My September Diplomat Essay: Relax – Chinese Hegemony in Asia is Unlikely

Posted on by
10

water_pollulation_shaoxing_zhejiang

The following is a re-up of a piece I wrote for the Diplomat last month as part of an informal back-and-forth series with the National Interest this summer on the US pivot to Asia and AirSea Battle. (Here and here are some of the other entries.) That pic, which has got to be the grossest river in all China, is from here.

In brief, I increasingly think that ASB is a mistake, because it’s almost impossible to read it as anything other than hugely provocative from the Chinese point of view, no matter what we say to them about our peaceful intentions. (Read this, and tell me reasonable Chinese wouldn’t flip out.) It’s a classic example of the security dilemma, but as I argue below, I am not really convinced that we actually need this high-tech, super-fearsome-sounding ASB right up in their face. More generally though, the pivot to Asia – a sharpening of American attention on the region, is probably a good idea. China is vastly more influential on American life than Israel or Iran. But the Middle East and Islam activates belligerent American religiosity so much, that I doubt we’ll really be able to pivot. In any case, the essay follows the jump and is written in an op-ed style.

Continue reading →

Walter Russell Mead Defends, Badly, the NSF cuts to Political Science

Posted on by
2

NSF

I originally put this on Duck of Minerva, an IR theory blog where I also write. But it’s worth putting here too as the US government shuts down over Tea Party intransigence.

I’ve defended Mead before on this site. I think he is a bright conservative who stands out in a sea of Fox News ideological bleh, like NewsMax or Drudge. He has a far better sense of the importance of religion in many people’s lives than academics do, and he has a good feel for western classical history that adds historical depth to a lot of his blogging. I read him regularly, where I recently stumbled on this defense of the coming NSF cuts in political science. Money quote:

Political scientists should know better: university faculties ultimately depend on taxpayers and their representatives for many of the resources they need for their work. This fact of life is truer than ever when health care and other costs are forcing discretionary spending down. Funding for political science is just another budget line item that needs to be justified. Writing obscure articles for peer-reviewed journals that nobody, not even other people in your discipline, will read is not the best way to do that.

And here’s another thought: making departments in social sciences and other disciplines more welcoming to political conservatives and—horrors!—seriously religious people may help build that bipartisan support without which federal funds will be increasingly hard to get.

Continue reading →

My July Diplomat Essay: The Korean ‘OPCON’ Soap Opera Rolls on – Hint: just drop it

Posted on by
3

Thank you for waiting out my summer break. I need summers to get some writing done, but inevitably I didn’t get nearly what I needed to wrapped up. Should you ever hear that argument that college professors slack, because we only teach 2/2 or 3/3, you ought to try writing for these journals. Just read this. That is why we don’t teach 30 hours a week. 

But I am still writing for The Diplomat, a gig I really enjoy. Here is my piece from August on the endless soap opera of the transfer of wartime operational control (‘OPCON’) from the US to the Republic of Korea. (The pic is the US SecDef and SK DefMin.) Why the RoK would even want OPCON back, before unification, is beyond me. It’s a perfect opportunity to buckpass to the superpower security guarantor. And in fact, that is sorta the way the Korean debate is going; they increasingly don’t want it back. Also, it seems pretty clear now that the Koreans aren’t really ready. Too many officers have been playing golf or whatever instead of getting ROKA specs and procedures up to snuff. Anyway, my own sense is to just drop it, because the US and RoK are just going to re-build a version of CFC (Combined Forces Command) that does all the same stuff but is just a little less ‘joint.’ I don’t really see the point then in ending OPCON. If you’re a real mil-tech expert, please tell me in the comments why a new ‘CFC light’ is better than the current arrangement? 

The essay starts after the jump.

Continue reading →

Want to Guest-Post on my Website? b/c I need a Summer Break…

Posted on by
1

Special-Cool-Summer-Drinks

Traditionally over the summers, I take a break; too much blogging eats up research time, and I have an r&r I gotta finish.

But guest-posting is a nice option to fill in some down time. So if you like the kinda stuff I put up, please comment below or email me, and maybe we can work out a guest-post. Please stick to the sorta stuff I normally put here up – Asian security, US foreign policy, Korea, China, Japan, the Middle East.

Or if you need some reading this summer, here are the 5 best international relations books and articles I have read so far this year:

“Don’t Come Home, America: The Case against Retrenchment,” Stephen Brooks, John Ikenberry & William Wohlforth, 2013

– yes, you probably already read it, but if you haven’t, it’s really important. I want to be a retrencher, because I think America has become infatuated with empire, but this is compelling case why that instinct is wrong.

“Rebooting Republican Foreign Policy,” Daniel Drezner, 2013

– great summary of why I went from voting and working for the GOP (a congressman) in the 1990s, to sheer disgust today at the neo-con/Tea-Party mania that has unhinged traditionally sober and responsible Republican stewardship of US foreign policy

The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, Hendrik Spruyt, 1994

– fantastic ‘Big Think’ historical social science; the kind of product that justifies why we have political science as a distinct discipline; if I only could write historically-informed social science this good…

Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, eds. James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, 2003

– if you like history and have never had a method class, this is a great place to start on how to do social analysis with history right

“Path Dependence in Historical Sociology,” James Mahoney, 2000

– the single best essay I’ve ever read about how to build a proper causal argument chain; shoulda been assigned when I was in grad school 

Guest Post – Dave Kang: “International Relations Theory and East Asian History”

Posted on by
3

AHN_HOUSEIt’s always my pleasure to guest-post my good friend Dave Kang. Dave teaches at the University of Southern California, runs their Korean Studies Institute (the pic), and knows way more about the issues of this website than I ever will. So if you aren’t reading his work yet, you should be. Here are some previous guest posts he’s written (one, two, three).

Here is his encouragement that you actually apply international relations theory to East Asia. I can’t agree more. There is far too much superficial think-tank wonkery about East Asia (how many nukes does China have? will Pyongyang test another missile? and so on), and not nearly enough real theory. Dave does that and you should too. So instead of writing yet another essay about the South China Sea, the essays referenced below should be good encouragement to write something richer.

“Thanks to Bob for letting me borrow his website yet again. I have an article “International Relations Theory and East Asian History” that appears in the current issue of the Journal of East Asian Studies, edited by Stephan Haggard. In conjunction with this post, Lynne Rienner will make the article freely available to all for the next 30 days; you can download it here until October 1.

The entire issue is devoted to the international relations of historical East Asia. The special issue features essays by James Anderson, Kirk Larsen, Jiyoung Lee, Seohyun Park, Kenneth Robinson, and Yuan-kang Wang, all exploring different aspects of IR and East Asia in many disparate epochs and areas.

Continue reading →

My ‘Diplomat’ Essay on whether these Youth Protests will Spread to Asia’s Democracies

Posted on by
5

Brazil

Here is a re-post of my July contribution to the Diplomat web magazine. It expands on a brief observation I made a few weeks ago – that a lot Asian democracies have the same characteristics that seem to have driven people into the streets in Brazil and Turkey.

Here is the best critical response I’ve gotten so far. In brief, it argues that my conditions for the revolts are so widely drawn, that arguably lots of states could see these kinds of revolts. That is a good point. And many of the commenters that the Diplomat said something similar – that Cambodia, Malaysia, and Thailand should also have been included in my piece as possibilities. I singled out India, the Philippines, and South Korea. I’m not a big expert in the area of modernization and contestation, so thoughtful comments would be great. Here we go:

Continue reading →

My ‘Newsweek Korea’ Cover Story: A Defense of Obama’s ‘Strategic Patience’ on North Korea

Posted on by
12

Newsweek Korea cover 2

Newsweek Korea asked me to participate in a cover story debate on Obama’s strategic patience. A friend of mine wrote against it; I wrote in defense. Here is the Korean language text at the NWK website. Below is my original English language version.

In brief I argue that NK is so hard to pin down, that big strategies never work with it, provoke North Korea into lashing out, and raise impossible expectations on democratic decision-makers. So Obama is acting responsibly, IMO, by not promising more than he can deliver and by not giving a reason for NK to act out.

After 20+ years of negotiating on more or less the same topics, it should be pretty obvious that NK is insistent on not being placed in some box by outsiders. It will not be treated as some technocratic ‘problem’ to be ‘solved’ by a conference of experts, like global warming or something. And it will lash out if necessary to remind us of that. Hence, I argue for ‘muddling through,’ and that we should stop expecting our policy-makers to have some great NK strategy that will fix the issue. That’s not gonna happen. We all know that. We just have to wait for China to stop paying NK’s bills. Until then, all the sweeping declarations (‘agreed framework,’ ‘sunshine’,’ the ‘axis of evil,’ the current big idea du jour of ‘trust’) are rather pointless and raise impossible expectations among voters in SK, the US, and Japan. Let’s be a little more honest about what we can expect from North Korea.

Here we go:

Continue reading →

Agree with Heinlein’s ‘Citizens vs. Civilians’? then this US Military History is for you: Book Review

Posted on by
3

Starship-Troopers-starship-troopers-13578603-1024-768

I was asked by a participating member of the H-Diplo/ISSF network to review The American Culture of War. Here is the original link to my review, but it’s off in some far corner of the internet, so I thought I’d repost it here. In brief, I found the book a pretty disturbing rehearsal of right-wing tropes about the military in a democracy, especially from an academic, and there’s no way I’d ever use it with undergrads as Routledge suggests. The underlying moral driver is the ‘chicken hawk’ principle – that those without military experience are not morally qualified to lead DoD and should otherwise defer to uniformed military. At one point the author actually says that, because the US Army ‘distrusts’ Congress, the Army should ‘guide’ Congress. Yikes. Do Americans (and the author) really need to be told civilian authority runs the other way, and that that’s in the Constitution? I find that sort of military elitism democratically terrifying and reflective of the post-9/11 militarization of America that is now the single most important reason, IMO, to end the war on terror.

I would just add the following update: Both the book and review were written before Petraeus’ resignation, but it should come as no surprise that the text lionizes Petraeus. It is therefore a pleasing schadenfreude for the frightening post-9/11 military hero-worship of the US right to be taken down a notch. Here we go:

Continue reading →

Could the Youth Protests of the EU, Middle East, Turkey, and Brazil Spread to Asia’s Corrupt Democracies?

Posted on by
8

brazil-confed-cup-protests_jpeg3-1280x960

Jay Ulfelder and I had a Twitter conversation on this question in the last few days (here and here). But Twitter has such limited space, I thought I would break out our discussion on the blog and ask what others thought.

Watching all these riots – driven heavily by youth dissatisfaction, it seems – is making me wonder if this might spread to Asia’s democracies. A lot of the problems these protests are identifying exist in spades in Asia: high-handed, out-of-touch governments; election-proof pseudo-technocracies that act as unaccountable oligarchies; shallow, clique-ish political parties that provide no meaningful transmission belt of citizen preferences; massive government and business corruption; wasteful white-elephant spending to capture global ‘prestige’ while everyday services like health care and education are underfunded; closed political opportunity structures that regularly reward insiders and large corporations with crony connections to the state; wealthy, de-linking elites with 1% lifestyles wildly at variance with the rest of the population… That’s Asia too; there’s more than enough sleaze to go around.

Jay asked which countries might this apply to in Asia. My first thoughts were India, the Philippines, and South Korea among the democracies (given the obvious problems street protests face in non-democracies). Are those countries really governed better than Brazil? I doubt it. Anna Hazare pushed this sort of agenda in India a few years ago, and South Korea, which Asian case I know best, has all those Brazil problems particularly – and probably even worse than in Brazil. I’ve wondered for years why there isn’t more populist anger and protest over the cronyist, Seoul-based chaebol oligarchy that is Korean democracy. (I’m usually told it has something to do with ‘Confucian’ or ‘Asian’ values.)

It’s terribly hard to predict outbreaks of mass street protest of course, but if I’ve identified the broad structural conditions of the current wave correctly, and if protest in one locale seeds it in another (“cascades”), (two huge “if”s to be sure) then Asia’s oligarchic, corrupt democracies are/should be next.

My ‘Diplomat’ Interview: the Inter-Korean Talks Collapsed over a very Korean Hang-up over Rank and Status

Posted on by
Reply

korea-talks

I write for the Diplomat magazine occasionally, and they just interviewed me on the collapse of the recent high-level inter-Korean talks. This is a re-print of that interview. It might seem ridiculous to non-Koreans, but Koreans take rank and status pretty seriously (because Korea is such hierarchical culture IMO). So a break-down over who out-ranks who (which is what happened) is not too extraordinary given the shared cultural context. Here’s that interview:

Continue reading →