Category Archives: United States

“Global Economic Crisis and Cooperation in East Asia: Search for Regional Cooperation, Leadership Formation and Common Identity”

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Part two is here.

The Institute of Chinese Studies at Pusan National University held this two-day conference with Chinese and Japanese scholars also invited. I was a discussant on a panel entitled “China’s Changing Role in NE Asia.” I provided feedback on a Chinese paper on Obama’s foreign policy. My remarks are my next post. It was a new opportunity for me to sit to meet with Chinese and Japanese scholars at a conference.

1. The Chinese were very policy-oriented, while the Japanese were more like American IR, and the Koreans split the difference (just like their geopolitics). I found it difficult to respond to my paper, because it was mostly a normative interpretation of US foreign policy, talking about what the US should or should not do. None of the Chinese papers used much IR theory; most of them cited news magazines, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy in order to make policy points. By contrast, the Japanese work looked more like what I read in ISQ or IO. In a side discussion, a Japanese scholar said to me that this was quite common from Chinese scholars at conventions, and that it used to be more so. S/he felt uncomfortable, because these things frequently degenerated into foreign policy contests. This reminded me of my earlier observation that Korean IR is also slanted toward public policy, although not as much.

2. The Chinese attitudes towards Japan, Korea, and the US were fairly hostile (or paternalistic toward Korea) in the formal discussion, but in the private conversation it was all smiles and congeniality. For example, my paper was all about the  US pursuit of “world domination.” (*Sigh* Thank the Bush administration for that attitude.) Another paper argued that China is becoming the dominant power in Korea, and will and should markedly structure the outcome of unification. China’s “3 No’s” are: a unifying Korea could not create chaos in Manchuria, not be a bulwark of US containment of China, and not indulge Pan-Korean expansionism. China would only ‘permit’ a neutral unified Korea. Yikes! This reminded me of Russia’s recent claims to a sphere of influence in the near abroad. I asked a few Koreans about these remarks, and they generally agreed that they were pretty sinister. This sort of talk will clearly push Korea toward the US more as an over-the-horizon guarantor of its sovereignty against a rising China. Empirically, the argument struck me as a correct reading of China’s attitude toward Korea, but normatively, I would be pretty nervous if I was a Korean. Japan too came in for lots of fire about history, its nationalist right, hidden expansionist impulses, toadying to the US. The Japanese scholars seemed to take this pretty well, but it was awkward. In the end, I got the clear impression that the Chinese would like the US out of Asia and think that the Japanese are closest militarists.

3. The body language of the conference became noticeable over time. The Japanese and Korean scholars tended to speak in low tones and short bursts. The Chinese spoke quite loudly, tended to wave their fingers and point, went on quite longer than others. I don’t know if this is culturally-encoded or belligerence or what though.

4. The Chinese scholars also seemed to speak for the government or nation. They comfortably and frequently used the first person plural –’we China will do this or that’,’ or ‘we will permit/not permit this or that.’ I and the Japanese scholars spoke in the third person generally. This made me wonder if their work is in some way cleared or approved by a government agency.

The IR scholar in me, of course, immediately perceived a sociology of power in all this. The Chinese clearly spoke with a self-confidence and assertion about their government’s “interests” in Asia that the rest of us did not. You could easily feel the ‘China rising’ vibe in their presentations and comments. They weren’t openly belligerent, but I did feel a little ‘bullied.’

Further, their presentations were quite normative and policy-focused, so they subtly polarized the panels. Other participants felt cast into national roles as ‘defenders’ of ‘their’ governments; certainly I felt that way. It easily could have become a foreign policy showdown between nationals rather than an academic forum. I remember when my turn came to speak – after an openly maoist, anti-American policy paper (covered in my next post) – that I did feel this ‘patriotic’ urge creeping up on me to play the ‘American’ in the room and say posturing, RISK-boardgame stuff like, ‘my government can hardly be expected to tolerate this…,’ or defend the US allies in room – the Japanese and Korean scholars. It was tempting to play the macho superpower and throw that back at the Chinese by, e.g., saying that the US will defend Korea’s sovereign right to reunify as it sees fit without Chinese guidance/permission. This was a genuinely uncomfortable, bizarre, and new feeling. I think I restrained myself reasonably well – I certainly don’t think of myself as a nationalist – but some of the comments (like the US wants to invade NK) were so outlandish I felt compelled to dismiss them as “fantasy.”

All in all, it was a great experience. The papers were a mixed bag academically, but as examples of attitudes and cleavages in NE Asia, they were superb, and the sociology of the conference was a huge learning experience – better than the papers themselves.

“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.

RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) vs Rush, Beck, & Fox News

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Before I blogged here, I and a friend tried a blog at blogspot on moderate Republicans under W. Here is the ‘manifesto’ (Sept. 2005), which I think bears repeating now, as Glenn Beck and Rush are taking the Right over the edge and driving away moderates like Arlen Specter.

“The national Republican Party today is slipping away from principles that once appealed to moderate and independent voters. We are concerned that the GOP has aligned itself closely to interest groups as powerful as those we dislike in the Democratic party. We recognize the legitimacy of interest articulation, but sharply conservative interests – from social and religious conservatives, as well as corporations – have seriously reduced the room necessary for moderates to comfortably co-exist. We do not believe that the GOP’s interests in becoming a permanent majority party are suited by the ideological narrowness of today’s leadership and strategy. While we do not blame President Bush entirely for this, he is the foremost example. His “instinctual” leadership style has empowered anti-modern and nepotistic elements in the GOP. We are concerned that short-term electoral interests have driven him to adopt highly contentious, unnecessarily conservative positions. Neither the religious right nor big business are fully consonant with the general will. In a two-party system, big tent parties are inevitable. For conservative activists who view us as “squishy” or “RINOs,” our response is that pluralism too is an American value.
We are, broadly speaking, classical liberals – or perhaps just Midwest moderates. For many years, a proper skepticism toward government and a preference for individual self-determination formed the principled core of the Republican Party. We were comfortable moderate Republicans for several decades. But today’s national GOP, with its untenable opposition to such clear requirements of good governance as accountability, empirical science, and balanced budgets, has left us profoundly alienated. Both of us felt compelled to vote for John Kerry in 2004.
We are deeply concerned that the Bush administration seems to have forgone a genuine trust in markets and individuals to embrace “big government conservatism.” We support necessary government capacity to rectify market failure and provide modern, humane safety nets, but not to reward market winners at the expense of challengers, nor to empower political cronies close to office holders, nor to shower programs on preferred electoral constituencies. We support individual freedom to make private sexual and cultural choices, and a balanced constitutionalism against the Bush administration’s breathtakingly expansive view of executive power.
These are hardly radical ideas. We do not believe the majority of Americans, or even Bush voters, share the social-conservative notion that the state should punish “immorality,” nor lobbyists’ view of public budgets as a windfall to be exploited. There is a modern, neoliberal/centrist way similar to the Free Democrats of Germany or the reformed Labor Party of Tony Blair. Such neoliberals and moderate conservatives exist here too – John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Christie Todd Whitman, George Voinovich spring to mind. We do not believe they share the divisive social conservatism, regressive fiscal propensities, and general opacity of the Bush imperial presidency.
So we invite all of you centrist and alienated Republicans to post here and engage in our debate. If you think we are Democrats, we are not. As bloggers, we feel close to grounded, moderate conservatives like Andrew Sullivan or The Economist. We generally trust the use of American power in the world. We support legal universalism against the multicultural opt-outs so dear to left. We admire the efficiency of the market and trade. But these sympathies are consonant with modernity. Increasingly the national GOP rejects the Enlightenment. We call it back.”

Start Investigating the Bush People for Torture

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The debate is beginning on investigating the Bush administration for torture. It seems to me that this is a no-brainer, and I am amazed at the hysterical conservative reaction that this will embolden the terrorists or divide the country. Perhaps the worst GOP cliche is that we will be ‘looking backward when we need to look to the future.’ Gimme a break. Accountability, which includes investigation where suspicion merits, is pretty basic in a democracy.

If the law was broken, there needs to be an investigation and possible prosecution. That is legally required. But of course, the politics of it are far more determinative of whether an investigation will happen.

1. If the Bush people have done nothing wrong, then they have nothing to fear. As Al Haig said to Nixon, an investigation can only prove that Dean is wrong, correct? (Ooops!) Indeed, an investigation will give the Bushies a chance to end this thing once and for all and defend their actions openly. Ex-DCI Hayden has already begun this by saying that torture did save US lives. We need to have this debate, in order to set the historical record straight and to decide if our values will permit torture if/when its efficacious.

2. Transparency and oversight are important. The country is far better off for things like the Watergate investigation or the Church committee. Investigating possible abuses of power so as to avoid them in the future is a fundamental difference between open and closed societies. It is also a major part of the balance of power. Congressional investigations of possible executive malfeasance are an important oversight tool. Having these debates out in public is good for the republic. It keeps government honest and insures the citizenry is informed of what occurs in their name, and hopefully encourages them to participate more. It is a healthy exercise that we do this when called for. It keeps us vigilant over our politics.

3. Walt makes the obvious and excellent point that the US has pushed for investigations and indictments of war criminals in places like the Balkans, Iraq, and Africa. If we brush this under the carpet, it will be far more difficult for the US to advocate for war crimes prosecutions in the future. The hypocrisy is so rank and obvious. To not investigate will damage the soft power and US reputation that Obama wants so much to restore and utilize.

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.

He’s a Black President and No One Really Cares … So Stop Bringing It Up

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Eugene Robinson finally got one right about race in the US. Usually he (and Bob Herbert at the NYT and Tavis Smiley) represent the worst unreconstructed, temperature-raising, black vs white, ‘civil rights’ commentary. So he deserves recognition, even if he did take the time to remind us that Obama is black, even while telling us no one is thinking about it (he clearly is). Kinda snarky there, but understandable given what a breakthrough Obama was.

The notion that somehow Obama’s great relevance is his race is astonishingly irrelevant, parochial, and incorrect. If the liberal commentariat and black political/academic elite absorb this, then hopefully the notion of a ‘black America’ as a Quebec-like societe distincte will slowly disappear. It is divisive, unhelpful, and empirically inaccurate anyway; Obama’s own election demonstrates this, as does the wide popularity among non-black Americans of black socio-cultural contribution – Oprah, jazz, rap, Michael Jordan, C Powell on the lecture circuit, the brief and rather quixotic ‘Condy for president’ wave, whatever. This is Obama’s own vision (‘no white America, no black America’) – as well as ML King’s of course – and the promise of the US melting pot. The alternative is that hideous and divisive multiculturalist metaphor – that the US should be a ‘tossed salad’ of clumped ethnic groups simply living in proximity. This strikes me as risky (Canada, Yugoslavia) and inaccurate – with the exception of Native Americans and the Amish, I don’t think most minorities in the US are so removed or culturally alienated that they merit the classification francophones demand in Canada. Do we really want to give up on integrative Americanization in favor of  self-segregated suburbs and gated-communities?

Irrelevant, because in the midst of 2 wars and the worst economic crisis since the Depression, who really cares? Parochial, because he is president of the whole country, and a simple black-white bifurcation no longer corresponds to its ethnic reality anyway. To say he is one of ‘us’ against them is narrow, racist, and needlessly perpetuates US racial divisions. Finally, it’s incorrect, because – if you must read race into his presidency – his mixed race background is the real story, not his ‘blackness.’ His family is a great story of the integration and tolerance the US seeks to achieve.

And in point of fact, the great man has not governed in any recognizably ‘black’ manner. IR feminists used to hope that women in power might in some way be more peaceful or multilateral, than their male counterparts. Yet women as different in background as M Thatcher, G Meir and I Gandhi were just as ‘realist,’ nationalist, and prickly as any other male foreign policy figure (too bad…sigh). And Obama too has shown that black American presidents will go the same way. Abroad, he has increased Predator strikes in Afghanistan and has raised US troop levels there. He is holding the line on NK (sort of), and Ipredict he will soon be confronting Russia and Iran in the place of the vaunted but empty ‘reset.’ (They’re simply too illiberal and nasty for a liberal like Obama to stomach for long.) At home, his governing style is marked by gifted oratory and outreach, but this veils a clearly partisan agenda. He has not talked up or openly identified ‘black issues’ for special treatment, and his staff is packed with white technocrats. All these choices are his right – he won. But it shows that he hardly self-indentifies as a ‘black politician’ in the sense of classic ‘civil rights’ figures like Jesse Jackson, Marion Barry, or George Forbes. He is clearly a racial bridge-builder, but he seems to do this naturally, not as a stratagem for power or moral recognition on cable TV. (In this he is similar to former Cleveland mayor Michael White.)

So stop telling us he is black, start judging him by his record, and even better, start admitting that its not going so well.

Give Hillary a Break Already on ‘Fashion’ – Who Really Cares?!

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In an otherwise intelligent article on Turko-US relations, Yigal Schleifer makes the following wholly unnecessary remark: “Clinton appeared on a popular television chat show, Haydi Gel Bizimle Ol (Come and Join Us), similar to the popular American talk show The View. On the program, Clinton opened up to the four hosts about her family life and her challenged sense of fashion.”

Wth? Why? What is the possible value to the article of this remark? I can’t possibly understand why anyone really gives a d— about HRC’s clothes. If I were a woman, this is exactly the kind of pointless aside that would drive me up the wall and tell me there is still sexism in the world. For something like 20 years, Hillary’s clothes and hairstyles have been an on-again, off-again topic of conversation. What is the possible relevance of any of that to anything meaningful at all in her political interests? It’s so thoroughly pointless and vapid, and, given it endless repetition, vaguely chauvinistic.

I will admit that I know little about ‘fashion’ (‘nice clothes’ to me means Brooks Brothers),  but its not as if HRC dresses in t-shirts or jeans or otherwise unprofessionally. So give her break, because, really, why do you care so much? Aren’t your concerns about politics deeper than women politicians’ color schemes? (If you think I am exaggerating, read Maureen Dowd’s fawningly sycophantic coverage of Michelle Obama, especially here.)

This reminds me of an oft-repeated and similarly pointless pseudo-criticism of Al Gore in 2000. He was supposedly a poor candidate because he was too wonky and dorky, and he looked stiff when he gave Tipper ‘the kiss.’ GAH!! Who really cares? Must we be so embarrassingly insipid? Who cares what the E! Network or whatever thinks of Gore’s kissing ability? Don’t we want politicians who are a little nerdy and overread and don’t worry excessively about matching their jewelry or something ? I’ll take Hillary over Mrs. Sarkozy’s fluff, or Gore over the incurious W any day.

And for good measure, when HRC came to SK last month, she gave a good talk to a women’s college in Seoul. She said good stuff to young women about empowerment and advancement in a male-dominated society. And to its credit, no one in the SK media mentioned her clothes, style, etc. By contrast, I can only imagine HRC rightfully grinding her teeth on the Turkish View as some product of plastic surgey half her age asked her why she wore those shoes at that dinner in the 1990s. Awful…

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.