Category Archives: International Relations Theory

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 🙂

How Come Walt’s top 10 IR books weren’t Assigned in my IR Program?

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So Walt published his top 10 IR books at FP. It is a good list, except that I was not required to read any of them in my grad program. Hah! Pieces of a few of them were listed in secondary suggested reading. By FP’s own ranking, I attended a top 20 IR PhD program. Why is this so?

1. The most important ‘books’ in IR at any one time are not this or that actual book, but the latest issue (book-length) of International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, or International Security. 75+% of my IR reading in grad school was articles. This is where the most recent research was (critical to know because it made you sound smart and ‘cutting edge’ at department gatherings), and the articles usually summarized the major arguments from previous work. So you didn’t need to read books or previous articles unless you had the time, which of course you never did. A lot of the IR books I like and recommend below, I read before or after my course work. Then I had time to actually ‘soak’ in the work and not just plow through the theory chapter as fast as possible so I could get to the next reading assignment.

2. No one had time in grad school to read books. Books are for wimps and generalists; plowing through dense, turgid article prose is the mark of a real social scientist! Besides, they were way too long, and you were already exhausted and out-of-shape from living in your basement, eating badly, rarely going into the sun (your implacable enemy), and binging on the weekends in breakouts of ‘freedom.’ I think I read only 3 IR books cover-to-cover in grad school – Waltz’ Theory of International Relations, Schelling’s Arms and Influence, and Gilpin’s War and Change in World Politics. I read these in my first year when I still thought books were to be read in their entirety. That fantasy disappeared quickly.

3. Walt stress lots of history and history of ideas stuff – like Guns, Germs and Steel or The Best and the Brightest. I would love to have had him as a professor, because these are the sorts of ‘big idea’ books with exciting history attached to them that made me go into IR in the first place. But that is hardly what I read. It was all theory, formalism, and models. This stuff made me a sharper abstract thinker, but it sure wasn’t as exciting as Walt’s list. So I can drone on about escalation dominance or the ideational structures of the ‘new regionalism,’ but undergrads and basically the rest of the world zone-out pretty fast when you shift into ‘social science voice.’

4. Here are my top ten IR books, in order:

Waltz, Theory of IR

Wendt, Social Theory of IR

Fukuyama, End of History

Thucydides

Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations

Carr, 20 Year Crisis

Gilpin, War and Change

Gilpin, Global Political Economy

Huntington, Clash of Civilizations

Schelling, Arms & Influence

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.

Careful with that ‘Decline of the West’ Riff – We’ve Heard It Before

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The conventional wisdom on the financial crisis is that it symbolizes or accelerates a transfer of power from West to East, from the US and EU to China and India. I think this is wildly overrated.

1. We have heard this before – and not just in the 20th century, but the West has proven extremely (frustratingly, if you’re from somewhere else) tenacious in leading the world pack since its breakout in the 16th century. Here are a just a few examples. Long before bin Laden, Islam was supposed to replace errant western Christianity, but failed at Vienna in 1683. Politically, Islam has never properly recovered. In the 19th C, the Chinese thought the western marauders a troublesome nuisance who would eventually recognize the superiority of the Middle Kingdom. It took 50 years of humiliation for that fantasy to finally fade. At the same time, pan-Orthodox/pan-Slavic Russians like Dostoyevsky and Alexander II thought the West would sink under its own corruption and decadence; instead that happened to the Romanovs. 1917 ignited the communist revolutionary wave (‘we will bury you’) that was supposed end capitalism and imperialism. After 75 years of unparalleled effort and bloodletting, it failed practically and morally. 1929 too supposedly revealed the inanity and shallowness of gilded age capitalism which macho fascist vitalism would sweep away. Despite exhaustion and disillusionment from WWI, western democratic capitalism hung on again, emerging stronger than ever, arguably, in 1945. By the 1960s, the new non-western future was supposedly in decolonization. The huge populations of the third world would modernize and turn the global system upside down. Instead they fell into Huntington’s decay and begged for debt relief. In the 1970s, the US failure in Vietnam and stagflation supposedly made the world multipolar, helped the Soviets to parity, and sparked a New International Economic Order. Reagan ended that sham. In the 1980s, came the declinism of Paul Kennedy and Walter LaFeber, this time based on massive US trade and budget deficits. The wholly unanticipated Clinton-dotcom boom put that fiction to rest too. And 9/11 of course was to spark an umma-wide uprising to humiliate the US as jihad had humbled the USSR in Afghanistan. Inside it pulled the US even more deeply into the Middle East.

2. China and India have huge hurdles before they even approach US/western power. They have massive internal structural problems – corruption, stifling bureaucracy, poor courts, bad information (propaganda and lack of disclosure), mediocre education systems for generating human capital, irregular treatment of foreigners and FDI. Development-at-all-costs too has resulted in enormous environmental liabilities that are now affecting lifespans. Do superpowers really have to spray-paint their grass green before an Olympics? They also lack the cultural software of entrepeneurialism and individualism that encourage the ‘animal spirits’ to take chances (worse in Confucian China than more liberal India). And finally, China is not democratic yet, which means a wrenching and usually expensive transition still has to come (think SK in the 80s, plus Indonesia in the late 90s, plus the end of the USSR all rolled into one). This will include restive provinces that will inevitably try to take advantage of the transition to push for autonomy. India of course is already, thankfully, liberal democratic, but it has found embracing wealth-generating capitalism extraordinarily difficult. There is no national consensus for it; all those tech companies that fixed Y2K have to keep redundant energy generators on-site in case there is a power failure. Finally both are still extraordinarily poor by OECD standards (to which neither belong). Between them both they account for half the world’s poorest people (most of the rest are in Africa). Don’t let Thomas Friedman’s stories about a zillion IT engineers in Bangalore or individual Chinese cities just focused on the production of cardigans or baseballs mask the reality that India and China together have something like 800 million people living in subsistence agriculture. Both economies are wildly unbalanced with relatively weak currencies, semi-dysfunctional politics, terrible corruption, and huge unresolved social resentment and poverty. That is not the future, at least not yet.

3. I think the best analysis of the geopolitical fallout of the crisis is here. Walter Russell Mead argues that actually the crisis will encourage states only tepidly committed to capitalism to once again turn toward statist, populist alternatives (think Chavez). Predatory elites will use the crisis as cover to resist liberalization. This will only continue the economic stagnation and political confusion of the Middle East, Russia/central Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The question is whether the Asian rimland states will go this way too. (I don’t think they will.)

So geopolitically, it is better to think of the crisis as a deck-clearing exercise, a shake-out of weak players and also-rans that will reinforce the leaders rather than damage them relatively. The leaders will slide, but the weakest will slide even more. As an analogy, think of how the dotcom bust killed off lots of wannabes on the internet. Only the strong survived that bloodbath. And my guess is that will be the real effect here. The crisis will reinforce the value of those very qualities that have catapulted the West to the top – market pricing, clean courts and banks, transparency, a free press (to spotlight failure), democracy (to insure the peaceful aggregation of conflicting interests and citizen grievance), etc, etc.

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.

Is It Cheaper for the US to Lose in Iraq/Afghanistan?: Costs and Benefits of Hegemonic Retrenchment

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This was originally written in the fall of 2007, but it applies to Afghanistan today as well.

Douglas MacArthur famously suggested, ‘there is no substitute for victory.’ War involves high costs, and victory is to redeem those costs. In rationalist terms, war should pay. Victory implies that payoff, and states should invest in success to achieve it. The benefits need not be material, such as territory or resources; they may be ideological, ideational, or in prestige. Hegemons and great powers particularly place great stock in victory because of perceived credibility and stature threats.

But the populist logic of MacArthur’s statement misses the shifting ground of costs and benefits in wartime. Sunk costs in lives and treasure expand; perceived benefits may wither; perceived costs to defeat may decline. In the history of US foreign policy, the rise and closure of the Vietnam War illustrates these shifting sands of costs and benefits. The domestic costs of lives lost, money spent, inflation, and domestic unrest rose dramatically. The benefits of victory became increasingly ethereal; South Vietnam was clearly a weak ally with little to offer for increasing high American costs. Conversely, the costs of defeat sank as US foreign policy makers realized that Vietnam’s loss would not in fact knock over many dominoes. Australia, Indonesia, and Japan would not ‘finlandize.’ The USSR’s experience in Afghanistan is similar. At some point, it simply is cheaper to lose.

Now apply this model to the current Iraq War. The cost-benefit analysis is (probably) turning against US involvement:

1. The costs of victory are skyrocketing. Estimates of the war range from one to two trillion dollars. Claims of a ‘broken’ army feed fears of imperial overstretch. A steady stream of American casualties from an unwanted nation-building mission has deeply divided and soured American public opinion. America’s global reputation and legitimacy are at record lows.

2. The benefits of victory are increasingly insubstantial. Iraq is back in OPEC. Maliki and the Iraqi religious leadership are no accommodating more of Israel than other regional states. No MWD were found. Iraq will likely be a failed/quasi-state, hardly a reliable or durable ally in the war on terror. Long-term US bases there would be controversial and attacked constantly.

3. The costs of defeat are lower than the US leadership believes. None of Iraq’s neighbors wants Iraq to become an Qaeda sanctuary; it is unlikely to be another Afghanistan. Small cross-border raids with drones and gunships (as in Somalia or Pakistan) will be possible should al Qaeda persist. The US has no clear national interest in the outcome of the Sunni-Shia civil war. Regardless of the outcome, the regional American alliance network will not likely change. Where else can the gulf emirs, Israel, Egypt, etc. realistically go for support beyond the US?

Yet hegemonic states figure in credibility as a cost particular to their status. US prestige concerns likely lengthened the Vietnam war by several years through the Nixon administration, as Soviet fears prolonged the Afghan conflict through the Gorbachev presidency. Both Nixon and Gorbachev promised to end the war but took years to do so. The current Iraq War again suggests that the hegemons will carry punishing cost/benefit equations for prestige. The question I propose to investigate is at what point do the non-prestige costs overwhelm hoped-for, yet hard to calculate, credibility gain.

Al Qaeda as an NGO

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Research Note

1. Argument

Since 9/11, the United States has implicitly treated its terrorist opponents as if they were states. It has deployed traditional assets of hard power against countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush speaks of a global ‘war’ on terror (GWoT) and listed only states in the ‘axis of evil.’ Yet terrorist groups themselves are structurally similar to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). While they may receive state-sponsorship, they frequently are an organizational embodiment of indigenous social movements. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamist groups emanate from the Islamic revival or wave since the 1970s, just as Greenpeace did from the environmental movement. That some of these NGOs or social movement organizations deploy violence distinguishes them tactically, but not structurally. Indeed at least one environmental NGO, the Earth Liberation Front, has slowly drifted into terrorism. Hence, warfighting counterterrorism strategies mischaracterize the opponent. This essay will first, map the structural similarities between terrorist organizations and NGOs through a comparison of Greenpeace and al Qaeda, and second, deduce counter-insurgency rather than warfighting policy implications for the GWoT.

As social movements arise – feminism, Islamism, Irish nationalism – they kick up non-state entities – NGOs – that agitate for new goals. Traditionally the literature on NGOs and social movements has implied that they are leftist or ‘progressive.’ From rising environmental concern emanates Greenpeace or the World Wild Life Fund; civil rights concerns generate the NAACP. Yet this logic does not preclude nationalist, religious, or ‘regressive’ social movements. Rising Irish nationalism in the environment of decolonization generated the IRA, as well as peaceful groups agitating for change. Similarly, an Islamic revival has gripped the Muslim world since the 1970s and created non-state, civil society groups to renew Muslim piety, some of which have reached to terrorism. That some, such as Hamas or Hezbollah, so blur the boundaries between NGO-style aid and charity work and terrorism, intellectually motivates my comparison of the two concepts.

2. Research

Several decades of research on social movements and NGOs has generated a general set of structural attributes of NGOs. For comparison, I choose Greenpeace, because it is a ‘classic,’ well-researched NGO case, and al Qaeda, because it is the best known terrorist group emanant from the Islamic revivalist movement. The following structured, focused comparison will be expanded in the full essay: Both are non-state and transnational. They are networked across borders through national chapters. These chapters have formal memberships, complete with selection criteria and bureaucratic jockeying over advancement, projects, and internal governance. National chapters are complemented by a wider but softer constituency of partially mobilizable sympathizers. Leadership is oligarchic and personalistic; charismatic founders tend to dominate, with limited circulation at the top. Both engage in fund-raising and recruitment within the relevant social movement. They are principled advocates; they seek deep ideational change in world politics. But the ‘deep politics’ of norm entrepreneurship is slow, and both are given to bouts of extraparliamentary direct action for immediate policy change. Neither seeks to enter traditional politics or morph into a political party. Both are media-savvy and engage extensively in public relations campaigns. They heavily use the non-nationalized, deterritorial space of the internet to organize, mobilize and fundraise at a global level for global change. Finally, like many NGOs, both share a general ideological disdain for US-led capitalist modernity.

3. Policy Implications/Results

The policy implications of this analysis, particularly for the current US WoT are significant. Islamism will continue to kick up groups like Al Qaeda or Hamas until the fervor behind the revival fades. As such, militarized strategies that target failed states are unlikely to reduce Islamic terrorism. Indeed, as the National Intelligence Estimates argue, the Iraq war has likely created more jihadists, because it plays to the most extreme variants of the Muslim revival. Warfighting counter-terrorism strategies significantly overrate the relevance of rickety, postcolonial states of the Middle East and Central Asia; they mischaracterize the opponent as a traditional state which can be reduced by traditional means.

If the opponent is primarily ideational – an inspirational social movement – channeled through violent NGOs, then a ‘hearts and minds’ strategy, complemented by containment and counterinsurgency, is likely a more efficacious approach. The model for future Western action in the GWoT would be not Iraq but the Malayan emergency of the 1950s. The norm entrepreneurship of Islamic radicals would be met by a contrasting, liberal campaign for hearts and minds. Where unsuccessful, Islamist regimes like Iran would face containment, and violent NGOs like al Qaeda would face counter-insurgency in fine-grained, patient, well-intelligenced, culturally-literate, small-footprint operations.

4. Method

The method is historical and cross-comparative. I will follow Alexander George’s prescription of structured, focused comparison. Along a series of generalized vectors, I will compare these two cases. The attributes listed above (section 2) are the general markers against which the two cases will be measured. The actual research will only involve reading. The relevant information is already in the public sphere. Because I wrote my dissertation on NGOs, I will likely circulate drafts among my NGO acquaintances; I will make a particular effort to solicit Greenpeace. I will also consult with associates from the CIA, homeland security, the military, and the other terrorism scholars in my professional network.

5. Literature/Contribution

This project contributes creatively to the international relations literatures on terrorism and social movements. To my knowledge, they have never been brought together before. Traditionally, social movement and NGO scholars focus on left-‘progressive’ groups like the anti-globalizers around the IMF and World Bank, or indigenous third world development groups. In Power in Movement, Sidney Tarrow noted that almost no one applies the tools of this work to rightist social movements. By contrast, the counterterrorism literature is dominated by Iraq, tactical considerations of how democracies should respond to terrorism, and state-sponsorship of terror. The structure of terrorist networks is simply taken for granted; they are like brigands or pirates or militias. But the operations of al Qaeda, Hamas and others suggest far greater sophistication.

So I believe I am creatively fusing two previously unaffiliated literatures. Applying our tools, as Tarrow suggests, to a conservative social movement and its emanant NGOs should yield theoretically interesting and policy-relevant results.

Globalization of Pluralism – Again

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Here is part 1 of this argument.

MNCs and NGOs are re-creating at the global level, what interest groups have long created at the domestic level. Where political interest groups emerged from domestic civil society and the economy to lobby government, the same is happening in the albeit less well integrated, global first and third sectors.

The global level has no public authority as integrated as a state. Yet it does, increasingly have policy processes that generate outcomes that apply to many states across many issues. There is neither global sovereignty, nor world government, but there is increasingly global governance. The pressures of globalization, particularly economic, but also social and environmental, have raised supra-state policy issues – human right, global warming, bank reserve ratios. States are not forced to submerge their will to supra-state policy answers – there is no world government – but rather strong functional and humanitarian pressures for coordinated policy responses. Globalization is not unstoppable, but increasingly states have gone along with its pressures to address problems at the global level. First and third sector organizations in states frequently demand such actions. Global governance, however, ramshackle and inefficient is the answer.

Globalization is the real-world driver of GG. As it elevates issues to a level of global concern, it creates strong incentives for global policy answers. But this does not explain the participation of nonstate actors in global policy making processes. In a strict inter-state model of world politics, GG would simply be regime building. But increasing actors from the for- and non-profit sector are joining the game. States could conceivably lock them out, and the most repressive do – the only voice from North Korea in world politics is the DPRK. But for an increasing number of states, preventing private actors from engaging in world politics, at least trying, is ideologically impossible. Democratization has driven up the costs of such repression. Surely Donald Rumsfeld would like to quiet Amnesty International’s harsh criticism of the Guantanamo detention facility, but to do so would violate clear norms, and in many democratic cases, written constitutional protections, of free speech. As more states democratize and liberalize, the most their internal private actors are allowed to make international connections, join the global economy and other global social movements. While GG has no formal charter to insure that is pluralistic, its most powerful state members, and an increasing number of the rest are liberal. Democratization has opened the floodgates, particularly for NGOs to spill into world politics.

Does the US Really Control the Bretton Woods Institutions?

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Research Note: TESTING REALIST INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION THEORY

A basic tenet of realism is that IGOs will reflect the distribution of power in their governance. Great powers will run the institutions and get more of what they want. The classic example of this in current world politics is the division of veto-wielding power in the UN.

Yet in my previous empirical work, interviewing within the IMF and Bank suggested that this is not always the case. In-house managers and institutional leaders had varying amounts of discretion. Day-to-day operations appeared almost exclusively beyond the direction of the GPs. Even some large policy issues seemed to swing in directions other than the apparent preferences of the GPs.

There is a transmission belt effect at work. The balance of power does not exist as a tangible empirical reality. It is reflected within the institutions; it must travel to them from national capitals. This creates room for slippage. Rather than simply suggesting, as neoliberal institutionalists do, that institutions can become sticky or gain self-confidence, I propose some specific hypotheses to explain why and how IGOs can in fact attain enough institutional autonomy to skirt if not openly contravene GP wishes.

H1. The role of GPs in IGOs will be reduced, if the IGO is primarily technocratic. It is not clear at all how America’s wishes differed from even the Soviet Union’s of Nazi Germany’s on the existence of time zones or postal details, for example.

H2. IGOs that can generate revenue internally can reduce their vulnerability to GP interference. The World Bank raises funds through the IBRD on its own. This provides it with some institutional autonomy.

H3. Presidential/managerial entrepreneurship can reshape GPs’ interests to align with the organizations. James Wolfensohn has dramatically reshaped the great power’s sense of the importance of development. A flamboyant, jet-setting advocate of poverty reduction, he oversaw a major expansion of the Bank’s resources, activities and prestige. Even the Bush administration agreed the poverty and AIDS in Africa were challenges it was simply inhumane to ignore.

H4. Great power stalemates create substantial institutional discretion. The split between large borrowing states such as China and Brazil, and donors like Great Britain, in the Bank and Fund over the role of NGOs, has created a stalemate at the Board level of the BWI on this question. The leaves management room to push around on its own, experimenting with how much change the member-state owners can absorb.

H5. Great powers translation of their global stature in policy clout within IGOs requires sustained commitment of resources and interest. It is not clear that many provide that. Even the United States’ Treasury Department only devotes, at most, 50 staff to monitoring the World Bank – an institution of 10,000 staff that turns over $20B per annum in new loans and generates enormous reams of reports. Without devotion to oversight, the reality of military and economic strength does not necessarily entail dominance or control.

H6. Epistemic communities and highly consensual knowledge may overrule the raw national interest of the great powers. The best example of this is the Bank and Fund’s continuing negative statements on OECD states’ agricultural subsidies. The powerful, deeply consensual global norms of poverty alleviation, and free trade seem to have overwhelmed the GPs’ interest in keeping the agricultural subsidies out of IFI discussions. Such ‘speaking truth to power’ requires deeply held and deeply consensual norms, but clearly the intellectual/normative hegemony of the rectitude of free trade and poverty reduction have placed agricultural subsidies regularly now on the IFI/world trade agenda.

H7. Great power indecision creates room for institutional experimentation and pathbreaking. While the logic of a high-profile bail-out to South Korea or Russia may be clear to the US, in many of the places where the Bank and Fund work, it is simply unclear what the GPs’ national interests are. IGO autonomy represents a manner of benign neglect. Does the US really care if Bourkina Fasso receives a dam project? Probably not. And even if it did, one can easily imagine countervailing interests (environmental NGOs vs construction conglomerates) who might undermine the unitary actor assumption.

None of this is not to say that the GPs do not get what they want. Where they are in agreement and show the requisite interest in a topic, they get what they want. As Dave Hunter of CIEL said to me, “if the US really wants something out of the Bank or Fund, it usually gets it.” But there are power translation questions on the transmission belt from the overall distribution of power to IGO outputs.

Little actual work testing the empirics of GP control of IGOs

Does it happen and what are the mechanisms?

Do splits among the GPs create room for IGOs to act autonomously?

Do IGO have some autonomy because without it they would be deserted by others?

So there is a trade-off between control and efficacy?

The US gets a lot of what it wants (in large terms of values, and in small terms of preferred loans or programs) in exchange for a minimal amount of autonomy. Miller Adams says the Bank is a good investment for the US – costs us little and gets us a lot

Process Tracing the Actual Dynamics of GP control of the IOs

Who in the US Treasury, State Department, White House, Congress?

What connection do they have to the Board and management?

How far down into the institution does US flow?

Does it influence on macro-policies and lending picks, or does it influence staffing and staff practices?

“The intense interest of the United States in the IMF sometimes borders on a proprietary interest. More than any other member, the United States has viewed the IMF as an instrument of its foreign policy” (Leo Van Houten, “Governace of the IMF,” 2002, IMF pamphlet 53, p. 42)

The US is so important to the functioning of the BWI that external review of the IMF’s external relations strategy recommended specific liaison with the US Congress (2000 annual report 154) had a section specifically on outreach to the US Congress, and the Bank has had separate meeting with the Congress (and the Bundestag) as well, outside of its normal accountability channels (The World Bank: Its First Half Century, Vol.I, ch.7 & Vol.II, 653ff)

What is the transmission belt of US preferences into BWI policy and does it work?

Interview the US EDs at the Bank and Fund.

Find the number and positions of influence of US nationals in the BWI

Is there a correlation between the US percentage vote at Boards and its influence?

Does the US have more than 17.14% influence? Probably

Why can the US punch above its weight?

How do the Great Powers Control IGOs?

1. GDP-indexed voting

Both BWI have weighted voting which is maintained despite the formalities of sovereign equality through the leverage granted by their status as creditors to the poor. The choice for the developing world is between an IMF and MDBs mostly dominated by the GPs or no IFIs, at all, and NOT as NGOs would have them

think, between the current voting structure and a more democratic one

2. Thorough staffing of the Boards of, and missions to, IOs

See interview with Keith Kozloff and Leo Van Houten, “Governace of the IMF,” 2002, IMF pamphlet 53, p. 15. The GPs have the money and trained staff to fill out their national missions and offices at the IO, as well as build responsible offices within their own executive and legislative bureaucracies. There are offices and staff in the various responsible ministerial department, EBAs and legislative committees overseeing the actions of the IGO. Developing countries frequently cannot compete with this level of oversight. Hence the miss important information and are unable to participate meaningfully in decision-making.

3. Culture of IOs, especially IFIs

All of the major IFIs have their HQs in the North, are financed heavily by the North, are staffed disproportionately by Northern-nationals, are staffed disproportionately by Northern-educated professionals, and have internal codes of conduct that reflect Northern modes of professionalism and business conduct. The IMF feels like another organization in Washington, and is a part of the larger Washington ‘theater of politics’ – including external protests, media attention and close alignment with the Washington political calendar, especially the American budget cycle

Superpowerdom on the Cheap

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Reasearch Note

A typical notion in the history of hegemonic states is note the roots of their eventual decline in what Paul Kenneday called imperial overstretch. Large powers dissipate their forces in distant peripheral commitments and conflicts. These outstrip available resources. As the domestic economy struggles to create the requisite surplus for the military, investment and technology growth slump. Eventually, the hegemon must either retrench (Britain) or collapse (Soviet Union, Rome).

The United States is therefore an aberration. Far from overstretch, America’s ‘informal empire’ appears underfunded. A wide range of critics have argued that the greatest threat to American foreign policy goals is poor resourcing (Nye, Brzenski). A standard critique of US troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan concern the low commitment of US manpower and reconstruction funding. Before September 11, 2001, the Bush administration toyed with the idea of eliminating one of the ten standing Army divisions (Kurt Campbell and Celeste Ward, “New Battle Stations?” Foreign Affairs September/October 2003). And even today the Bush administration is adamant in its refusal to expand the number of Americans in uniform or raises taxes to close a budget deficit roughly equal to the size of the US defense budget.

Superpowerdom on the cheap is unprecedented. The result is a bizarre, by the standards of past empires, reach for influence without resources. The US appears to be attempting to learn the lessons of history before they are taught. Rather than end in the ‘inevitable’ predicament of imperial overstretch that has bedeviled hegemons from Athens to the Soviet Union (Kelly and Rowe 2003), the US seems to consciously trying to avoid it.

This is therefore an astonishing experiment for international relations. In the 1980s, historians of imperial decline like Walter LaFeber and Paul Kennedy were already writing of American decline. The Vietnam quagmire, the military retrenchment and economic malaise of the 70s suggested the US was going the way of other would be hegemons, only faster. The rise and fall of imperial states seemed like a law (or as close to a law as we can get in IR), and already ‘declinism’ was writing obituaries. Yet the boom of the 1990s suggests the 1970s were a slip dip, but not a serious reduction in American power.

The US’ current effort therefore should fascinate IR theory for two reasons. First, we must evaluate how successfully the US manages its balance sheet of resources vis commitments. This question is particularly relevant as America’s commitments are expanding in the wake of 9/11. Particularly, we must examine how the US strives to meet its commitments with minimal resources.

Second, we must examine whether US policy makers have in fact learned from the social research on imperial decline and are using that as a guide of what to do or to avoid. Professional IR theory and diplomatic history have provided a large body of work on hegemony. Almost all of it ends in generic predictions that hegemony is unsustainable over the long-term. Even Rome fell at some point. In dissecting the causes of imperial decline, important lessons on economic management, resources extension, ideological commitment, and domestic mobilization have been elucidated. It bears investigating then whether the knowledge actually changes the behavior of the current hegemon.

This discussion is particularly important for the philosophy of social science. There are tough debates within IR over the policy relevance of our work and over the learning capacity of statesmen. The (non-)use of the hegemony literature by US decision-makers has important implications for these debates. Were IR debates exploited within decision-circles to improve policy judgments, then this is evidence of IR’s policy-relevance, even if unattended. It would also suggest that learning is real. This is a sharp point of contention between realists and constructivists. Randall Schweller quipped once that learning is when policy makers do what academics want. Ned Lebow responded that is we don’t learn from social science, what is the point. American hegemony and its management is an important case for this argument in IR, as American unipolarity is the dominant feature of international politics today (Kapstein and Mastanduno, Unipolar Politics).

METHODOLOGY

Keynes famously quipped that self-described practical men are usually unconscious disciples of some dead economist. In the same way, evidence that US policy-makers need not be tied directly to a reading of ‘declinist’ historian or hegemony theorists. Abstract theoretical work often filters in larger debates through second and third had treatments in the media or praxis-oriented journals, like Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy in the United States. So we are looking for tropes and expressions that suggest an awareness of the declinist and hegemonic literatures.

Sources:

2001 National Security Strategy

2001 Quadrennial Defense Review

2002 Nuclear Posture Review

Interviews in the State and Defense Departments