forces in Korea and the Korean military, the army particularly. I talked about this on the radio this week; if you are curious for an introduction to US-Korean military cooperation, check the transcript below.

These drills have shrunk dramatically over the years, mostly in an attempt to bring around the North. Also, as Korea has gotten wealthier, environmental restrictions have made it increasingly difficult and politically unpopular to put a 100,000 people and tanks into the countryside. West Germans used to complain about this too in the 70s and 80s. Try to imagine what, say, 100 M1-A1 tanks would do to a river valley. They weigh 65 tons each! So increasingly these exercises are actually computerized wargame scenarios.

Anyway, these exercise are less and less about maneuver warfare (the old story for the North Korea army), and more and more about what to do if North Korea implodes (or explodes, or whatever – no one really knows). They big concern for the US is how to prevent NK WMD from either being launched or smuggled out. For the South, it is how to prevent NK civil war and army mutinies, to restore civil order, feed the NK population, and capture the party elite before they spring for China. And of course, lurking in the background, undiscussed by everyone and never properly accounted for in the wargaming, is what happens if the Chinese army, the PLA, pushes south and collides with us coming north. Yikes…

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TRANSCRIPT – DR. ROBERT E. KELLY, PUSAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

BUSAN E-FM: “MORNING WAVE”

MONDAYS, 8 AM

March 15, 2010

 

Petra:

Professor Kelly comes to us each Monday to talk about big issues in Korean foreign affairs. And this week we are going to discuss the big US-Korea military exercises last week. Hi, Dr. Kelly.

REK:

Hi, Petra. Thanks for having me

Petra:

 

Thanks for being with us again today.

REK:

 

It’s my pleasure.

Petra:

So last week there were these big Korea-US military drills. It seems like these are so common, we don’t pay attention to them much anymore

REK:

That’s right. They are pretty regularized now. They get a little bit in the news each year, but not much more. Politically the most interesting thing for Korea is not the US participation actually, but how North Korea responds each year.

Petra:

Don’t they usually say this is practice for an invasion?

REK:

That’s right. They always denounce it as imperialism, but the calm or anger of their denunciation tells us a little about what is going on in Pyongyang.

Petra:

 

And this year they didn’t seem to say much.

 

REK:

That’s right. In fact, after last year, when the North was very belligerent on just about everything, their recent behavior is downright gentle by historical standards.

Petra:

So what purpose do these drills serve?

REK:

Well, they are essentially practice. The first exercise is called Key Resolve; the second is Foal Eagle. That title is to indicate the resolve of the US to fight for Korea. This a computerized wargame, in which various scenarios are ‘played.’ These scenarios are defensive in nature, although the increasingly focus on the possibility of North Korean collapse. That is why the North Koreans worry. Should the North’s government implode, the US and South Korean militaries need plans on the shelf about how to restore order, disarm the North Korean military, and prevent nuclear weapons from either being launched or slipped out of the country. These are the big areas of interest now.

Petra:

What about an Northern invasion of the South?

REK:

Yes, that is still drilled too, but most experts, both Korea and American, consider that extremely unlikely. In fact, I have never read any war scenarios at all for Korea that realistically predict a Northern victory today. As we all know, the North’s economy is a shambles, its people are under-fed, and its military equipment is increasingly obsolete. In fact, South Korea could probably win a war on its own without the US at this point. This is one of the big reasons Kim Jeong-Il sought nuclear weapons. The inter-Korean race – military, political, economic – is over and has been for 15 to 20 years now. And North Korea has lost, very decisively. Nukes are just a desperation tactic.

Petra:

So do we even need the exercises?

REK:

That’s actually a good question at this point. I think the answer is still yes, but North Korea is in so much trouble now that the US and South do not exercise nearly as much as the used to. There used to be four really large exercise each now. Now it’s more like two, and they are smaller. As you might imagine, it costs a lot of money to run these simulations. Almost 20,000 Americans, beyond the US Forces in Korea here already, are flown for several weeks. Tens of thousands of Koreans are mobilized too. That’s a lot of money, and increasingly, South Korea’s environmental laws make it difficult for huge numbers of soldiers to tramp all over the countryside. It’s quite a big show, although its size has declined in the last decade or so.

Petra:

I heard that the US is going to give up the command of the Korean military sometime soon. What’s that all about?

REK:

Yes, that’s true. Right now, the US military has legal authority over the South Korea military in wartime. The Korean military is integrated with the US military into what we call the Combined Forces Command, or CFC.

Petra:

But that’s going to be abolished or something, right?

REK:

It is supposed to be, in 2012. Former President Roh pushed for this. He sold this to the Korean public as a restoration of Korean sovereignty. Seoul received peacetime control of its military in 1994. Before then actually – many Koreans don’t know this – the US government was legally the permanent, commander in chief of whole Korean military. For obvious reasons of course, that looked like US colonialism, and Kim Il Sung used to say that all the time. So after the Cold War, and the withdrawal of Soviet and Chinese support for North Korea, peacetime authority was returned to Seoul. As said earlier, by the mid-90s, South Korea had essentially won the inter-Korean race. North Korea became increasingly isolated as its former communist patrons turned away. So the Northern threat diminished dramatically. This gradual demilitarization of domestic life also helped South Korea democratize more rapidly.

Petra:

But CFC retained wartime authority. I have seen that discussed in the media a little.

REK:

That is correct. If there were a war, the US would re-take control of the Korean military. From a Korean perspective, this sacrifice was worth it. By giving the Americans command of Koreans’ own military, this helped keep the Americans here and committed to Korea’s defense. But again, it looked somewhat imperialistic – a foreign power controlling your own army – and the South Korean left had complained for years about this.

Petra:

So President Roh negotiated an end to it…

REK:

That’s right. Roh was probably the most anti-American president Korea has ever had, and George Bush was quite unpopular here. So Roh marketed the abolition of CFC as a big deal. CFC is supposed to disappear in April 2012, but now Koreans are starting to get cold feet.

Petra:

Why?

REK:

Under Presidents Kim and Roh, relations with North Korea – the sunshine policy – seemed to be improving. CFC looked like a relic of the Cold War. But sunshine never really came together, and the North’s nuclear program has grown and grown. This helped put a conservative, Lee Myung-Bak in the Blue House, and the Lee people a lot more nervous about ending CFC.

Petra:

What do you think?

REK:

Well, it does make life easier for the Americans. It makes it easier for the Americans, if they want, to say they are not as tightly bound to Korean defense as they were. If I were a Korean I think I would be nervous. I think the political pleasure of ‘total sovereignty’ does not outweigh the military benefit of tying the Americans to Korea as tightly as possible.

Do Americans Know Anything about Korea beyond the North? Not so Much…

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Greetings Earthlings

On the radio this week, I spoke about Americans’ image and sense of Korea; the transcript is below. This is a big deal here. Korea has lately gotten quite excited about ‘public diplomacy,’ brand promotion, and soft power. You may recall that the Bush administration got big into this for a few years after the Iraq War and Guantanamo wrecked the world’s opinion of the US.

National ‘branding’ has always struck me as pretty ridiculous. A rose is a rose is a rose, and no cute advertising campaign is suddenly going to make people think differently about you. No amount cheesy ‘peace ambassadors’ or ‘socialist fraternity’ internationales conned people into believing the USSR was any less dangerous. In the same way, Bush hack Karen Hughes’ surreal photo-ops with Arab children could do nothing to change the US image in the Middle East that was being set everyday by the carnage in Iraq. The point being, you can’t do something dumb, have it blowback in your face, and then try to advertise or ‘rhetoric’ your way out of it. If the US wants to change its image with Arabs, killing fewer of them is the most obvious thing to do, not sending some flunky to smile on al Jazeera.

This skepticism applies to Korea’s efforts too. The overwhelming problem for Korea’s image is the North. This simply goes without saying. Newsweek put Kim Jeong Il in its ‘global elite,’ and I dare say most westerners couldn’t name another major Korean figure, political or otherwise. When Gallup recently asked Americans to name their favorite/least favorite countries, North, but not South, Korea was on the list. Pity South Korea. We can’t even remember they’re an ally. (That’s actually pretty pathetic. I’m fairly embarrassed. Even worse: only 41% of Americans think the US should fight to defend South Korea. On how the US is slipping out of the SK defense treaty, read this.)

This annoys Koreans to no end. I hear about it all the time from friends and students. So here are my quick top guesses on why Korea is so ‘foreign’ to Americans and Westerners.

1. It is small. When westerners think of East Asia, that means China or Japan. Korea is just the little bit in between. This could change if unification happens, if unification is successful, if Japan continues its slide. But for the foreseeable future, Koreans should think of  Austria – quiet, small, rich – as their model, not Germany, China, or Japan – rich, aggressive, demanding.

2. Korean food is not distinct enough from other East Asian fare for the median westerner to know the difference. Now that I live here, I know the difference, but, honestly, it is a learned art. For the average westerner looking for lunch, accustomed to eating his national cuisine mostly, Korean food is just another ethnic take-out choice.

3. The language is really hard. The US Defense Department’s Defense Language Institute ranks Korean in its hardest languages to learn category, along with Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic. By contrast, Spanish is a snap for anglophones.  This is an absolutely crucial barrier. It makes the life of all the foreigners I know in Korea much, much harder. (See p 8 here for the complete DLI ranking of language difficulty for anglophones; the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute estimates that a mediocre, ‘professional working proficiency’ in Korean requires 4000 hours of study!! Spanish is ranked at just 1100 hours.)

4. The Confucian-Buddhist tradition. The West’s religious traditions are Christian, Jewish, with some Islam thrown-in. These monotheistic sensibilities are distant from  Korea’s social norms (ancestor veneration, e.g.) and the more ‘metaphysical’ religions of Asia.

_______________________________________________________________________________

TRANSCRIPT – DR. ROBERT E. KELLY, PUSAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

BUSAN E-FM: “MORNING WAVE”

MONDAYS, 8 AM

March 8, 2010

Petra:

Hello everyone and welcome to …..

Right now we have our weekly foreign affairs expert for some commentary on Korea and Northeast Asia. Dr. Robert Kelly teaches in the Political Science and Diplomacy Department at Pusan National University. He’s been living in Korea about 18 months now, and his area of expertise is the international relations of East Asia. If you wish to contact him, please see his website at http://www.AsianSecurityBlog.WordPress.com.

Professor Kelly comes to us each Monday to talk about big issues in Korean foreign affairs. And this week we are going to discuss US relations with South Korea. Hi, Dr. Kelly.

REK:

Hi, Petra. Thanks for having me

Petra:

Thanks for being with us again today.

REK:

It’s my pleasure.

Petra:

It seems that several new polls came out about Americans’ image of Korea. What can you tell us?

REK:

About three weeks ago, the biggest US polling service, Gallup, released a survey of American attitudes towards foreign countries. And then last week the Chosun Ilbo and Gallup Korea ran a survey of ten wealthy countries’ attitudes toward each other. Unfortunately, Korea did not fare too well in either survey.

Petra:

Can you tell us some of the details, and why Korea is viewed poorly?

REK:

Well, I think poorly is not the right word. Instead I would say that Korea has two big ‘image’ problems. The first is North Korea. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea simply dominates the world’s sense of Korea. I know this disappoints South Koreans very much. South Koreans would very much like Yuna Kim or Samsung televisions to be their representatives to the world, but this is just not the case. Kim Jeong Il is easily the best known Korean in the world.

Second, Korea is quite small, and to western populations, geographically and culturally quite distant. I discuss this often with my students. Koreans seem unhappy that there is a strong asymmetry between Koreans’ interest in the US, and American interest in Korea. Koreans, for example, have great interest in English, like to attend American universities, eat US fast food, and watch so many American movies that the Korean film industry requires tariff protection.

Petra:

But Americans don’t really know anything about Korea, do they? Hah!

REK:

Beyond the Korean immigrant community of course, no, not really. The Gallup survey, for example, did not even list South Korea as a choice for Americans to select as favorable or unfavorable. So traditional US allies, such as Germany, Canada, Britain, France, Japan, etc. were listed, and all received high scores of favorability. That is, Americans said they liked these countries. But South Korea was not listed at all. However North Korea was, and the DPRK received an 80% unfavorable rating. The only country with a worse number was Iran. So, no, South Korea is just not really on the radar for most Americans; Korea means North Korea to most Americans.

Petra:

What about the Chosun Ilbo study?

REK:

It too found that South Korea had only a 37% favorability rating.

Petra:

That seems pretty low.

REK:

Yeah, it is. I agree. Actually, I was surprised that the Chosun figure was so low. I am quite aware of how little Americans know of Korea, but the Chosun poll included other Eurasian countries that I thought would have more exposure to Korea, including France, Russia, Italy and China.

Petra:

So what does this mean?

REK:

Well, honestly, I don’t think it means all that much. It does not mean that Korea is any less free, wealthy, green, socially happy, secure, democratic, etc. These sorts of polls are usually like high school popularity contests. They make you feel good or bad, but they don’t actually change that much. However, Koreans have stressed Korea’s ‘global image’ a lot under this administration. Notions like ‘branding’ Korea or Korean ‘soft power’ mean a lot to South Koreans, so the government has embarked, eg, on a big push of Korean food in the West.

Petra:

Right. I read about. The First Lady is pushing Korean food. So these polls are disappointing, but don’t mean too much. Ok.

REK:

Generally, I think so. Koreans worry a great deal, unnecessarily in my opinion, about Korea’s image. But, we all know that clever TV campaigns or cute food advertisement aren’t really the driver of such things. Korea’s image in the world will be built on its political values, not by things like how many LEDs get exported to the EU. Look at India. It is quite poor, yet its long-standing commitment to democracy and freedom, and the pacifist, Gandhian heritage in its foreign relations has won it many friends for decades. And Korea will enjoy this sort of reputation if it continues to build an open, globalized, free democracy.

Petra:

But I think Koreans want more than that. They wants others to see and enjoy their cultural products too – like hanbok or kimchi.

REK:

Yeah I think that’s right, but I just don’t know how well that stuff translates into the West. Asian food is available in the West of course, but quite honestly, I never really knew or cared to know the difference between Chinese, Korean or Japanese food when I lived in the US. I didn’t know many people who could properly eat with chopsticks. And I certainly never met anyone who could speak Korean. There are of course pockets of interest in the biggest cities, but outside the Asian immigrant community, I dare say, Korea just doesn’t have that sort of profile.

Petra:

Why not? I think Koreans really would like Westerners to be more aware of it, as distinct from China or Japan.

REK:

I think you really put your finger on it right there. Korea is small; Japan is big, and China is simply enormous. Less than 10% of Americans have passports; we don’t travel that much. And the US has ethnic populations from almost every country on the planet. In the huge melting pot of American life, Korea is just one far-off place, with a very difficult language and religious traditions very different from those of America. By contrast, when Hispanics immigrants come to the US, they already share some cultural territory: the alphabets are the same, and Spanish is vastly easier for English speakers to learn; Mexican food has already made huge inroads in the US; most Hispanics are Catholics. But the cultural gulf with Korea is much wider – language, Confucianism-Buddhism, food, chopsticks, traditional dress and music. Things like that.

Petra:

So China dominates everything?

REK:

That is an exaggeration of course, but kind of. To the extent that Westerners follow events in Asia, China is the behemoth that dominates discussion, and for Americans, it is the alliance with Japan that is the lynchpin of the US presence in Asia. This is important. It is the alliance with Japan that draws most US attention on security in Asia. Indeed, the one truly important statistic for Koreans is that only 41% of Americans think the US should deploy combat troops to South Korea to defend it. That I think it is genuinely worrisome.

Petra:

Thank you professor for coming again this week.

The Politicization of the Olympics

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olympics

Honestly, I have never understood the appeal, much less the fanaticism, of professional athletics. To quote Ian Malcolm from the Jurassic Park (the novel), grown men swatting balls is not serious as a career, nor particularly entertaining. I certainly understand that there is something admirable in watching highly trained people perform their expertise, but MDs, PhDs, and soldiers are all highly trained too. At least what they do with all those long years of training is socially meaningful (health care, education, national defense). Beyond entertainment, it is not clear if there is any benign social purpose professional athletics serves. Note further, that its malign social impacts are well-known: corruption of US collegiate education, dead-end hopes with squandered education for millions of poor kids dreaming to be Michael Jordan, a huge diversion of social attention away from meaningful social questions to the ‘sports page,’ families and teen health ignored so athletes can spend 6 hours a day in the gym. I admire the old British tradition of the ranking amateur with a proportional view of athletics as part of physical health. How all this stuff can be a career genuinely baffles me.

As for the viewer, I think we watch not just for the entertainment of competition, but also for darker reasons. First, there is definitely freak-show curiosity. There is something deeply creepy about Barry Bond’s biceps being larger than your thighs, or those misshapen teen athletes who sacrifice their menstrual cycle to become Olympic gymnasts. That is why we respond so lightly to doping and steroids; we kinda want to see what these aliens will look like. Part of us is curious to see the East German women’s swim team with hairy chests or Mark MacGuire’s robo-body perform, even though we all know he cheated. I also think we find a dark pleasure in watching people with unique abilities purchased a terrible cost. Watching skiers fly into moguls at 100 mph or boxers get the hell beat out of them is part of the bloodsport of it all. You didn’t turn away when those lugers crashed, did you?

Nor is there any doubt that professional athletics, especially across borders, gets deeply politicized and nationalized. Today on the radio I talked about how South Korea has used the Olympics as a wedge against North Korea for decades. There is a long tradition of politicizing the Olympics that goes back at least to Hitler’s perversion of the games in 1936 into a demonstration of Aryan physico-racial superiority.

_________________________________________________________________

TRANSCRIPT – DR. ROBERT E. KELLY, PUSAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

BUSAN E-FM: “MORNING WAVE”

MONDAYS, 8 AM

February 22, 2010

 

Petra:

Hello everyone and welcome to …..

Right now we have our weekly foreign affairs expert for some commentary on Korea and Northeast Asia. Dr. Robert Kelly teaches in the Political Science and Diplomacy Department at Pusan National University. He’s been living in Korea about 18 months now, and his area of expertise is the international relations of East Asia. If you wish to contact him, please see his website at http://www.AsianSecurityBlog.WordPress.com.

Professor Kelly comes to us each Monday to talk about big issues in Korean foreign affairs. And this week we are going to discuss the two Koreas at the Olympics. Hi, Dr. Kelly.

REK:

Hi, Petra. Thanks for having me

Petra:

 

Thanks for being with us again today.

REK:

 

It’s my pleasure.

Petra: 

This seems like a lighter topic than usual. Why are the Olympics important for the inter-Korean relationship?

REK:

It is a lighter topic. We can’t always discuss trade or border conflicts in the Yellow Sea. But it is also true that countries take their international tensions into world sports. You can learn a surprising amount about the workings of the global economy or nation-state competition by watching the Olympics.

Petra: 

How is that? Aren’t they just athletes?

REK:

Well, yes and no. The Olympics is supposed to be apolitical, but they are very clearly not. The International Olympic Committee has been riddled with corruption for years. Countries are regularly caught trying to bribe the committee members to vote for their cities. Host countries routinely use the Olympics to display their modernity, prestige, economic growth, etc., to a global audience. Or countries that are competing with each other in more serious global arenas, like security or ideology, frequently seek to win medals at Olympics as a marker of national greatness or triumph in the larger international contest. In fact, athletes frequently allow themselves to be used in this manner. Korean athletes, for example, routinely carry the Taeguki in their victory laps. This is unnecessary, of course, and violates the Olympic spirit, but it is a hypocrisy that most countries demand from their athletes. In the Korean case, carrying the Taegukgi is a way to prove to the world that South Korea, not North Korea, is the real Korea.

Petra:

I never thought of that Olympics as so politicized…

REK:

Well sure. Let me just give you a few examples. In 1936, the Nazis used the Berlin Olympics to show the world that Germany had recovered from the devastation of World War I, that fascism was the wave of the future, that Germany was racially clean and hence physical superior. It was consequently a huge embarrassment when an American black, Jesse Owens, defeated German athletes. In 1980, before professional athletes were allowed in the Olympics, the US hockey team, composed of mostly amateurs from college teams, played the highly professionalized Soviet team and won. Americans took this as a huge underdog victory in the Cold War, and there is even a movie about it. More recently, Greece used the 2004 Olympics to prove that it was a modern European country that rightfully belonged in the European Union and the euro currency zone. Today we know how wrong that is, as Greek debt is now threatening to destroy the euro. In 2008, China used the Olympics to prove that it was rich, modern, intimidating, and a great power. And all Koreans, of course, will recall how South Korea used the ’88 Olympics as a world-wide coming out party or fashion show for the Korean economic miracle. Indeed, so highly politicized were the Seoul Olympics that North Korea engaged in terrorism to stop them. Kim Il Sung knew, correctly, that a successful Olympics in South Korea would be a significant defeat for North Korea in the inter-Korean competition.

Petra:

Yes, of course. And the 88 Olympics did presage the North Korea’s very difficult problems of the 1990s. It really did mark the beginning of South Korea’s victory in that competition. So what about today?

REK:

Well the Olympics today are relevant for South Korea as a continuing global marker of North Korea’s defeat and humiliation. The North Korean team is small, poorly-trained, and their performance has been weak. North and South Korean athletes did compete against each other in a few events, with the Northern athletes easily trumped. With no medals, no one in the global viewing audience will see the North Korean flag raised, nor hear the North Korean national hymn. By contrast, South Korea is wealthy and populous enough to field a major team. Yuna Kim of course will get lots of publicity, and other South Korean athletes will win here and there. So the monolithic image of Koreans in this global forum will be of South Koreans

Petra:

It sounds tough for the North.

REK:

Yes it is. Very clearly. Which is probably why the North declared last week yet another round of military exercise in the Yellow Sea, and yet more zones of military exclusion that will provoke the South Korean navy. Rocket tests are troublesome way to remind South Koreans and the world that Yuna Kim is not really that important.

Petra:

And South Korea has been trying to get another Olympics too, hasn’t it?

REK:

Yes. South Korea has come pretty close in the last few years to winning another Olympics. And it seems likely that it will get one again reasonably soon. This would be yet another humiliation for the North. Two Olympics in a row in the South, and none in the North. You can imagine the torrent of bellicose Northern rhetoric that another Southern Olympics would bring.

Petra:

This is somewhat cynical view of the Olympics as a tool of countries to show off and compete with each other. What happened to the idea of global sport something all people can enjoy, regardless of the nationality or citizenship?

REK:

Well, there is some of that. When the classical Greek city-states started the Olympics, they really did see them this way. But today, they really aren’t. The Olympics have become about much more than the sports – particularly money and nationalism. I would blame a few things. First, the Cold War. The East-West competition for decades all but insured that just about every Olympics would be highly politicized. The importance of Yuna Kim today as a triumphant South Korean athlete, fits exactly that Cold War context. Second, I blame television. TV has turned the Olympics into a global bonanza for countries – and companies – to strut their stuff. In the same way that TV and money have corrupted American college athletics, they have also corrupted the Olympics. Consider all the advertising revenue Yuna Kim will earn from her Olympic performance. She is clearly doing this more than just love of skating. Finally, I blame the host countries. Hosts as diverse as the Soviet Union, Greece, the Nazis, the Chinese communists, or South Korea have all sought the Olympics for primarily political purposes, and used the Olympics as such. Just recall how intimidating and subtly threatening the Beijing Olympics seemed; the whole vibe of Beijing 2008 was China rising. I even went to a political science conference last year on this topic! Even the mild-mannered Canadians used the opening Vancouver ceremonies as a celebration of Canadian nationalism, not a global sport community.

Petra:

So the Olympics are a nationalist backlash against globalization? It’s a global sporting event in which the athletes wear their national colors?

REK:

I think so. Certainly, Koreans don’t treat the Olympics as just a global sporting event. My impression from Korea’s coverage of the Olympics is that it is highly nationalized and politicized.

Petra:

Ok. How depressing. Thank you professor for coming once again. See you next week.

Reform of US Institutions to Prevent Decline?

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James Fallows had a good piece at the Atlantic on US decline. This sort of writing is all the rage now of course, given the huge US debt and deficit and the indefatigable rise of China. Zakaria made a fortune and got a gig at CNN on the back of punchy neologism ‘the post-American world.’ Fallows is a nice antidote to the simple ‘power is moving to the East’ schtick of so many, especially out here. Asians love this discourse – for obvious reasons – but don’t really see the limits on the flow. There is too much enthusiasm out here, not enough analysis. For my short take on this, see here.

Fallows makes some solid arguments about Asia’s limits: gross levels of corruption, weak education systems that encourage volume over quality, limited, messy semi-democracy, socially circumscribed personal freedoms (due to strong social pressure to conform) and consequently lower creativity. All this is true. To it I would add the huge informalism and personalism of the economy. Massive amounts of money sloshes about illegally, informally, or simply ‘off-budget’ (what a wonderful euphemism for your slush fund!). As I have remarked before, the grey economy here is pretty big. I am always prompted by small vendors out here to buy in cash, not on a credit card. Credit card purchases are used for tax purposes, so this is basically a form of quiet tax fraud. I wish Fallows had actually written more on these bureaucratic-institutional limits on Asia’s rise. They don’t get nearly enough attention, as the GDP expansion stats dominate the debate.

But for Americans, probably the most interesting claims he makes concern US institutional reform. He notes that the US Constitution is over 200 years old. While this is a source of pride, it is also that case the the original document grows distant with each passing day from the realities of American life. Further, the simple age of the US government has insured the now long accretion of interest groups around the Washington policy process.

Fallows particularly targets the Senate, in which the divergence of voting weights runs from 1 senator per 18.5 million Californians, to 1 senator per 270,000 Wyomingans. Furthermore, the rise of the filibuster threat by the minority in the Senate means that a functioning majority in the Senate is now 60%, not 50%+1. Targeting the Senate for reform is popular at the moment. Obama hinted obliquely at it in the SotU.

The problem with reforming institutions, particularly the Senate, is that we have been here before. Robert Dahl noted many years ago about how the Senate wildly overrepresented agricultural interests in the US. The Progressive moment also thought that Congress got in the way as much as it worked constructively. It upheld the president as the sole carrier of the national interest, because he was the only one to get elected from a fully national constituency.

But ultimately, I am not really sure if the problem is institutional, but rather popular. The US public is simply unwilling to pay for  the expense of the services it wants from government. The country is now so large, so heterogeneous, that it is easy to adopt a NIMBY approach to tax hikes and spending cuts. The pool of US resources is still enormous. So its easy to lose sight of the costs your selfishness. Someone somewhere else is paying for you Medicare. Or perhaps even worse, we are losing the sense that behind government spending are the taxes that we pay. So of course we can raise unemployment benefits; it would be cruel not to, right? Of course we know in the abstract, but the bite of reality – of higher taxes when we demand more unemployment or Medicare – is lost. The chain of steps between completing our 1040s in the spring and the receipt of grandma’s social security check is now so long, that we not longer see the causal relationship. This creates the illusion that someone else can pay, but you can keep your redistribution or tax credit. So let other see their services cut and/or their taxes go up.

Hence, my sense is the problem is attitudinal. As US dominance ages, we have become more and more accustomed to more and more. We have lost the gritty bootstrap spirit that rising actors always have, whether they be emerging nation-states like China, or upstart interns at work.

As our sense of entitlement has expanded-  due to the sheer scope of US influence and wealth for 3 generations now – we  have accrued wildly unrealistic expectations of what government owes us. Bush 2’s fiscal policy is the perfect embodiment of that explosion of unrealistic expectations. He said we could have it all: tax cuts, wars, more Medicare. Serious people knew this was unsustainable, but the great damage done has been to the US citizen’s perception. We have been borrowing from the future for so long, that these expectations are now set; they are locked into the psychology. This psychology of being owed a lot, not institutional blocks in the Senate or K Street, is the real problem. And it may very well take a national fiscal calamity to change popular attitudes downward. By way of example, this happened in Korea in 1997/98. The Asian financial crisis brutalized the country, but helped insure a national seriousness about growth and taxes that you just don’t see in the US.