National Security Decentralization: Kor. Inst. of Defense Analysis (2) – UPDATED: Response to Charli Carpenter – UPDATED II: More in the Comments

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Part one is here.

Last week, I spoke at a KIDA discussion of the Korean peninsula post-Cheonan. In brief I argued that there was no ‘post-Cheonan’ world as the SK right was hoping for. South Koreans are unwilling to risk war. There is no desire to hit back for the Cheonan sinking, because escalation might lead to a war in which South Koreans believe their wealthy democracy will get trashed and then burdened with Northern reconstruction.

But there is another specific reason why there is no response. SK’s hands are tied by the extreme vulnerability of its major population centers to NK retaliation. Specifically, following the above map of Korea’s provinces and cities, Seoul has 10.464 million; Gyeonggi province around it, filled with Seoul’s suburbs, has 11.549 million, and Incheon has 2.767 million. Busan by contrast has just 3.566 million. Korea’s total population is 48.875 million. (Those numbers come from a colleague at PNU’s Department of Public Policy and Management.) Worse yet, Busan’s population is shrinking, and Incheon’s is growing. So this means that 50% of Korea’s population lives within 50 miles of the DMZ, and 30% lives within just 35 miles.

NK knows this, and in order to hold SK hostage against any Southern retaliation for incidents like the Cheonan, it has stationed something like 10-20k artillery and rockets at the DMZ closest to this massive urban agglomeration in northwest SK. In effect then, half of the SK population is a massive city-hostage to NK, and it is only worsening because of Incheon’s rapid new growth.

In game scenarios of a second Korean war, the first six hours are decisive. NK knows that it will likely lose the war, and that its assets will be quickly eroded by allied air power. That is, in the first few hours, a primary SK-US bombing target will be all those rockets and canon at the DMZ. Nonetheless, almost everyone thinks that the KPA will be able to get off enough shells and rockets to effectively devastate the Seoul-Gyeonggi-Incheon area. Given that Koreans mostly live in high-rise apartment buildings, some with 60+ stories, the result would be hundreds of World Trade Center collapses. I live in such a high-rise; I can’t imagine that it could realistically withstand a Scud missile or two. 2500 live in my building alone. Consider that all across Gyeonggi, and you have a holocaust.

Note too, that all this can occur without Northern nuclear use. Essentially,the early hours of a war would a race between allied air and ground power to hit all those Northern emplacements before they fire. Like the old Cold War logic facing the the US and USSR, NK faces an extreme ‘use-it-or-lose-it’ dilemma. For this reason, the DPRK has repeatedly threatened to turn Seoul into a ‘sea of fire.’ This huge threat to SK’s extremely vulnerable northwest urban centers is the primary reason why the North never suffers military retaliation for attacks such as the 1976 tree-cutting incident or the 1987 KAL bombing.

So what to do? To me it seems rather obvious – the gradual de-centralization of SK’s population (and government and economy) from the northwest. Strangely, I have found almost nothing in the IR-national security literature on SK defense recommending or even discussing this choice. Yet when I suggested it last week at KIDA, multiple SK and US analysts and officers approached me afterwards to discuss the idea. Should Korea’s population be spread more equitably around the peninsula and further south from the DMZ, this would open new strike-back options after incidents like the Cheonan.

There are several objections worth rebutting now.

1. It would be expensive. Ok. Sure. But so is all the ROK defense spending that goes into protecting the northwest already.

2. It would take forever. Yes, this is true. But the stalemate with NK is now entering its seventh decade. To our great surprise, NK has withstood the end of the CW, the collapse of Soviet support, the death of Kim Il Sung, and the famines of the 90s. Rather than taking a perpetually short-term attitude toward NK – when will it just collapse so we can get on with reconstruction? – a better approach might be to consider strategies to win a drawn-out stalemate, which is already what this conflict is anyway. Consider that if decentralization had started in 1990 how much better the post-Cheonan options would be.

3. When NK collapses, this will have been a huge waste of money. Not necessarily, because there are regional growth and national equity reasons also in support of decentralization. Ie, the ROK is already far too centralized in one place (Seoul). Koreans outside of Seoul even call it the ‘Seoul-Republic.’ Like France, SK is wildly unbalanced with one city starving the rest of the country for capital, human talent, government attention, etc. (One sees this quickly living, as I do, in the ‘provinces,’ like Pusan.) Even if NK collapses, it would be healthier for SK to look more like Germany, Canada, or the US, with multiple large cities competing with each other for national resources and talent.

4. Forced population transfer are illiberal and wrong in a democracy. This is the strongest argument. Clearly decentralization would happen most rapidly if it were coerced, but this is, correctly, intolerable. But the government could create lots of incentives short of force. It could move the seat of the ROKG out of Seoul for starters. Brazil did this – for regional equity purposes – in 1960; and West Germany put its capital in sleepy little Bonn, because West Berlin was just too exposed. Israel doesn’t let too many people live near the borders with Gaza and Lebanon. So there is democratic precedent. Also, the Korean government intervenes in the economy all the time to help companies with subsidies and what not. How about directing some of that money outside of the northwest? But I agree it would be tricky; eminent domain, even for national security, would be tough when millions of people are involved.

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UPDATED:

This was linked heavily at Lawyers, Guns and Money and the Progressive Realist (h/t Charli Carpenter). Here is a response to the criticims raised in the comments:

“Let me try to answer a few of the objections proposed:

1. ‘You can’t just move cities.’ Perhaps, but that misstates my suggestion. Seoul is very old city with strong emotional roots in Korean national identity. It will not move. But it can shrink. Its postwar explosion into a megalopolis is a direct result of (reversible) policy choices – including the government’s susbsidization of mega-firms (chaebol), huge infrastructure projects like the Incheon airport, and most importantly, the legacy of authoritarian political centralization. Like most dictators, SK’s pre-democratic generals centralized almost everything (in Seoul) in order to more easily control the state. This legacy survived and worsened, gradually depopulating Korea’s other major cities (Pusan, Daegu, Dajeon) as everyone now wants to ‘move up’ (the local term) to Seoul. It has become a vacuum that hoovers up talent relentlessly and starves the rest of the country, and it is actually getting worse now, not better: Pusan, the second city, is shrinking and aging, while Incehon, right next to Seoul, is booming. (This has slowly become a bigger issue in Korean politics in the last two decades as the imbalance between Seoul and the rest has become genuinely extreme. The ‘Sejong City’ project aims to move the capital, although the local argument for rebalancing away from Seoul is made mostly for regional equity, not national security, purposes.) In short, Seoul’s centrality relfects historical path-dependence that can be reversed by new policy choices, although Seoul-based elites in almost all fields oppose this as a major inconvenience.

2. ‘It is illiberal to move them.’ Yes, it is, but a) deomcracies make such calculations all the time, b) living next to NK is vastly more disruptive than refusing to move for the development of a mall or something, and c) I don’t endorse coercion but incentivization. The West Germans imposed all sorts of restrictions on the residents of West Berlin that didn’t apply elsewhere, and Israel too uses zoning codes and such all the time for political purposes. SK already prevents people from living even closer to the DMZ. Also, Korea, unlike Western states, embraces state-led development and expects the state to do these sorts of things. Americans find ’eminent domain’ a culturally unacceptable intrusion on personal freedom, but I bet if you polled Koreans you wouldn’t get nearly that sort of anger. The role of the state in Korean life is much greater, subtler, and desired than it is in the US. Further, all sorts of places are deemed off-limits for residence for national security reasons in many countries. Finally, it hardly strikes me as ‘residential fascism’ or something to encourage people not to live right next  door to a super-dangerous enemy. Indeed, I am rather amazed that SK never did anything to halt this decades ago. The scale, not the legality, strikes me as the real problem. There are just so many people in Seoul and Kyeonggi; any serious plan to encourage relocation would take forever and cost mountains of money. On top of the demographic movement would be the further costs of an economic and political shift. It seems ridiculously expensive when the money could be spent on so much else. But if unwinding the already-exising over-population would be hard, the government could still take steps to prevent it from worsening in the future, as it is doing right now (point 1 above).

3. ‘Can’t we just protect them by destroying the weapons targeted at them?‘ This is what US Forces in Korea (USFK) hope, and they will tell you that in the first few hours of a war, they are going to fly hundreds of sorties to get the canon and artillery. In response to this NK has put, by some estimates 20,000 artillery and rockets at the nearby DMZ as a counter. I have not meet any analyst here – military or cilivian, Korean or America – who believes that allied air power could get them all without several hours (minimum) of bombing runs. Given that most Koreans live in closely clustered high rises, not dispersed homes, you only one need one or two shells or rockets to kill 2000 people. The referent image should be the hundreds of World Trade Center towers clustered tightly in an area smaller than Rhode Island collapsing under a rain of shells. You don’t more than a few hours of Northern shelling to create a holocaust.

4. ‘Can civil defense protect them?‘ Probably not. First, Seoul/Kyeonggi’s transportation network would be dwarfed by the scale. Seoul traffic is already some of the worst in Asia. The subways are bursting during rush hour. The dilemma is similar to New Orleans’ one road out during Katrina. 2. The area around Seoul is hilly and rugged. 75% of the Korean population lives on only 25% of its landmass (that’s one reason we all live in enormous apartment towers). There is simply no where close to Seoul to handle the scale of movement unless you had many weeks to disperse them all over the peninsula. Finally, as I said in the orignal blogpost (above), NK artillery at the DMZ faces a severe ‘use-it-or-lose-it’ dilemma: once the war starts, allied air power is going to hammer these sites relentlessly. So if you start moving people out of Gyeonggi preemptively in a slow-moving crisis (like summer 1914, or right now in Korea?), you are signaling to the North to strike first before its deterrent evaporates.

For all these reasons, it seems to me that there is no short-term answer, but that a medium-term policy incentivizing residence and investment elsewhere is the way to go. That should probably include decentralization of authority to Korea’s provinces, the movement of the capital to either Sejong City or Daejeon (because they are in the geographic middle of the country [and not Busan, because it is too far away]), and the subsidization of economic development outside of the northwest.”

Cheonan Sinking Changes Nothing: Kor. Inst. of Defense Analysis (1)

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Another week, another North Korea conference. It amazes me just how much we (in Korean IR) talk about this issue. It is a never ending thrill-ride. And it is not just academics. I meet military, intelligence, even literature and photography experts (deciphering NK propaganda) from the US, SK, and Japan regularly. If you thought the GWoT created a defense-intel-IR gravy train in the the US, try Korea’s never ending circus on what to do about NK. It’s a cottage industry military-industrial-academic complex all of its own. Honestly, I wonder if we’ll all miss NK when she finally goes. Shamelessly, of course, I too am a part of that circus. Part of me understands obviously. The US doesn’t live next to the wackiest, more dangerous state on the planet. But still, I am amazed just how much of my time goes into this issue because of the simple fact of teaching IR in Korea.

So this week, the Korean Institute of Defense Analysis (KIDA) held its conference on what has changed since the sinking of the Cheonan in March. Here is my previous thinking on this. Here is the ROKG final report on it, clearly blaming NK. KIDA is a great institution, with really high-quality material and a super SSCI journal. So off I went to talk about this with the usual suspects of intel, military, diplomacy, academics, and the rest.

So now, 6 months out, tempers have cooled. No one is talking about air-strikes anymore. So what have we learned?

1. We didn’t learn much about NK. We already knew that NK is erratic, prone to savage, but limited outbursts, shamelessly denies everything, and uses external military-intel actions for internal in-fighting purposes. The tree-cutting incident, the cabinet bombing, the KAL bombing, and Cheonan sinking all show these characteristics, as well as the smaller incidents like the sub penetrations or Yellow Sea skirmishes.  So yes, the regime may be attributing this to the new boy-king, Kim Jong-Eun,for internal promotion purposes. But while that is important, it is not new. We didn’t see much we haven’t seen before.

2. Regarding the cause, we still don’t really know. I tend to agree that Jong-Eun (Kim III) is being given some accolades to establish him. But the larger structural cause is the steady factionalization common in late-stalinist systems. We saw internal jockeying among elites and interest groups in the USSR in the 80s, and in China in the early 70s. My read of the Cheonan sinking is that it is a message from the NK military to everyone else – the party and civilians in NK, including Kim III, the ROKG and military, the US, etc. – that it is a major, if not the central, actor to be reckoned with in peninsular affairs. There is no deal to be had without the KPA’s approval, and they will shoot up SK facilities every once in awhile to remind us all of that fact.

3. The Cheonan sinking told us more about SK than NK actually:

3a. We learned that SK has a very high threshold for NK pain; ie, that South Koreans don’t care much about NK and just don’t want to hear about it. There was no outburst of popular anger at NK. No call for air or naval strikes, much less war. Like the Chinese insistence that maybe the Cheonan just hit a rock or the Russian notion that it hit a mine, South Koreans too just want to put their head in the sand and not know the truth. Everyone just wanted it to go away as soon as possible. No one wants to recognize that NK did this, because it is so nasty, it screams for retaliation. Consider if Iran sank a US warship in the Gulf, or if Pakistan shot down an Indian jetfighter. The rhetoric would have been sharp and the responses swift. Here, nothing happened. No one, but for the SK military perhaps, wanted a strike-back. So it all just faded to black, and we are back to where we’ve always been – NK asking for aid, rumors about the 6 party-talks again, a focus on nukes, more talk of succession. The Cheonan changed nothing, because SK doesn’t it want it to.

3b. From this minimal willingness to risk escalation, we can conclude that SK has become a status quo power effectively in the peninsula, despite its formal (ie, constitutional) claim to the whole Korean landmass. SK has labored tremendously to build its consumer society-trading state, and it does not want that wrecked by NK. While most observers would say that NK has more to lose in a war – the regime leaders are terrified they will be hanged in the end – South Koreans clearly don’t see it that way. Instead they see their wealthy democracy getting trashed to save poor people they scarcely know, possibly including the use of nukes on their own soil. For this, they are willing to pay this price of a few Cheonans now and then. 6 months ago, most of us would have said something like the Cheonan would be a redline. But here we are over it with little change, so the question arises, just how far can NK go?

3c. We also learned how deep anti-Americanism runs in SK. To the astonishment of just about every mi-guk-in I know in Korea, something like 1/3 of Koreans believe the US sank the ship. And another third or so, think the sinking reveals the incompetence of the Lee administration. This just floors me. It tells me SK is so desperate to avoid escalation, they’ll believe anything. And how the Lee administration could realistically have been expected to defend against something like this is just beyond me. The case for NK blame is so obvious – yet so disruptive to regional stability – just about everyone – the SK public, the Russians, the Chinese – want to pretend otherwise, and NK denials dovetail perfectly.

4. Finally, the Cheonan tells us just how willfully unhelpful China and Russia really are. Russia’s primary foreign policy goal is to be perceived as a great power, because it can only barely claim that status now. Crises which get Russia invited to the top tables of world politics are therefore to be kept going as long as possible. Russia’s interest is the perpetuation of the stalemate, not its resolution. Regarding China, the news is even worse. When forced to choose between the two Koreas, China chose the North (foolishly); China refused to admit that the North sank the ship. This more clearly pushed NK into China’s embrace, making it ever more likely that China will keep the North alive for awhile yet, and that when unification does happen, China’s role will be more intrusive, including perhaps demands for a buffer zone or unified Korea’s finlandization.

Part 2 is here.

Asia’s ‘Culture of Export’ 2: The Case of Korean Mercantilism

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Part one is here. On the financial mercantilism rising in the wake of the Great Recession, go here.

Any foreigner living in Korea is bombarded with the notion of Korea globalizing. Its everywhere – both at the IR academic conferences, and in everyday life. The government-sponsored English agitprop network (Arirang) positively gushes about how cosmopolitan Korea is and how happy resident expats are to live here. Korean print media is constantly hyping this or that Korean star breaking into global attention. Yuna Kim in iceskating was last year’s rave; this year its Yong-Eun Yang the golfer. Korean films, we are told, have a worldwide audience, as does Korean pop music. Even Korean food they tell us, is poised for a global breakout. (I actually doubt all 3 claims; they are recycled endlessly like propaganda. In 32 years living in the US, I only saw 1 Korean movie – The Host – and never heard K-pop or saw a Korean restaurant. That hardly means they don’t exist in the US, but if they are as popular as the Korean government tells us, then I should have seen something.) And Koreans are downright obsessed with the numbers and kinds of foreigners living here, and multiculturalism is a raging debate right now in Korea.

Yet for some reason, this incipient globalization never seems to happen. And every once in awhile, you get a glimpse of the real story – the deep seated nationalism and the desire to have globalization occur on strictly Korean terms. Try here and here,  and note that the primary response to a trade deficit with Japan is the desire to reduce it through increasing self-sufficiency, a third worldist economic notion directly at odds with globalization.

This sorts of articles show you exactly the Korean ambivalence on globalization that prevents it from every attaining the global status it so desperately craves. I see this attitude all the time at conferences on the topic of Korean trade and IPE policy: exports are good, but imports are bad. For a raw, almost xenophobic, example of this mercantilist, illiberal spirit (trade surplus = health), try here.

So its great that Korea exports this or that to the world (food, cars, TVs), but Koreans clearly violate the spirit of the WTO by formally and informally discriminating (‘nationalist buying’) against imports. Koreans are downright desperate for global cultural recognition (endless stories on Korea’s ‘brand’ – whatever that means), but lots of knowledgeable people I know in academia still insist that Korea needs a positive current account and should mimic rather than import successful foreign products. Of course, you can’t have it both ways; you can’t demand ‘buy Korea’ from locals and then tell foreigners you are globalized.

Here a just a few examples. Imported goods are almost always far more costly in run-of-the mill stores. The best known stories are the 20-30% tariffs on cars imported into Korea. You’ve never seen as many Korean cars in the entire rest world as you do here in this one small market. Alcohol too has a extreme price differentials. A fifth of Jack Daniels costs $40 (see the picture above from my local grocery store)! Even something as mundane as scotch tape is hammered. Scotch brand transparent tape is 3 times the cost as the Korean brand. When I bought a TV, there was not even a discussion that I would buy a Sony or a Panasonic. They were a good 25% more costly, so of course, I bought the Samsung. And the cell phone sector too is overpriced, protected, and cartelized. Blackberry, Apple and Microsoft scarcely operate here. So forget about the easy compatibility of Windows Mobile or an I-phone.

This attitude is hardly specific to Korea. Lots of countries express a preference for mercantilism, and the everyday voter generally does not support free trade anywhere in the world. But economic nationalism is stronger in Korea than it was when I lived in Europe, and the cost differentials are more obvious and so extreme, there is no way they reflect just market pricing. Further, it jars badly with Korea’s constant repetition that it is globalizing. Because of course, globalization goes both ways. The flow of goods, people, ideas, etc. comes in and out. Little I have seen here or read in the literature or media suggests Koreans really want a lot of inbound traffic. Exports are great, but imports will probably bring swine flu. Incoming traffic is strictly controlled, especially of foreign people living here.

Asia’s ‘Culture of Export’ (1): Persistent, Politicized Asian Imbalancing

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Part 2 is here.

In my IPE class this week, we discussed the issue of global imbalances. (If you have no idea what this means, start reading Martin Wolf at the Financial Times.) I argued that it will take awhile to ‘unwind’ them, because Asians have acquired a cultural habit of saving and exporting. Imports are suspect, and a trade surplus has become a downright obsessive national goal out here rather than a natural, occasional imbalance in trade. Now this would be a laudable goal if East Asian states were highly indebted poor states, as in Africa and Latin America, but East Asia is sitting on close to $4 trillion in US debt stocks from two decades of single-minded stockpiling. If China didn’t run a trade surplus in a given year, it would provoke an existential political crisis in the Chinese Communist Party. This is just how deeply mercantilist Asia is. Korea’s trade balance is reported every month in the news, and it is frequently the leading story. The reporter’s spin is always congratulatory and nationalistic. The trade surplus is always reported as a major national-political goal, not a technical economic outcome. In Japan in the last month, the BOJ intervened to keep the yen down at the behest of major exporters, and it is threatening to do so again this week. There is your ‘culture of export.’ East Asians are politically opposed to running trade deficits. Trade surpluses are not economic outcomes; they are nationalistic, highly managed, artificially and purposefully-created political outcomes. This is a massive cultural hurdle to righting the global economy.

Asians desperately want the old system of high exports and high savings to continue, but it can’t because traditional global importers are leveraged to this hilt. But I genuinely believe Asia’s mercantilist elites will put their hands in the sand on this and simply refuse to play ball seriously in the medium-term and so prolong global unemployment. Exporting in Asia is not just a regular economic activity on par with consumption or government spending. Export has acquired a near-mythic status as a mark of national greatness and power. This is wildly mercantilist and unsustainable, but that won’t prevent Asian elites from trying anyway and dragging the globe into a long ‘savings glut’ recession.

In liberal trade theory, current account surpluses are natural outcomes of an unforeseen change in the desirability of a country’s exports. One year, a country’s exports may be suddenly very desirous. Recall that the first Playstation 3s were resold on Ebay for $1000+, so Japan got an export surge. This is ok, because when you exports surge, your currency, if it is floating, should surge too. Your stronger currency reflects that your stuff is in greater demand than you are demanding others’ stuff. The following year, as your stuff becomes more expensive due to your appreciated currency, your net exports over imports, your current account surplus, should recede. Broadly, your imports and exports should tend toward equilibrium, because the world is a closed system. So everybody is happy, because in the long-run, there should be – in fact, mathematically, there must be – equilibrium.

But this healthy process of circulating trade and currency got all gummed up in the last 15 years or so, and this is why the Great Recession is so brutal. In short, East Asia (and Germany) are big net exporters, and the US and peripheral Europe are big importers. If the exporters don’t buy stuff from the importers though – ‘recyle’ the importers’ currency back to them by buying stuff from them – then the importers eventually run out of money. This is ‘natural.’ Previous importers should pendle back to export, and vice versa. But that is not at all what happened.

Instead, running out money didn’t stop the Americans (or the Greeks) in the last decade. When the money ran out, we just borrowed more – and from the exporters. The average American burned through all his savings by around 2005 and went into debt; the US government of course was in debt too. So everyone was borrowing more and more, and Asian states, unwilling to import more, were super-willing to lend their savings back to Americans so that they could keep on buying. (The same thing happened within the euro-zone between the German exporter and the southern European importers.) Hence the ‘imbalance’ – importers piled up more and more debt borrowed from the exporters, and the exporters piled up more and more savings by lending and re-lending their profits back to the importers.

We piled up debt to buy more, while they lent us our own money back to us so we could keep buying. This bizarre, predatory symbiosis is why Ferguson coined the expression ‘Chimerica,’ and its unsustainability has now become evident for all to see. Resembling a ponzi-scheme by 2008, it all collapsed.

The big problem is that if the pre-Great Recession super exporters (above all, China) don’t start spending, not saving their foreign currency, then global consumer demand will collapse, because the erstwhile importers’ demand is much reduced. Indebted and overleveraged, the former consumers are now saving again. The problem is that all that US (particularly) consumption before created global demand which created jobs. Now that US demand has contracted dramatically. Without demand from consumers to buy stuff, companies don’t need as many laborers to make stuff, so they start firing people – unemployment.

So in brief, US demand imploded under debt, but Asians don’t really really want to substitute for that demand. They don’t want to go shopping, or rather their governments don’t want them to go to shopping, because the governments are trapped in a Spanish Habsburg mindset that they MUST run trade surpluses all the time. Getting Asian consumers, especially the Chinese, into the malls is the globe’s best hope for a fast recovery, but the cultural blowback from 40 years telling citizens to save as a national mission is a huge obstacle, as is the Chinese government’s adamant, infuriating refusal to encourage its citizens to shop.

Part 2 will be a case study of Korean mercantilism.

US Embassy Security – Yikes!

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There has been a lot of discussion of the ramp-up of US embassy security since 9/11. Generally, the fear is that US embassies increasingly look like bunkers. They are being moved far away from downtowns. They are surrounded by loads of police, military, and barbed wire.

The Seoul one was quite an experience. I needed more passport pages, so off I went. It was frightening. There were multiple layers of security, blast doors, and US and Korean military and police with automatic weapons and body armor all over the place, including the SWAT tanks in my picture above. To boot, cell phones were confiscated, and there were the ubiquitous cameras. I imagine if I wrote more about it, they would be miffed over this post.

It was a depressing experience. I am with Thomas Friedman on this issue of US openness post-9/11. I think this stuff just sends a terrible image to the world about an open society gone loopy. 9/11 abetted the worst instincts of the national security state, and I fear we are moving down an Israeli path toward a barracks democracy with gates and locks all over the place. But this is not what open societies look like. Nor is it what we should want. Who wants barbed wire and cops with rifles at the mall? This is Bin Laden’s real victory – the installation of paranoia in the US. And I fear it will take decades to undo. The 1990s seems like such a paradise by comparison.

And I am not sure all this is necessary. The US has not in fact been targeted that much since 9/11. As John Mueller noted years ago, a lot of this has been overblown. I recall reading somewhere that you are more likely to be hit by lightning – twice – that killed in a terrorist incident. And what terrorism there has been has not been Bin Laden-style plots, but wacky rogues like the underwear bomber or the Fort Hood shooter. It is unlikely that all these walls could have stopped them.

Visiting our embassy was a genuine shock. It certainly didn’t look like America. It reminded me of those execrable gate-communities that fill California and subdivide people against themselves. This doesn’t look like homeland security. It looks like Israel, Pakistan or South Korea in the cold war – democracies under siege and paranoid. This is exactly the sort of freedom-reducing militarization the Founding Fathers warned about in instances of long wars and huge standing armies. This needs to be unwound sometime soon for the health of our democracy.

‘Economist’ Magazine Conference on South Korea

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Like most of you, I have been reading the Economist off-and-on for 20 years. It, along with the Financial Times, is the most reliable journalism in English I think. I find it less partisan and noxious than most US journalism (or maybe I just agree with the classical liberal bent more). In any case, I got invited to its ‘Bellwether’ conference series on South Korea last week. Here are a few thoughts.

1. Bankers and financiers are a greater force for liberalization than I realized. I have the general IPE knowledge of Asian mercantilism, which I bemoan regularly here. But these guys really knew the details in depth, and they hammered the Korean policy-makers on this. This was an education. Among other things, I didn’t realize how much the Bank of Korea intervenes to ‘fine-tune’ the exchange rate or just how many gimmicky non-tariff barriers Korea uses to continue to protect its car industry. The ‘fine-tuning’ (nice euphemism that) is done at the behest of Korea’s biggest exporters – the chaebols in shipping, automobiles, and electronics. And it was quite amusing to watch the westerners at the event try to get the Koreans to admit that such gaming was in fact ‘capital controls,’ but the policy-makers ducked that one again and again. Being a political scientist focused on politics, I assumed the dirty work of pushing Asia toward liberalism fell mostly on the western bureaucrats who arrange FTAs. It was pleasing to see so many private sector people saying the same things that we say, only without all the theory.

2. Korea’s modernity. Nothing is a better marker of Korea’s modernity than a conference like this – filled with foreigners who want to make a lot of money! Having written my dissertation about the IMF and World Bank, I am accustomed to going to conferences on development, debt and similar travails. But here was a country that escaped from all that to be a good recipient of FDI, just as those institutions hope. (The World Bank calls former borrowers like Korea ‘graduates’ into private sector capital markets. Condescending?) 

3. Korea’s failed quest to be a ‘hub.’ For 10 years now, the ROKG has been trying to build up Seoul as an ‘international financial hub,’ and the session on this was downright self-congratulatory until I asked a question. I suppose academics exist to speak truth-to-power (which we don’t do usually – see Iraq). So I was pleased for a moment to be persona non grata on this, because I think it is wildly overhyped. The idea is that Seoul in Northeast Asia could become like Hong Kong (HK) is to China, or Singapore is to Southeast Asia – a bastion of modernity for international banks in a wild west region. There are some pretty obvious problems though:

3.a. Northeast Asia doesn’t really need hubs like Southeast Asia does, because Northeast Asia is already quite settled (but for NK) and developed. A ‘hub’ implies a surrounding piedmont that is less orderly or coherent, like Hong Kong to early 20th century China, or Singapore to ASEAN, but still worth penetrating. But there is no disorderly yet still accessible backyard up here: NK is closed; China is modernizing; and Japan is already modern. That leaves Russia’s extremely underpopulated Far East. Anyway, if there was such an opportunity, Tokyo would have grabbed it long ago. And this leads to the next problem…

3b. The hub market is Asia is already full – HK, Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo. You can’t have too many hub or special economic zones, or they aren’t special anymore. So the first mover advantages are high and Seoul has come late to this party.

3c. North Korea. Seoul is 35 miles from the DMZ. This proximity makes it a city-hostage to the North. None of Seoul’s regional hub competitors have such a geopolitical backdrop. I find it hard to believe that big banks will locate their Asia HQs so close to such unpredictability. I can’t see Seoul competing among Asia’s biggest cities until the peninsular situation is resolved.

3d. Korea is still struggling with just how much it wants to multiculturalize, and until it accepts ‘diversity,’ it will be very difficult to get lots of middle-aged professional foreigners with families to reside here permanently (as in HK or Singapore). English is spread only thinly among the elite; getting a taxi is still a hassle. Foreign schools are insanely expensive here ($15-20k a year). The bureaucratic hassles of foreign life in Korea are endless – our national identity numbers are coded to mark us as foreigners, so shopping websites routinely block us. Cell phone companies still make it hard for foreigners to buy phones themselves (my Korean wife had to reserve our iPhone 4; Korea Telecom would not accept me). Tenant law is a nightmare (the courts tilt against us), as is contract law or getting a serious bank loan, like a mortgage or a car loan. In short, the primary hurdle for Korea to international/regional ‘hub’ status is not infrastructural, political, technical, etc., but cultural. Do they really want us here in large numbers, and are they prepared to really entrench the English bilinguism necessary to attract professionals, as has been the case in Singapore and NK for decades? The answer is still no.

4. Bankers, financiers and policy-makers find academics sort of a waste of time. There were 200 invitees, and among them only 5 academics. Given that I usually go only to academic conferences, I was out of my comfort zone – which of course is a good thing for most of us. I really began to see just how peripheral we are to, well, almost anything really important to these guys. This was quite a let down, and somewhat humiliating. Everyone was quite polite, but their skill sets were radically different, they had their fingers deeply on the pulse of policy in SK, and Asia, far better than I, and they speak their own CPA/MBA/Wall Street language that I really struggled with. My commentary seemed tiresomely abstract to them. I felt like a high school kid in a college class – out of my league and eventually cowed into silence from fear of looking like an idiot. Walt and Mead worry a lot about the ‘cult of irrelevance’ in political science, and nowhere in my recent experience did I perceive that as strongly as sitting in a room filled with serious people in expensive suits about the serious business of making money. What a contrast to the ridiculousness of so much academic theorizing! Conscious of this over the years, I have forced myself through econ textbooks and the Financial Times’ business coverage (a HUGE education that), but it was a healthy shot again my academic hubris to realize I didn’t understand 20% of what was said at this event. Even more humiliating was being told that most invitees must pay up to $2000 to attend these Bellwether conferences, but they invite academics gratis, because they assume we are broke. Good grief. 😦

5. Korea and Islamic finance? A couple of speakers mentioned this as a future expansion possibility for Korean banks. I found this downright off the wall. I suppose when there is big money involved, everything else fly out the window, and international private sector banking is far from my skill set. But the political scientist in me sees several huge hurdles. First, most obviously, Koreans know very little about Islam, and what they do know is generally negative stuff flowing from the GWoT. My students ask my astonishingly basic questions. The cultural distance is huge; Korea has less than 35k Muslims. Second, Korea is becoming more Christian, specifically more evangelical, and more closely aligned with the US in the GWoT. Third, the cultural fit of the sovereign wealth funds of the Gulf states make them the obvious choice for pious Muslims. If you were an devout Indonesian investor, what would really draw you to Korea of all places? I just don’t buy it all. Far more realistic would be a move into development financing in Southeast Asia without the cultural baggage. This is far closer to Korea’s own past and skills.

‘Responsible’ Sovereignty vs the Responsibility to Protect

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The ramp up in drones and special operations in the GWoT has me thinking we are stumbling into a future of unspoken limitations on sovereignty.

Limits on sovereignty is an old story, and one of the classic points of disagreement in IR. Usually, it pits realists against liberals – the general lines being that states won’t really cede any authority to a higher institution, while liberals scramble to find examples from the UN system to suggest that sovereignty is slowing leeching away. The ‘institutional’ debate is wrapped up in globalization too. Globalization supposedly makes the world more interdependent. More interdependence means more rules are needed, so states will slowly give up some prerogatives in order to get the benefits of the global economy. Earlier generations of IR talked about ‘spillover,’ as states slowly slid into more rule-bound orders, almost unconsciously.

But now we are seeing something different. Now, we see the US (usually) telling countries that if they can’t get their act together internally, we will take action. The issue is the responsible use of your sovereignty (RS). If you turn your country over  to drug lords, proliferators, pirates, terrorists, etc, then you are gambling with your sovereign inviolability (Afghanistan, northern Pakistan). Or even if you don’t agree to turn over your state to such non-state and if it happens against your will, others will still feel it ok to intrude (Somalia, Congo).

This most definitely does not fit the traditional liberal IR image of sovereignty cession. It is a product of state-weakness (Somalia) or nastiness (Taliban Afghanistan), not democratic decision-making or spill-over (the EU).

If intruding on sovereignty used ‘irresponsibly’ sounds like another neo-con excuse for democratic imperialism (it is), one can always try the liberal internationalist version of this – ‘the responsibility to protect’ (R2P). R2P puts a lefty spin on this by saying that the government has a responsibility to protect its own people; i.e., governments can’t prey on their own people as in Sudan. Governments that continue to do so will ultimately face international sanction and an agreement by the great powers, ideally through the UN Security Council, to step into your affairs to protect your own people from you. Obviously, this only happens in extreme circumstances (Kosovo, Rwanda), and the Chinese, with their regular opposition to any ‘intervention in internal affairs,’ will oppose it. But nevertheless, R2P thinking clearly suggests that human rights sensibilities are now so advanced, that there are extreme limits to sovereignty, and that is almost certainly a good thing. Governments can do a lot, but they can’t do anything anymore.

If this sounds kind of benign, focused on human rights and the domestic population’s well-being, ‘responsible sovereignty’ is a little scarier, because it is focused on outsiders’ well-being (defined by them of course), and it explicitly embraces the use of force by outsiders to protect themselves from you and your carelessness. So if Sudan is a good example of the R2P logic – a nasty state tearing up its own people which should get whacked a bit by the international community for doing that – then Somalia is a good example of RS – failed state so out of any domestic control, and thereby becoming so dangerous to the rest of us, that it has essentially forfeited its right to manage itself and foreigners will do (some of) it for them. Is this neocolonialism?

Finally, the US has already flirted with RS before the declaration of preemption by the Bush administration. A century ago, in the Roosevelt and Wilson Corollaries to the Monroe Doctrine, the US reserved the right to intervene in Latin America should its governments become too ‘disorderly.’ The neo-con update of this idea is to expand it worldwide, which I can’t help wondering if the US can really afford now, with a $1.5 trillion deficit. Sounds like overstretch all over again…

Pop Culture and International Relations Theory

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Just about everyone plays video games now, and a sizable chunk model international relations in one way or another. Over the years, I have noticed that students have picked up ‘information’ from games – just as they do from film – which filters into the classroom. For example, I had a student once who insisted on basing his cyberterrorism paper on the scenario of Die Hard 4. Film, and increasingly now video games, are a shared language and pool of narratives among our undergraduates. They provide common stories and references, just as the transmission of Homer did among the Greeks. But the big films of the last 40 years are the stories they know now: my students are far more likely to know the Star Wars mythology than classical myth. Yoda has replaced Zeus, and Halo replaced the Iliad as a depiction of combat.

This raises all sorts of interesting pedagogical questions, and it places a burden on us as teachers to at least be mildly informed of what they watch and play. (If you don’t,  students think you are a hopelessly out of touch dork they can’t relate to, and hence, you are less likely to reach them.) The study of IR film is mature, but I have yet to see any serious treatment of video games as either depiction of international relations or as teaching tools. Duck of Minerva has touched on this a little bit. But this topic needs to be really worked on by someone in IR with an interest in communications. It doesn’t strike me as a well-organized enough topic for a dissertation, but definitely an MA. If Lord of the Rings can be discussed as an IR teaching tool, then so should gaming. Most of our students now game. Military games are hugely popular – including a bestseller released by the US Army itself originally designed as an in-house simulation and now used as a recruiting tool. Such games regularly include depictions of war, the normative concern behind IR’s very existence. At the very least we should think about how this impacts what they bring to class.

Sound ridiculous? Actually, in my experience in the classroom, it’s not at all. Whenever a big war or history movie shows up in theaters, we inevitably discuss it in class, because students ask questions about it or it otherwise creates such a stir in the larger society. So frequently did I notice this when I first started teaching, that I actually bought a few movies that I was asked about most, because I thought it was a good idea to know them well – including Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now, JFK, and the Hurt Locker. This has been a constant experience in teaching undergrads. It may depress more mature readers and IR observers, but it is nonetheless a reliable element of teaching undergrads. In fact, so prevalent are references to Black Hawk Down especially, that I even read the book, because I fielded so many questions on it.

I don’t have the training in media studies for this, but two video games which I have played leap out to me as relevant in IR – the Civilization series and the Modern Warfare series. Civilization is essentially a state-building simulation, complete with interaction with other states, including warfare. But Modern Warfare is far more important given how much the games have sold and how directly they model the current GWoT. The sequel is basically  ‘Iraq War- the video game,’ which is pretty shocking the first time you see it. Sequences are ripped straight out of the documentary Generation Kill. The battle-realism of the violence is far beyond anything you have seen in a game before. The gunfire, killing, and destruction are extreme and amazingly graphic. There are no aliens that are morally easy to dispatch by the battalion (Halo, Quake, etc). Instead your character knifes people, shoots dogs (yes, that’s right), and fairly easily racks up ‘collateral damage.’ At one point, your character even participates in a terrorist massacre at an airport (video above), which generated a big controversy apparently. Quite honestly, it is a shocking sequence in the game – you are expected to participate in machine gunning hundreds of civilians! The sequence creeped my wife out so much she made me turn the game off. This is calling out for a serious treatment.

More African Impressions

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This continues my just-off-the plane post from our return from Africa in late August. Further discussion with political science colleagues, commenters, and students got me thinking more:

1. Where are the Americans and Japanese? To my great surprise, we met very few Americans on the trip. Usually Americans are everywhere when one travels. Being a superpower with bases and businesses around the world, Americans are a fixture of the global tourism industry. So much that the term ‘ugly American’ came about – a vague caricature that we’re monolinguist rednecks, like Sheriff Pepper in the ‘Man with the Golden Gun.’ But I didn’t see too many. In fact, we scarcely saw any Americans. And we didn’t see any black American tourists at all. (I’m not quite sure what to make of that; all the western tourists were white.) Ditto for Japanese. 80% of the tourists we met were Europeans. There were 5 Koreans in our safari trip. And of course, we saw Chinese – not just from all the construction projects, but even tourists too. Chinese tourists, but no Japanese tourists? What a sea-change. Is this a sign of the bite of the Great Recession or disinterest, or what?

2. Africa Time/TIA (this is Africa)/‘It’s always Friday night in Mozambique.’ This was the hardest one to get used to, as you don’t know if it is a real ‘cultural attribute’ you should respect, or just a BS excuse for bad service, endless delays, and cold food.  The last expression came from our South African tour guide in Mozambique; the other 2 are ubiquitous. After a few weeks on the road in Africa, we started using them too. Africa time is the same thing as ‘Latin time,’ as a friend told me they say in Belize. The idea is the ‘we are slower here than you noxious, western city slickers. Life is pleasant, and we enjoy ourselves. So take a load off; drink a beer; and don’t worry. Your bus will show up some time, and you’ll get there eventually.’ TIA gets to the dysfunction of, well,  almost everything. When the bus you paid a lot of money to take breaks down, and you are standing around in the desert for 12 hours getting sunstroke (true story), or when the border guards rip you off for your visa (also true), or there is one clerk at immigration and a 2 hour line at midnight in the outdoor cold (also true), well, this is Africa. Get used to it. Don’t stress or try to fix it. You can’t. And inevitably, you do just give up and go with the flow. You plan that 5-10% of your expenses will be rip-offs where you are overcharged for stuff, because you’re a tourist. You get used to the fact that a sandwich and a Coke take 45 minutes to prepare in a restaurant. When our truck broke down for a whole day in South Africa, the recently-arrived European tourists on our trip got furious and impatient. But my wife and I, after 5 weeks already in-country, were just fine with it. We napped and read, and then watched Weird Al videos all day at the farm of a friend of our driver (yes, that’s true too). And no, the guide never even bothered to suggest that we be compensated for the whole lost day of the tour we paid for. Sigh. TIA…

3. Where is the developmentalism? This observation is as much a product of living in East Asia as it is of visiting Africa. In Korea, you see everywhere the dynamism and energy driving this place. Koreans are obsessed with catching up with the first world, joining modernity, being taken seriously in the G-20 and OECD, etc. To be sure, I was in Africa for only 6-7 weeks, but I didn’t see that vibe at all. I was amazed how much loitering about there was. In countries with 30-40% unemployment, this is inevitable. But the economist in me saw huge wasted labor potential. All those young men just standing around, looking for something to do,and then, inevitably, depressingly, trying to rip me off by changing money on the street with folded notes and other tricks, or harassing me to buy some shoddy overpriced souvenir. And there was so much obvious need for all that unused labor. Streets needed to be cleaned, trash picked up (the amount of litter in southern Africa is astonishing), decaying, half-finished building are everywhere. Nothing made me more sympathetic to the ‘Beijing consensus’ as this trip.

4. They still say ‘coloured.’ This was another big surprise as an American. Raised on strict US political correctness, where you can only say ‘colored’ if you say ‘NAACP,’ it was pretty striking to hear whites say this or that guy is coloured or black. I even heard ‘mulatto.’ But the blacks and ‘coloureds’ talk that way too, so you quickly realize the language of race is a lot more relaxed, and I have to say I kinda liked that. I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘colored;’ I used the more anodyne US ‘mixed.’ But still, compared to the verbal acrobatics Americans go through to talk about race – like ‘European-American,’ – this was kind of refreshing. I found it rather more mature.

Ground Zero Mosque & Koran-Burning: the Xian Right Learns ID Politics

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Just about anyone with a website has already commented on this. There is no doubt the Christian right has responded as predictably and disturbingly as one might expect. I have only a few thoughts.

1. The Ground Zero ‘Mosque’ is probably a bridge too far at this point. In his fumbling way, I think Obama got it right. The community center should be permitted legally as an expression of religious freedom, but so many Americans, especially Christians, find it uncomfortable at minimum, terrifying at worst, that it is probably not a good idea at the moment. It is clear misstep in a country still trying to come to grips with 9/11, Iraq, the GWoT, etc. And the hysterical reaction from the US right over it should be an obvious red-flag to Islam generally that it desperately needs to conciliate the rest of the world rather than insist maximally on its rights – an obvious lesson that should have been learned in Europe, India, or after Durban II. To many Americans, Ground Zero is practically holy ground (rightly or wrongly), and it is indisputable that its perpetrators acted in Islam’s name. It is also clear that the US is spending a great deal of blood and treasure pushing back on radical Islam, and that many Americans want to see a pleasant, conciliatory face on Islam before they can swallow something like this. So long as global Islam’s image is dominated by this guy, Muslims in American should really be working bottom-up outreach, demonstrating on 9/11 in solidarity with the victims rather than openly testing the patience of the majority culture, by blaming it on a few bad apples and dismissing the rest of the discussion as islamophobia.

American Muslims need to pick their battles just like any minority; civil rights movements for blacks and homosexuals have showed us that Americans will accommodate. Acceptance will come, but not by pursuing CAIR-style grievance politics that sees racism everywhere. I think most Americans are still waiting for the debate inside Islam on what caused 9/11; this would really prove that Islam accepts pluralism in its heart, not just when some firestorm occurs on CNN. But you only get that from americanized Muslims like Foud Ajami or Fareed Zakaria who are effectively isolated from the discussion. It is outsiders like Olivier Roy, Bernard Lewis, R M Gerecht, Ann Applebaum, or  Christopher Caldwell who have really exposed the pathologies behind 9/11 with no clear response from folks like Tariq Ramadan or Feisal Abdul Rauf, much less the reactionary clerical elites in Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. Instead, the critiques are just ignored, as were the Arab Human Development reports earlier this decade. Just like Germany had to examine the Holocaust eventually, Islam needs to look inside 9/11 for a good house-cleaning before westerners will really be comfortable. Consider this counterfactual: if CAIR had organized a ‘Solidarity with America’ march on 9/11 every year or some analogously Oprah-style outreach, then I can’t imagine anyone would care now. But instead of introspection and an admission that pathologies deeply rooted in Islam created 9/11, the response of the US Muslim community has been quiescence or CAIR-style identity politics. I criticize America’s Christian right paranoia regularly on this site, but it is also willful ignorance to pretend the US is not a Christian-majority country, and as the Koran-burners show, they have learned identity politics too. How ‘bout everyone cool it on the religion for awhile?

2. The Koran-burning is the revenge of identity politics on the left. They are loopy and dangerous, but they also teach you just how dangerous stoking identity politics is. And for this you must blame the Left in the end. Starting in 1970s, civil rights-era equality was out, and identity politics was in. Non-white minorities in America were trained in multiculturalism by US universities and told to press group-fashioned political claims built around race or gender. The result was political correctness, in which free speech was assailed as permitting ‘disrespect.’ And no concept is more abused by ethnic ideologues than ‘respect.’ What better way to embarrass and delegitimize your critics than to easily cast them as ignorantly disrespectful of your culture, which you can casually invoke by just your last name. If they are racist, then you hardly need to listen to them, a tactic first rolled out against Daniel Moynihan’s famous DoL report 45 years ago. ‘Respect’ is wonderfully indefinable and elastic, its lack implies racist, vulgar stupidity, and it provides an easy out from the hard criticism liberal free speech permits. Pretty quickly, Israel’s defenders learned this; there is no better way to discredit Israel critics than anti-semitism charges. And Islam learned this too at Durban II. Now at last, white Christian Americans are learning this language as well. Regularly assailed as redneck racists, the easy answer is to adopt the pose of the opponent and ‘discover’ prejudice in the liberal anti-Christian media, e.g. This is why Fox News has such a siege mentality tone to its reporting, like the ‘war’ on Christmas. Here is a nice summary of how religious groups get trained to frame their demands as ‘rights’ they deserve as ‘victims’ of never-ending ‘prejudice’,’ i.e., free speech. But to be fair to the US right, it only went down this route after the ‘ethnicization’ of left-wing politics in the US in the last three decades. And for that blame the explosion of ethnic identity studies on US campuses.