Category Archives: Foreign Policy

“The Obama Administration’s Policy toward the Korean Peninsula”

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On April 21, the Korean Association International Studies held this conference in Seoul. I was a discussant on a panel entitled “The Strategic Mindset of the Obama Administration and Its Policy toward Northeast Asia.” The conference was pretty good – a mix of academics and public policy types. IR academics from Korean universities mixed with a few parliamentarians, staff from the foreign ministry, and US embassy staff. I found this a nice change from APSA and ISA conferences.

1. I got into a minor flap over the ‘criticality’ of South Korea, and of East Asia in general, to the US. I argued that SK is tied as an ally with Turkey behind: 1. Canada, 2. Great Britain, 3. Israel, 4. Japan, 5. Mexico, 6. Germany. I also argued the most critical regions for the US before East Asia are: 1. North America, 2. Western Europe, 3. the Middle East. Ranking is a contentious but useful exercise. Pleasantly, the audience of almost all Asians did not respond with resentment, although most seemed unhappy. Most seemed to accept that North America and Western Europe outranked Asia; the ME was more contested. But very revealing was the desire for SK to be high up on the list of US allies/interests. That bespoke the enormous prestige of the US as the G-1 and the craving others have for US recognition. Should it really make a difference to South Koreans how Washington ranks it? Does SK worry where Kenya or Brazil ranks it? The difference is that US can bestow status on middle powers. Even NK craves that recognition by its avowed enemy.

Briefly, I think there is little doubt that the most important region for the US must be North America. This is basic geography. Canada has been the most important US ally for a century for obvious reasons. And despite cultural distance from and an awkward history with Mexico, the US clearly needs it to be stable, if not democratic. Two years ago, no one thought the US would worry about a semi-failed narco-state emerging in Mexico, and now we might have to send troops to the border. Europe too is no brainer. US cultural, religious, linguistic, military, and ethnic links vastly outweigh the bilateralism we pursue in Asia. Americans learn European languages when they learn them at all, and go on vacations and junior years abroad in Europe. By contrast Asian languages with their culturally distant alphabets and pronunciations are just too uncomfortable for Americas. Asian food is challenging to the American palette. And non-theistic Asian religions are too different. Finally, the Middle East is of greater importance, not just because of current crises, but for structural reasons too. Oil and Israel are long-term US interests, and the post-1967 Islamic revival, the extreme edge of which lead to 9/11, will be with us for generations. Regardless of the success of the Iraq war, the neo-con argument that the ME’s dysfunction has become a major threat to the US and will require a long-term commitment to fix is accurate. We fear the radicalization of moderate Muslim opinion far more than NK stalinism or even Chinese nationalism.

2. I think expectations of Obama are wildly out of proportion to his personal time and energy, his ability to impact foreigners’ preferences, and the domestic constraints he faces in Congress, from interest groups, etc. I find myself repeating all the time that Obama is not Jesus or a magician or something. He can’t simply solve NK, or fix the financial crisis.  Like Walt in Singapore, I found at this conference what seemed to me an excessive hope that the great O could simply make things go back they way they were before the financial crisis or breakthrough long standing problems like NK. The big IR problems are deeply entrenched, and Obama, like all presidents, faces enormous bureaucratic-congressional inertia at home. US consumers and the government are tapped out right now, and a return to the US as importer of last resort is unlikely for awhile and probably not very healthy for the global economy anyway. Asian exporters are going to have to focus on difficult reform (cleaning up the SOEs in China, chaebol in Korea, kereitsu in Japan, eg) and domestic demand. And this will be good for them, as simply exporting to the West has sustained political and economic oligarchs around the region for too long

Foreigners’ expectations are enormous, and I think very misplaced. The US consul in Busan told me that he finds himself telling Koreans that he is our president, and that you should expect him to defend the US national interest. This is obviously so, but that it needs to be repeated at all, speaks enormously of just how much the rest of the world hopes Obama can transform almost everything. Eg, what I really learned in listening to Korean high hopes for Obama at this conference was the deep, deep exasperation with NK. You could see in the hope for Obama just how much South Koreans would like the endless NK game to finally stop so that Korea could be a more normal country.

Much of this is fantasy I fear – like that woman who said that Obama will pay her rent. I want Obama to succeed too, but most of the long-standing problems in IR will not succumb to his charisma.  The structures of IR change very slowly. Darfur, Iran, Russia, NK, Palestine – all these may change a bit at the margins due to his personality, but I doubt Obama will achieve major breakthroughs without the long patient work of diplomacy that most US presidents have pursued. But this presidency is a good test of the levels of analysis theory in IR. Maybe Obama can overcome the domestic, state-level impediments and international-level structures that usually dictate IR outcomes.

3. Korean IR, like Latin American IR, seems pretty focused on practical applications and policy. All the conference papers were policy-relevant, and much of the discussion was as well. I attended another conference in November last year and am participating in another on regional order in East Asia tomorrow. Those talks were/are all policy relevant as well. And the Korean IR journal literature is heavily focused immediate issues, such as NK, democratization, Asian growth models, and the character of leadership in Asia. In this way it feels more like International Security than ISQ.

I imagine this focus on policy stems from the huge challenge of the DPRK to the South. IR is an existential issue for the ROK. Theory probably seems like a luxury. Similarly, SK only got wealthy in the last few decades. The practical needs of interaction with the global economy probably trumped model-building or formalism in Korean IPE. All this is relevant to the debate in IR since the end of the Cold War about whether IR is too eurocentric. ISR (10/4, Dec. 2008) had a good symposium on this question. A good addition would be a discussion of Korean IR.

Top 10 Gloriously BAD IR Movies You Still Should See

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So there is a nice little academic dust-up going on over IR film: Walt, then Drezner, then Kaplan, then Drezner again. All mention good movies you should see, but none mention any dumb or silly movies you should see that still tell us a lot about IR. Rambo 2, e.g., can tell you as much about American attitudes toward Vietnam, the Soviets, and the Cold War as the vastly superior Hearts and Minds.

Given the sheer volume of idiot films with a pretense to IR insight, I classify mine by types of paranoia and hysteria bred:

1. World Politics is a Global Conspiracy!

JFK, Nixon

bonus conspirators:

IMF: Battle of Seattle

UN: Left Behind series

Jewish: Valley of the Wolves Iraq

American: The Host

Catholic: The DaVinci Code, Angels & Demons

Japan: Rising Sun

Bankers, Jews, albino priests (wth?), Lyndon Johnson, the US Forces in Korea – everyone gets a shot at global tyranny. How come there are no movies about cliques of sinister college professors plotting global domination?

2. Nurturing your Inner Fascist Superman

Starship Troopers, 300, Triumph of the Will

In case you thought war wasn’t fun, along came ST  and 300 to tell you why you’re a liberal wimp. 300 actually has a scene where the soldiers laugh as arrows rain down on them. Good lord.

ST also contains the greatest Hollywood lines ever about the profession: “This year you learned how the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos. How the veterans took control and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations.” Those limp-wristed egg-heads! Hang ‘em from the lampposts!

3. Kill those Commies!

Red Dawn, Rocky IV, Rambo 3

Back in the 80s, you knew those commies deserved to die. You knew they were plotting to spread the evil empire into America. So forget the Day After, you wanted to kick some russki a—! And Patrick Swayze told you why. They were going to take away your Second Amendment rights!

So laughably ridiculous today, you can’t help but love the Reagan-era action film. I watched Red Dawn with a Russian friend. She exploded into laughter almost immediately and continued for the entire film. Rocky trained to the worst 80s montage ever, while D Lundgren took steroids; but Rocky’s victorious American spirit still came through in the end! Yeah! And don’t miss Stallone taking down a Soviet helicopter with an arrow in Rambo 3.

4. You don’t know much about Africa and you don’t really care

Black Hawk Down, Blood Diamond

bonus Japanese edition: The Last Samurai

If you ever needed an excuse to explain your ignorance of Africa – they’re all just killing each other over there, right? – these films will help you out. God forbid you read a book about the place, just enjoy the on-screen slaughter. At least Blood Diamond will help you sound a little intelligent at the next grad student meeting.

But you say, you don’t really want to read about Asia either. I know, I know. It’s pretty far away, and the Seven Samurai is 3.5 hours long and in black and white for god’s sake. (And you’ve never heard of Ozu.) Well, Tom Cruise is here to help! Didn’t you know that the Japanese needed a white guy to realize they should hold onto their culture? Good thing Americans are around to help balloon-headed foreigners find the important things in life.

5. The GWoT is really just a Misunderstanding

Kingdom of Heaven, The Siege

Is there any movie in the GWoT era more misguided than KoH? You’d never know that deep theological differences divide Islam and the West, that deep-rooted frictions (Bosnia, Spain) have made reconciliation difficult, mutual histories of imperialism created rivers of blood, that language and cultural differences block shared norms, etc.

None of the deep-seated religious frenzy of the Middle Ages is presented in its own terms. Wholly missing is that Christians and Muslims thought it was right to kill each other, as well as internal dissenters, for religious truth. Instead, the presentation is through an anachronistic, can’t-we-all-just-get-along liberal GwoT lens – complete with O Bloom saying at the end that Christians, Jews and Muslims all have claim to Jerusalem. Oh please. Religious pluralism in the 13th century? Are you serious? Despite a 3.5 hour run-time, this obvious medieval characteristic is missing, and KoH degenerates into multicultural pap

The clerics are bloodthirsty or insipid. The Christian princes are mostly brigands, and in a shameless act of currying favor in the modern Middle East, the Muslim princes are a model of tolerance. All-in-all, its political correctness all over the place; it’s possibly the most anachronistic serious film about the Middle Ages ever. If you want to see what people really thought about religion in the Middle Ages, complete with all the superstition, absolutism, and butchery, try The Name of the Rose or Queen Margot.

6. The Cold War was just a Misunderstanding

Star Trek 6, Cold War-era James Bond movies

If there is any lesson to be drawn from Hollywood’s standard treatment of tough topics, it’s that it wants to offend or challenge no one, so as to insure that everyone will buy movie tickets. Hence the multicultural pluralist fluff of KoH or the gentle portrayal of the Japanese military junta in Pearl Harbor.

So god forbid Bond actually battle the KGB. Instead he usually hooks up (literally of course) with some hot Russian agent to battle a rouge financier, industrialist, general, whatever. Even in the Bond film about North Korea – the worst country on earth – the filmmaker didn’t have the guts to make the villain a part of the regime. Yawn. C’mon already. Even the DPRK gets a pass? We think the Bond movies are about the Cold War, but they really aren’t. Usually, the KGB is working with MI6 or the CIA. The real Bond meme is  straight from the antiglobalization movement – megalomaniac corporate leaders who want to take over the planet. Bill Gates as a psychopath, not Brezhnev, is the real enemy. Bleh.

Star Trek 6 follows the same silly pattern. The Cold War was really cooked up by military leaders on both sides who wanted to rise to power! And the Soviet-Klingons were really peace-lovers, defending their culture and loving their children too, just like Sting told us. Whatever…

7. Intelligence Work is Really Cool – Babes, Gadgets, Jumping out of Airplanes

Bond, Jack Ryan, Bourne

My students come to class with some of the most hair-brained ideas about world politics, because spy movies are so ubiquitous and so stupid. Blame Bond of course, but Jack Ryan – with a PhD no less! – has gotten more and more ridiculous too. I stopped reading Clancy novels after Ryan became POTUS. PhDs carrying guns and becoming prez? Gimme a break.

I have a few friends who work at the CIA, and they do a lot of what professors do – reading open source material, trying to draw conclusions, writing product. Certainly the literature on intelligence suggests this too. The most convincing film I saw on the CIA was The Good Shepherd, and the best film ever on intelligence work in the field is The Lives of Others. No one named Agent XXX or Holly Goodhead shows up.

Bonus all-time Bond idiocy: Denise Richardson with a PhD

8. We lost Vietnam because of the Politicians

We Were Soldiers, Rambo 2

So you can’t stand the fact that the US lost in Vietnam. It must be someone else’s fault – Democrats, hippies, freemasons… So why not dredge up the ‘stabbed-in-the-back’ theory of the Weimer German right? Jews sold Germany up the river in WWI. So did the protestors, bureaucrats, and politicians in the 60s and 70s over Vietnam. If the Democrats hadn’t voted against war funding, we might have won! Call it the R Reagan-O North-T Clancy theory of the war’s failure.

I find this so toxic, its frightening. The war was ‘lost,’ because by the early 70s it was clear that South Vietnam would never stand on its own; the cost to the US was threatening other international commitments, as well as the domestic economy and social order; and the South’s collapse, we finally learned, would not result in a massive domino effect in East Asia. In other words, losing had become cheaper than continuing to fight by the early 70s. We decided to give up after a major effort when we realized that the costs now outweighed the benefits. This is why the Republican Nixon administration accepted the Paris peace deal that did not force the North to remove its forces from the South. We just didn’t care that much by 1973.

Yes, we could have slugged it out, perhaps into the 80s, or, risking a wider war, used nuclear weapons, bombed the Red River dykes, or openly invaded the North. But it just wasn’t worth it anymore. As Cronkite said, we did the best we could as an honorable people, and that was pretty good.

If you believe that that is liberal professorial clap-trap, that Americans win, they don’t explain defeat, then Stallone will give you the Reagan era revisionism you crave. The film includes such iconic right-wing delusions as: Rambo’s question, ‘do we get to win this time?,’ his retrieval by force of POWs, his defeat of both Vietnamese and Soviet forces, and his assault on the feckless, lying homefront bureaucrat who wants his mission to fail. So in 90 minutes, the shirtless supersoldier re-fights and wins the Vietnam War, wins the Cold War to boot, and vindicates one of the great right-wing myths – so effective against the left in the years after Vietnam – that the US left soldiers behind and that the North secretly held POWs (for what possible reason?). The movie’s so close to propaganda, it could have been funded by the Army or the Reagan White House.

Gibson gives you Vietnam as World War 2. Strong men with good families doing what is right. Gone are the concerns about imperialism, US behavior in the field, the confusion over ends and means, the blurred lines between the VC and civilians, or the sheer bloody mess of the war in vastly better films like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, or Apocalypse Now. We Were Soldiers is the celebratory Saving Private Ryan of Vietnam war movies, complete with subtle digs about politicians not committing enough to do the job.

9. America kicks A—!

Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, Stealth, Lord of the Rings 3, Pear Harbor, Armageddon, Behind Enemy Lines, and just about every US war movie ever made

bonus lampoon: Team America: World Police

Americans love to tell their history to themselves in such a way as to lionize the individual US solider, thank the US for saving the world from fanaticisms, and generally vindicate American exceptionalism. The regular diet comes from the History Channel with its ceaseless treatment of US involvement in WWII, the ‘good war.’ Spielberg lays it on awfully thick in Band and Ryan.

Ask a Russian what they think of this treatment of WWII, and you will get either a laugh with a shake of the head, or anger over American ignorance of the real cost of the European war. 20 million Russians died fighting the Nazis. 200k Americans did. We stepped in late (6/’44), after the USSR had essentially stopped and reversed the Nazi tide. We played the offshore balancer – which was good strategy but not especially heroic. We were entirely comfortable allowing red and brown totalitarianisms to destroy each other, before we stepped in to prevent Stalin from marching to Paris. When Patton famously said, ‘we could still lose this war,’ he was lying to himself to exaggerate the importance of the western effort. Ryan wildly overrates the US contribution to the European war. Unfortunately no good movie about the Eastern front exists. Try Enemy at the Gates, Stalingrad, or Cross of Iron, but they aren’t that good.

Every Russian knows this history. Its etched into the very landscape of European Russia, and its deeply humbling when they ask you why the US didn’t intervene earlier as they were being slaughtered. The answer is realpolitik, but that hardly feels sufficient when you are talking about the Nazis. Ryan and many US WWII movies are downright embarrassing when you are confronted by the enormity of Russian suffering and Russian moral anger for our late entry.

As for M Bay, he might as well collect a paycheck from the USAF. Pearl Harbor is so bad, it’s hard to know where to begin. The worst line is probably when A Baldwin points to a group of US pilots and says that is why we are going to win, complete with melodramatic music in the background. As if courage, fortitude, willingness to sacrifice, etc. were some US monopoly. Japanese pilots flew planes into US ships for god’s sake. This is the kind of remark that sends foreigners up the wall. Once you live overseas long enough, you see how much non-Americans resent that sort of over-the-top US self-praise. The reason the US won is a lot more bureaucratic and less romantic – good leadership, a huge industrial advantage, larger population, etc. Using America’s material superiority to achieve decisive military advantage is the “American way of war” (or more recently, the “Powell Doctrine”) and flows right from Sun Tzu’s argument that you should only fight when you have the upper hand (“every battle is won before its fought”). But this does not fit with the John Wayne image Americans cultivate of the US solider or his actions.

Armageddon is the similar. Thank God America is here to save the world, because nobody else could do it. Good heavens. How arrogant are we ?! How many slow-mo shots of US flags and pilots will sate American exceptionalism?

More revisionism is the Balkan pseudo-history Behind Enemy Lines and the USAF commercial that is Stealth. Behind appeals once again to the rugged, macho US solider myth we love, but it wildly misrepresents America’s commitment in the Balkans. The US scarcely did a thing to stop the war until 1996. And we certainly weren’t trying to stop the slaughters, as the movie suggests. If you know the history of the Balkan wars, it’s fairly embarrassing to watch.

Finally, nothing channels the ‘America-will-save-world’ motif of the Bush years like the last LOTR film. A few heroes stand against the armies of darkness to usher in a new world of light in the West. Come on already. They might have just put Hitler, Stalin, or OBL’s head where Sauron’s eye was on top of that tower. Only children and fundamentalists believe that ‘evil’ is some external entity that can be ‘defeated’ by force of arms. If you ever wanted to know what ‘moral clarity’ looks like, this is your movie. In this story, like W’s fantasy of the GWoT, the bad guys are irredeemable, so you can say stuff like ‘no prisoners!’ and butcher them all with no qualms (see point 2 above). But don’t try this in the real world; that’s what leads to Abu Ghraib.

Team America does a great job lampooning all this. The song ‘America, F— Yeah!’ could be the theme song of the W years and should tell you why overseas Americans had to say there were from Canada.

10. Fox News told me the Third World is a Pretty Creepy Place

Gunga Din, Indiana Jones 2, Commando, Turistas, Hostel

Does your inner racist miss Western imperialism? Wasn’t Casablanca a nice place when the French ran it and the Arabs served you drinks at Rick’s? Has Glenn Beck convinced you to fear your organs will be harvested by dark skinned people whose language you can’t understand? Then allow Indy and Arnie to show you how right you really are!

Were Lucas and Spielberg on drugs when they made Indy 2? Human sacrifice and child slavery with white people to stop it all? Or try Gunga Din, where the hero is an Indian solider who loyally dies for his British masters fighting other Indians. It’s basically the movie version of the ‘White Man’s Burden.’ Yikes!

And just in case you were curious how many shady Hispanic paramilitaries Schwarzenegger can machinegun in 85 minutes, now you can find out. Commando, like the Rambo films, is a ‘great’ 80s revenge fantasy – this time about disciplining sleazy drug-dealing Latin dictators like Noriega or those bad guys in Miami Vice episodes.

Like Black Hawk Down or the Last Samurai, these sorts of films use a white character to ‘anchor’ western viewers in the story, but they frequently slip into postcolonial tropes that are downright embarrassing or exploitative.

So enjoy a filmfest of the silly, reactionary, hyperpatriotic, conspiratorial, whatever meets your paranoid fancy!

Finally, let me conclude with the side, but telling, observation that all 4 of us are movie buffs – an eminently academic pasttime. Gee, I wonder why academics’ hobbies never include mountain climbing or marathon running? Like Mozart’s music, we are an indoor art 🙂

Start Admitting that the US Commitment to SK is Weakening

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The Korean press has been filled for months with the coverage of the US military’s redeployment from north to south of Seoul. Usually these reports include protestations from both sides that the military commitment of the US to the South has not diminished.

I just can’t see how that can be the case. I want the US commitment to remain strong, but I think this is wishful thinking.

1. The US has slowly reduced its ground forces in Korea over the last few decades. US force totals are now around 28k and may sink below 25k by 2015. By contrast, the US has about twice that number in Japan and Germany, neither of whom are as directly threatened as SK.

The common response is that the US can provide the same level of protection with fewer people because of today’s greater lethality per US warfighter, as well as the continuing cover provided by the US air force and navy. Essentially this is a Rumsfeldian transformation argument. The ‘transformation’ of the US military has made each US solider more individually effective, so you need fewer of them for the same job. This is achieved through better training, and use of IT to coordinate firepower better. Smart soldiers and combined arms have multiplier effects we didn’t enjoy during the Cold War. So instead of blowing up a whole valley to kill the enemy, you only need the firepower to blow up a part of it, because IT (‘the networked battlefield’) will tell you exactly which part the enemy is in.

I find this moderately compelling, but the verdict is not really in yet on transformation. (See Thomas Ricks at Foreign Policy and Fred Kaplan at Slate, who have long chronicled the ups and downs of this notion.) While it seemed to work well in Afghanistan, it was an abysmal failure in Iraq, where low force totals were the single biggest US problem until the surge. Transformation and smaller forces also seem to run against a basic military lesson – more is better. Ceteris paribus, a larger force should improve options and create a greater cushion to absorb casualties and defeats. I think we all assume that NK’s military is clapped out, but it is over 1 million strong, and US totals seem awfully low. Also, should the US be involved in another war – as we are now – at the time of a conflict with the DPRK, more is again better. It just seems awfully risky.

2. US forces are being moved south of Seoul. To me, this is the most obvious sign of decreased willingness. During the Cold War, US troops were purposefully strewn along the DMZ, so that if there was a conflict, US lives would be lost almost immediately. Dead Americans would then rouse US public opinion to commit to the war. NATO followed the same logic in central Europe. The more flags on the initial coffins, the more likely collective security would be honored.

It seems willful blindness to say that the US is not looking to avoid casualties and therefore the public opinion chain-gang effect by this southward move. This may be good for the US. It lowers the likelihood of an immediate public outcry, and so gives DoD and the White House some time in a crisis. But if I were South Koreans, I would be nervous.

Similarly, US forces will no longer be located between Seoul, the capital, and the DMZ. 20m people live in greater Seoul – 40% of the national population. It is extremely exposed. It is only 30 miles from the DMZ; it is extremely dense, and it is filled with skyscrapers and high apartment tower blocks that would fall easily if it hit by NK artillery. (Picture the horrifying WTC collapse happening dozens of times.) I imagine the ROK army will be put in the US place, but still if I were a Korean, I would be pretty spooked that the US is no longer protecting what would obviously be the primary target if the DPRK drove south.

3. In 2012, the US will relinquish wartime authority to control SK forces. This abolition of Combined Forces Command (CFC) is marketed as restoring sovereignty and control to the South, but an obvious extra for the US is that it is no longer obligated to command in the case of a war. Again, this gives the US more wiggle room.

4. Finally, I think US public opinion is hardly deeply committed the defense of SK anymore. The Cold War is over. If SK were to go communist now, it would not matter to US security as much as before. And Americans are exhausted from Iraq, Afghanistan, and the general stress of the GWoT. To the extent Americans even know where SK is, most of their political images will be of a wealthy country (Samsung TVs, etc, etc) that should be able to defend itself. The American attitude, and probably that of DoD, is burden-sharing. Allies should carry more of their own defense. NK is SK’s problem, let them fix it; it’s their war, let them fight it.  Only 41% of Americans think we should aid the South against the North with combat troops (p. 18 here).

In sum, the bulk of smaller US forces will be 100 miles from the DMZ, south of Seoul, and we don’t have the authority to command the SK military in a fight most Americans won’t see as critical for national security. In other words, we are reserving options for ourselves, including just how much we want to commit.

The Imminent Death of ‘Democratic Realism’

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Obama’s bow to the Saudi king may go down as one of those moments when Americans, or at least its foreign policy elite, realized the dead-end of the new realism of the post-Bush Democratic Party. Obama was probably just trying to be polite, and bowing is a common, albeit declining, practice in much of Eurasia. It is pretty uncommon to Americans, so it is easier to overread its significance. (Its so ingrained in Koreans, eg, that I have seen people bow instinctively after a phone conversation.)

But it is also true that it is a not a democratic or egalitarian practice. It is rooted in aristocracies like those of Prussia, France or Britain. It does signify some deference, and those lower on the food chain are supposed to bow more deeply than those higher up. (You learn the intricate gradations of bowing in Asian cultures.) And Obama’s bow was awfully deep (about 90 degrees). Honestly, he probably should not have done it.

It looks pretty awkward for the leader of the world’s most successful democracy to bow to one the world’s most reactionary monarchs. And this mini-flap is part of the larger debate stirred up by Obama’s outreach to some of the nastier regimes on the planet – including Iran and Russia. Not only the American nationalist right, but most Americans will eventually sour on it.

The reason is that realism is not the instinct of Americans when it comes to foreign policy. Most Americans like think that US foreign policy is doing good in the world, and we recite our history to ourselves in that manner. I see it in my undergrads all the time. They love movies like Black Hawk Down or Band of Brothers (Americans dying to do the right thing for others), or just go watch the History Hitler Channel’s constant celebration of WWII, the ‘good war.’ In US foreign policy mythology, Eurasians are gutless, insipid dealmakers (EU countries trading with Iran and yakking at the UNSC) or progenitors of world-breaking fanaticisms (fascism, communism, Islamic fundamentalism) the US has to stop. The US is the city on the hill needlessly dragged in by Pearl Harbor or 9/11 to clean up Eurasia’s inability to leave in peace with itself. (For the long explanation of all this, try William Russell Mead’s Special Providence; the title alone tells you enough.)

Nor is realism really the position of the Democratic Party or Obama in their hearts. Obama is too much the social liberal – a supporter, eg, of gay and abortion rights – at home to really believe that the US should ‘respect’ dictatorships, theocracies and other closed states. Nor is realism the traditional foreign policy stance of the Democratic party. Since Americas ‘rise to globalism,’ the Democrats have traditionally argued that the US should promote human rights, expand aid, avoid alliances with nasties, limit the use and scope of force, etc. One of the great, and underappreciated moments, in the Democrats’ foreign policy history is C Vance’s principled resignation.

It is the GOP that is supposed to be the heartless defender of US interests, cold pragmatists, willing to expend ‘blood for oil,’ and all that. But actually, the GOP has never been so thoroughly realist either. Nixon and Bush 1 were the most ‘realist’ GOP presidents, but Reagan, the great GOP folk hero, was decidedly not. Reagan thought nuclear weapons, MAD, and the Cold War were a moral bane on mankind. He was as crusading as W on the promotion of US values abroad. And W of course argued that democracy promotion should be the whole point of US foreign policy.

My guess is that the newfound realism of the Democrats is simply a reaction to W, whom the left loathed. N Pelosi represents the city with the largest population of homosexuals in the country. She can’t honestly believe that Iran, whose president said there are no homosexuals in his country, is just another country we can deal with. At some point, she, Obama, HRC, and the others will turn from NK, Russia, Iran, etc. in disgust. They won’t be as obnoxious about it as W was, but I predict we will be nagging the Chinese about human rights again soon, re-containing Iran, squabbling with Russia and NK, etc. This trend will only accelerate as it becomes clear that pragmatic engagement doesn’t work much anyway: http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE53B0Y020090412 and http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/04/116_43165.html.

How to Deal with NK? More of the Same

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There has been lots of good commentary since the missile launch on how to respond. Ideas have included a big bang deal to create a breakthrough, malign neglect, confrontation, and just neglect. Most of it castigates Washington officials for policy incoherence, lack of cultural understanding, lack of guts, etc. All that strikes me as pretty unfair though, especially now that, living in SK, it has become far more clear to me just how unpredictable NK really is. So give Washington (Seoul and Tokyo) a break. Like the financial crisis, no one really knows what to do. NK is just too erratic, opaque and downright weird. (Remember Kim Jong Il is on record saying long hair on men is bad for socialism. Also: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4157121.stm.)

All the handwringing overlooks that the likely response is probably more of the same – tedious, torturesome negotiations, with a huge amount of skepticism that the North Koreans are probably negotiating in bad faith and cheating, and a general goal of slowing down as much as possible the nuclear and ballistic march and more broadly containing NK bad behavior as much as possible.

This uninspiring ‘muddling through’ is probably about the best course anyway. If this feels incoherent, then so be it, because the NK problem is too messy and unpredictable for some big aggressive framework. If we must give it a title so that it can be called a ‘strategy,’ how about, “chronic threat management through skeptical negotiation”?

In other words, its pretty clear that NK probably won’t meaningfully de-nuclearize or de-missile-ize (as S Africa or the Ukraine did). As Brian Meyers has noted, the confrontation with the US has become central to NK existential justification. Without that standoff, NK just becomes a poor man’s SK, likely to last about as long as the GDR after the Wall fell. Any ‘big deal’ is likely to die in artificial NK objections over this or that detail, etc., etc. Even if they agreed to some big deal, they’d probably cheat anyway. Simply ignoring them is not an option, because S Korea and Japan simply can’t.  Similarly, confrontation risks 20 million people in Seoul (SK’s proximate city-hostage gift to NK that makes a hard stance almost impossible).

15 years after the Agreed Framework, it is pretty obvious that obfuscating, stalling for time, flim-flamming the 6 party talks, asking for favors with faux-goodwill, etc. is not just a negotiating strategy for the North, it is its foreign policy goal. The process, and keeping the process going indefinitely, is the whole point. It keeps NK relevant in the world, coughs up gifts from time to time, justifies domestic misery to its people. As JL Gaddis said about the SU, we are probably just going to have to hang tough on this one until NK finally implodes on its own.

The big factors in NK foreign policy – NK elite and Chinese opinion – are simply out of our (SK, Japan, US) hands. So the best attitude is the same we have always pursued – cautious long-term crisis management, sticking close to the allies, trying to get deals if possible, shooting for small betterments like family reunifications, trying to stop the worst, most threatening security externalities (like dealing with AQ Khan or Syria) unilaterally if necessary. Its sloppy and headache-inducing, but the alternatives are worse.

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

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

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

Consequences from this argument include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That ‘Significant’ EU-Korea Relationship – Yawn…

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

Consider:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where are those European Troops for Afghanistan already?

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

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

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

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

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