Happy Thanksgiving. I love the holidays, especially the Peanuts’ videos, so enjoy at least the clip.
And if you don’t love these specials, then Sarah Palin is right: you aren’t a real American! You are probably palling around with terrorists in some elite, liberal ivory tower in San Francisco. Hah!
So this month is the 20 year anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s collapse. Most of the retrospective focus, naturally, on Europe. But here are a few thoughts for Asia:
1. National unification with communist basket-cases is ridiculously expensive. Germany has dumped a staggering 1.2 trillion euros into East Germany, but the east is still only 9% of GDP with 20% of the population. The South Koreans are downright freaked out by these sorts of numbers. The Korean situation is worse than the German one. The GDR was a more functional economy than the DPRK is today, and its people far less brutalized and abused. West Germany was a wealthier and more politically mature country than South Korea is today. So the costs (economic and social) to the South will be higher than they were to the West, at the same time that the South’s ability to pay for and manage (political capacity) them is lower than the West’s.
2. Have no illusions about just how bad communist governance really is. Before the Wall came down, all sorts of western liberals, neo-marxists, social democrats,etc. hemmed and hawed about the economic and human rights performance of the communist bloc. We constantly heard hopeful rhetoric about how Yugoslavia was a possible model, that East Germany was an ‘advanced’ economy, that the Czechs/Poles/Hungarians were putting a ‘human face’ on socialism, that communism might somehow turn a corner and become what Western academics wanted it to be. Open sympathy with the egalitarianism of communist theory lead far too many otherwise intelligent leftists to constantly forgive Soviet-style governance, to indulge the Koestler-esque notion that the bloodbaths and privation were just ‘transition steps,’ and give credence to shallow excuse-notions like ‘real existing socialism.’ (This willful leftist blindness about the East Bloc also helped birth US neo-conservatism.)
In the end, it was pretty much as right-wing Cold Warriors feared though – lots of repression, lots of misery, an ‘egalitarianism’ of brutalizing poverty side-by-side with a pampered, hidden elite, plus an ecological catastrophe to boot. When the Wall came down, the captive populations sprinted as fast as they could to the West. No one wanted socialism, a ‘third way’ for East Germany, or the foggy notions of communist equality so dear to the western left.
And the same will happen when NK, Vietnam, and China begin to unravel. When NK opens finally, the inside will look much, MUCH worse than we ever thought, and defenders like Bruce Cumings will be ashamed they ever defended the camps, family executions, forced labor and all the rest.
3. Autocracies can learn. China has very clearly learned from the Soviet implosion, as Kim Jong Il did from Ceausescu. This is critical in explaining why the PRC and DPRK keep hanging up, despite the 1990s optimism they would implode. This runs counter to the conventional wisdom that autocracies don’t adjust well because information flows are highly politicized and communication tightly controlled and regulated. (In other words, bad news does not make it up the food chain, and dogmatic elites don’t want to hear it anyway.) Azar Gat even thinks that China is the new model for IT-age autocracy.
4. Communist autocracies collapse rapidly. This lesson is most applicable to NK, as China is not really communist anymore and is reasonably stable. And Vietnam too is trying the China path, albeit more haltingly. But the DPRK is hanging tough on confucian stalinism, with all the explosive potential that suggests when the change finally does come. South Koreans frequently talk of a gradual reunification, a slow integration in which a North/South Korea federation would be like China and Hong Kong – 2 systems, 1 country. I find this highly unlikely. Stumbling reform like China or Russia in the 90s is likely insofar as radical change can be demonized as a foreign/western plot. But in Korea, the nationalist card will be neutered, because unhappy North Koreans will simply look at SK and say, why can’t we live that way?
This is what happened in East Germany in 1989/90. East Germans had little time for western stability notions of gradual integration, or GDR intellectuals’ notions that a reformed East Germany could somehow find a third way between capitalism and communism. Quite the opposite. East Germans rushed to unity as fast as possible to get all those things so long denied and so tantalizing close – legally protected freedoms like human rights and travel, and nice products like telephones and good quality cars. Once unleashed, the nationalist passion was impossible to stop. The momentum for unity in 1989/90 rolled a like snowball going downhill. It got bigger and faster, and no one could stop it without massive, illegitimate intervention. Helmut Kohl had historic insight and audacity to ride this tiger rather than fight it.
Korea would do well to prepare for unity on such fast-moving, erratic terms. The Kim NK regime is so illegitimate, so hated, so obviously awful and unsuccessful, that it is extremely likely that change will produce an explosion of popular desire, first in the North and then throughout the peninsula, for rapid unification regardless of the economic or diplomatic costs. In fact, South Koreans should welcome this likely explosive popular enthusiasm, because its intense nationalism and tremendous speed will help deter the Chinese from seriously intervening to slow or otherwise structure Korean unification.
American politicos and pundits love to see a ‘realignment’ in almost every election. After 2002 and especially 2004, Rove told us all about a ‘rolling realignment’ toward the GOP. Bush was building a durable Republican majority, based on a populist, Christian-Jacksonian mobilization and the ‘Ownership Society.’ Values voters were energized, and the GOP base was bigger than the Democrats’. Rove was the ‘Architect.’ What a load of bunk that turned out to be…
And then last year, the Democrats made the same sorts of claims about 2006 and 2008. Obama told people his election was the beginning of a new era. Instead of activist Christians realigning US politics to the right, now it was the growing nonwhite population and the youth who would give Obama a reliable center-left coalition. Michael Lind particularly makes these sorts of arguments a lot. Now Krauthammer tells us this was also a fantasy.
Previous pseudo-realignments occurred in 1988 and 1994. Bush 41’s election supposedly gave the GOP a ‘lock’ (remember that one?) on the White House, and then Gingrich was going to ‘revolutionize’ Congress’ role. Both the lock and the revolution ended just 4 years later.
All this strikes me as overheated punditry trying to reach for some ‘Bigger Story’ in every election. Most journalists and academics like to deal in big ideas and structures. Who wants to say that candidate X won because heavy November snow in swing-state Ohio drove down candidate Y’s turnout? There is a lot more randomness than we probably want to admit. Yes, there are big structures in US electoral politics, but there are also clearly a lot of local effects. Kerry probably should have won in 2004, given the Iraq mess and the closeness of the 2000 election, but he was an awful candidate. The so-called transformational presidencies of Reagan and Obama were hardly massive landslide elections; in August of 1980 and 2008, both elections were a dead-heat. Gulf War victor Bush 1 should have beat a weak, second-tier governor in 92, but out came Perot to throw the whole thing up the air.
The point of these examples is to suggest that while there are big structural forces that persistently shape elections (unshakeable black support for the Democrats, e.g.), a lot more of the electorate is in play than we admit, especially in retrospect when we desperately want to find ‘Big Explanations’ and ‘Important Trends.’ Further, it is quite healthy actually that the electorate is so competitive. Polarization of the voters into two sharply divided and political consistent voting blocs is a recipe to divide the country against itself – as we saw with the Red-Blue divide of 2002-2006.
I think the search for realignments in every election comes from two journalistic desires. First, journalists probably want to think their work is tapping into something big and important. Who wants to write about how a sex scandal or loopy political family member cost someone an election? It is far more exciting to say things like the end of the Cold War, globalization, ‘postracialism,’ etc. drove an election outcome. Journalists probably want to be purveyors of big ideas and make a philosophic, rather simple day-to-day, contribution. Hence every election is scrutinized with a desire to find a big meaning. Then you can write books like this or this. This is probably a worthy instinct, but I have the sneaking suspicion it is rooted in a journalistic craving for academic/philosophic prestige (to be a public intellectual), particularly against academics, who professionally deal in big ideas and like to disparage bad social science as ‘journalism.’
Second, I think the realignment schtick helps create a comforting sense of predictability about US politics, and also justifies why we listen to journalists to begin with. This makes the exciting but clearly erratic US democracy feel more certain when we talk about it, and more importantly, ‘experts’ need that predictability if they are going to be experts. Cookie Roberts is already the flakiest commentator on TV, but no one would ever listen to her if she did not have the pseudo-certainties that come from these biannual ‘big explanations.’
Of course, there are big explanations, and the work of EJ Dionne and M Lind is actually quite good. But my sense is the realignments are usually of certain subgroups who don’t represent enough of the electorate to make elections really predictable. We know, e.g., that something like 1/3 of voters make up their minds on election day, and that name-recognition drives a huge amount of the House vote. But certainly specific blocs of voters have realigned. Civil rights is an obvious example. It drove blacks permanently to the Democrats, and rural white Southerners to the GOP. But simultaneously other groups have de-aligned in the last 50 years, and this gets a lot less attention. Jews and Catholics are good examples. Both were mainstays of the FDR coalition, but now they are so much in play that it is probably oxymoronic to speak of a Jewish or Catholic vote. Neither Israel nor abortion has created a meaningful GOP ‘capture’ of these groups. Women too are hardly a Democratic bloc; feminism has only at best a weak appeal.
So instead of trying to find a Bush- or Obama-driven realignment in the last 10 years, why not note that both had success in battleground states, and that the number of swing-states is actually fairly large now? And how about also mentioning how this is healthy for the republic? It keeps politicians on their toes and forces them to reach out to different communities and build bridges. This is good.
I have been teaching terrorism since 2003, and again and again, I have asked where is the mini-terror campaign against American infrastructure and civilians?
Al Qaeda has a well-known penchant for mega-terror. 9/11 is an obvious example, as was the attempted sinking of the USS Cole in 2000. Other foiled plots included wild efforts to blow up multiple hijacked planes over the ocean, and this year’s more varied mega-efforts.
Yet this has always struck me as strategically foolish for al Qaeda after 9/11. Post-9/11, the US is pursuing al Qaeda all over the place. Institutional security, hardening of civilian infrastructure,and homeland defense are all vastly improved. It is much harder to hijack a plane or blow up a building now. Mega-plots are hard to organize. They are complex and expensive. They require more staff, more preparation, etc. With so many moving parts, it is easier to catch and unravel them, especially given the long build-up time necessary and the greater western vigilance post 9/11. The 9/11 plot was a one-off opportunity; its very completion eliminated such an opportunity for future plotters by insuring a major subsequent security beef-up. It benefitted from the low scrutiny and attention given to terrorism pre-9/11. Insofar as it permanently heightened western awareness of suspicious activity, it has become significantly harder to pull off mega-terror since then, at least in the west.
Given this western police awareness and sensitivity to big plots, why doesn’t AQAM (al Qaeda and associated movements) pursue mini-terror, like Fort Hood or the Virginia Tech shootings? Terrorism is well-known as an asymmetric tactic, so if western agencies are keyed into mega-plots, why not adjust and go the low route?
A mini-terror campaign would focus on the softest of western civilian infrastructure, as it does in Israel – malls, shops, buses, restaurants, etc. The sustained mini-terror campaigns of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were brutally successful at destabilizing Israeli society in the 1990s, as the Bader-Meinhof gang was in the Germany in the 70s. If I were an enterprising young terrorist looking to make my mark (think Abu Musab al Zarqawi), I would take these urban war tactics right to the US. Consider:
1. how easy it is to enter the US illegally; something like a million people a year do it.
2. how easy it is to buy a gun, legally or not, in the US.
3. how many people Nidal Hasan (Ft. Hood) and Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech) killed and wounded simply with pistols.
4. how many old people, children, and pregnant women go to your nearest shopping mall, and how obese the guards look.
5. the crippling, popular paranoia 2 or 3 such mall massacres would create in the US (imagine the Fox News response!).
This scenario seems so blindingly obvious to me, it cries out for explanation why it is NOT happened: three or four OBL-wannabes slip across the Mexican-US border, paying the vast human smuggling networks operating in northern Mexico to get them over. They then hit a gun show in Texas, because gun show gun sales require no background check. They then head off the nearest shopping mall. Learning from Cho, they chain or block the ground-level exits. They then walk in and start shooting. In 20 minutes they could kill 100+ unsuspecting, unprepared, slow-moving people. A few of these massacres would then create a massive populist outcry to treat US Muslims as we did the Japanese during WWII. And this is exactly what AQAM wants – the clash of civilizations right in the heartland of the infidel.
Given that this has never happened, especially when it would be so easy, a serious research project is waiting to be written. The answer is not simply that US Muslims are well-integrated. That did not prevent the 9/11 hijackers from penetrating the US, nor did it stop Hasan this month. I think a better answer is that of John Mueller – that the Islamic terrorist threat may in fact be wildly overblown. If it is this easy to kill so many Americans and stir up mass islamophobia, then the only reason it hasn’t happened is because there a lot fewer radical Islamist suicide killers than we think. This a guess though; this question needs a real researched answer.
As has been noted, too much of the commentary on the Fort Hood shooting has avoided the fairly obvious, albeit very politically incorrect, explanation. Clearly Hasan, who yelled ‘Allah akhbar’ during the killings, was murdering out of jihadist-fundamentalist intent. These were the same last words heard from Flight 93 over Pennsylvania. Given that the US has a Muslim population of at least 2 million (the data are hotly contested), it is hardly unlikely that all US Muslims remain untempted by the binladenist call. In fact, given Europe’s thorny problems with jihadism, it is remarkable how little of this has happened in the US.
This does not mean, of course, that all Muslims are radicals or that some sort of ‘green scare’ is necessary or whatever. But that is a straw man used to deflect serious discussion. We should also not use ‘islamophobia’ as a racist slur to prevent a serious investigation of Hasan’s motives and a national discussion about the integration process that so spectacularly failed in his case. If anything, the initial US reaction was so adamantly worried about this possibility, that the analysis, for all its good intentions, has obviously missed the real reason. It is politically correct to suggest stress and syndromes and such, but it is also rather dishonest.
Hasan actually fits a fairly well-known profile of Muslim bombers and fanatics who have emerged from the West. They feel deeply alienated by the GWoT. They worry that it targets Muslims, not terrorists, and that the GWoT is really a Judeo-Christian crusade against Islam. They feel deep conflict between their ties of citizenship and religion. Frequently they are socially isolated, and their vague discontent is catalyzed and metastasized by some radical cleric or website. Olivier Roy has done a lot of good work on the alienation Muslims living in the West feel, and how that alienation can drive extreme cases into terrorism. Try here and here. This profile fits the 9/11 hijackers, the Scottish airport assailants, and the London bombers.
The issue we seem to loathe finger for multicultural PC reasons is the ‘dual loyalty’ problem, but it so clearly obvious here that it cries out for discussion. It should be blindingly obvious that most people hold multiple identities or roles and that these will conflict. They do so in our lives everyday. Our roles as professionals at work collide with our responsibilities to our families. But if we apply this strikingly obvious logic to race/religion/nationality questions, it simply becomes taboo in US.
Because the US is an immigrant country, this logic creates terrible tensions. So we have admirably tried to ignore it, but turning away doesn’t mean it goes away. Indeed, what softens that dual loyalty problem is integration over time – the Americanization that comes from living in the US for several generations. Just about everyone’s grandmother gets off the boat with deep ties to the Old Country. The parents straddle the Old and New Country with proficiency in both languages. The grandkids don’t speak the old language at all, indulging only silly multicultural fantasies of ‘finding their roots,’ even though anyone from the Old Country would immediately tag them as an American. By the great-grandkid’s generations, the Old Country is a misty myth, and the great-grandkid’s spouse is likely to be of another ethnicity anyway. Hence, Americanization.
As Samuel Huntington notes, the requirements of US citizenship are comparatively light. This means just about anyone can join the US national community. It also ensures a certain level of cultural frisson that simply would not be tolerated in many other countries. Clearly simply handing someone a flag or a driver’s license does not insure Americanization, nor, does even the military uniform of Hasan (a great surprise, that, actually). Far more likely is time and sociality. Mixing, learning, speaking the language, interaction, slowly wears away the sharp conflict of identities and helps each individual informally reconcile possibly competing loyalties.
Islam however does raise particular issues of integration, as Islam frequently defines itself as a ‘way of life,’ rather than simply a ‘go-to-service-on-the-weekend’ religion that most Americans profess. Insofar as Islam indulges totalist visions of religion as an all-encompassing lifestyle, the pluralism and tolerance necessary for living in the West may not come easy. (For a similar problem, consider the unique status of the Amish.) This seems to be Europe’s great problem. America’s Muslims seem to have made their peace with pluralism better. That needs to be explained; there is a good dissertation there.
For part one, on Afghanistan, try here; for part two, on Iran, try here.
The budget deficit for FY 2009 (which ended on September 30, 2009) was $1.42 trillion. I can hardly think of a better reason to ask the question in the title of this post. For comparison purposes, the US economy is about $14.5 trillion and its national debt is $12 trillion. South Korea’s GDP is about $900 billion. So the US borrowed 150% of the entire output of the world’s 13th largest economy. If that is not imperial decline, I don’t know what is. The day after I read that statistic, I told my Korean students they should start thinking about a post-American Korean alliance framework. The odds against us are lengthening fast.
A few months ago, the US general in Afghanistan said we are losing there. And that seems to be the general consensus. This happened in Iraq too from 2004 – 2007, and in Vietnam after Tet. In the Iraqi case we pulled off something like a miracle with the surge and tribal awakening against al Qaeda. Although the best authority on Iraq says we are worse there than we think, at least we aren’t calling it the ‘forever war’ or a ‘fiasco’ anymore. In Vietnam of course, things went less well. Despite the changes at the top (Clark Clifford, Creighton Abrams, then the Nixon administration), we could not pull the South back from the brink, and by 1975, we had effectively lost.
So my question is why would a great power like the US give up, one possible option in the current greater ME mess? Clearly the US has huge resources, greater than North Vietnam & the VC, al Qaeda in Iraq, or the Taliban. (Remember that the Iraq Study Group recommended in the fall of 2006 that we gradually withdraw – effectively giving up. Nor is it likely that we are willing to plunge back into Iraq in huge force if things go badly in the next 2 years, during the final withdrawal.) And we have seen other great powers give up and leave/lose before too: the USSR in Afghanistan, France in Algeria, and lots of the postcolonial struggles. This is a great dissertation waiting to be written. Here are a few thoughts, all directly relevant to the medium-term US presence in the GME.
1. Wars, like any other enterprise, involve a cost-benefit analysis. Sullivan makes quite clear just how high the costs of the GWoT really are, and how little we have accomplished. It is painful reading. But by any reasonable assessment, the costs of the ME to the US are skyrocketing and look only to increase for all sorts of reasons (continuing Israeli intransigence, Iran’s nuclear sprint, the $1 trillion price tag on McChrystal’s plan). The unprecedented size of the budget deficit, and level of borrowing necessary to continue the ME wars, makes the cost-benefit question far more relevant than I have seen in the Afghanistan surge debate in the last few months. Too much of the debate has focused on Obama’s backbone or channeled ‘Americans-don’t-lose-wars’ nationalism. Far too little focuses on the extreme lack of resources.
2. We learned from Vietnam that losing a war isn’t so bad after all. All the predictions of the 1970s about coming of multipolarity, the end of the Cold War, the rise of the third world, and American decline were wrong. The US has tremendous power reserves. A strategic retrenchment will not diminish them. Most of the world will still expect US military power to dominate major power crises; most of the world will still value US market access above all trading relationships. Leaving the ME is not the fall of the Roman Empire.
3. Extended wars are domestically destabilizing and liberalism-reducing. This is a brutally obvious lesson from democracies in extended wars or standoffs. Israel and South Korea have done reasonably well in reconciling the nationalism and militarism demanded in such competitions, with the liberalism and social tolerance we expect from democracies. But the nominal, might-have-been democracies of Pakistan and South Vietnam were simply destroyed by unrelenting external confrontation.
4. Small wars that become big endanger other, more critical international commitments. Here is another Vietnam lesson. The drain of Vietnam began to seriously endanger America’s more central needs in Western Europe and Northeast Asia; this is major reason why we gave up. Today, the 3 trillion dollar GWoT is sapping America’s ability to hold the line in places of much greater importance. While Europe is not threatened (Russia somewhat in the east), East Asia is witnessing a major power shift. It’s hard to argue that Asia’s rise is not of far greater importance to the US than the enduring primitivism of ME. The US is not balancing China right now, but it is awful nervous about the future of Chinese power, and you can be sure the Chinese relish watching the US lose its bearings (torture) in the ME.
In my last post, I suggested that maybe Afghanistan is a bridge too far. More generally after 8 years of the GWoT, I am starting to think the GWoT more generally is going that way too. I know it is vital for US security, but the costs are really starting to scare me, encouraging the isolationist hidden in every American: if they don’t want our help in Eurasia, fine – let them kill each other as they wish.
A friend went to hear a Council on Foreign Relations speaker on Iran – inevitably an ex-national security type. The speaker said we are leaving Israel in the wind to deal with Iran, and that the likelihood of an Israeli strike is rising faster than most people think. Here was my response.
“She sounds to me like your standard neo-con hawk actually – mixing analysis with policy preferences, trying to scare the hell out of the West with frightening scenarios that imply if only the US was tough and committed, this would not have happened. I think she reads the Kagans too much.
A few points:
1. Nuclear proliferation is inevitable. It’s already underway in Asia seriously. The US can’t bomb, sanction, invade all these places. We better find a way to live with this, instead of saying every time a proliferator is on the cusp that we should consider military force. That’s a recipe for forever war as the costs of nuclearization continue to come down.
2. Israel’s security is not America’s security. If they want to start a war with Iran, then that’s their issue. The US informal security guarantee to Israel cannot mean that we get chain-ganged into every conflict it wants to fight.
3. I think the likelihood of an Israeli strike is wildly overrated. They’re not stupid, and they know they are deeply isolated on this one. Israeli hawks are probably bluffing to encourage the US and UN to move more meaningfully on Iran. It’s the Richard Nixon ‘madman’ theory all over again: if Israel acts wild and erratic enough, maybe others will be spooked into doing something.
4. Iran with nukes is more dangerous, but let the locals balance/contain it first. It should not be our affair firstly.
5. We don’t really have much choice. Iran is genuinely committed to nuclearization, and Americans are unwilling to use serious force to stop that. So all we can really do is watch from the sidelines. Our hands are tied by a US public opinion that has been deeply anti-interventionist after Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Asked if I had suddenly become a dove on the GWoT:
“I don’t know. Maybe. But I think more that I am really beginning to worry about the costs of the war on terror. It goes on and on, and the US is bankrupt now, seriously, and really overstretched. We just cannot afford this stuff much longer – we’re becoming like Britain in the 30s or the USSR in the 80s. I can see the enthusiasm out here in the Chinese scholars I meet. They are relishing watching American fritter away its power running around the caves and deserts of the ME. Israel is our friend and should be, but the ME is becoming a sinkhole for US power. We desperately need Israel to find peace with its neighbors, or to cut it loose, because its exceptionalism is becoming just too expensive for the US now. We need to start seriously telling the Israelis that American support is not a blank check. If the Jewish religious right wants an apocalyptic war over the territories, and to bomb Iran…, well, that’s just a bridge too far. Right now Iraq and Afghanistan are enough. Do we really need to risk a regional war between Israel and the US on one side, and Muslims on the other? Increasingly, I am thinking we need a long-term out from the ME. It’s bankrupting the US. I don’t know. My thinking on the ME is in real flux; maybe because I am watching Asians get rich and strong while we are stumbling. The trend lines are just not good. The ME just seems so intractable, and it is becoming such a huge drain on the US.”
To the charge I might abandon Israel:
“Well, I am watching Asians get rich while we are hunting ghosts in the ME. The Chinese love this. They are watching the world’s only superpower blow its lead and fritter away its power in a probably vain effort to bring peace to the ME. It is becoming increasingly apparent that this is a fool’s errand. You must be thinking the same…”
Part 2 is here; Part 3 is here.
This week I am putting up my thoughts on accepting a ‘defeat’ in the Greater Middle East (at least for a little while); cutting our losses; and a long-term exit from a region that is consuming US power at a remarkably frightening rate. My ‘rah-rah’ instincts are to stay and ‘win’ and my blogging to date has supported the GWoT pretty strongly, but increasingly the parallels of Afghanistan to Vietnam linger in my head. It’s hard not to see this debate like those of the Johnson administration in 1964-65. The risks of staying and draining US power, especially in the face of rising Asia, increasingly worry me. Perhaps living in Asia and seeing how wealthy they are all getting, while we run all over the ME, has instilled greater fear in me of US overstretch. The GWoT needs to end soon, or at least we need to find a far less expensive way to fight it.
The intellectual drivers of this rethink are all the good punditry that has emerged in the last 2 months of the Obama review. (This time has been an excellent public participatory debate on the republic’s foreign policy. Let’s hope this style recurs. It is downright revelatory and democratic compared to W.) Particularly influential on me have been Walt, Kaplan, and Greenwald. Walt’s constant and intelligent blogging at FP has really forced me to rethink how unlikely, unnecessary, and costly a counterinsurgency ‘victory’ would be, and the importance of husbanding US power for other concerns (Asia). Kaplan convinced me that we are helping others a lot more than ourselves. And Greenwald convinced me that my own thinking on US geopolitical problems too easily slides to the standard US ‘foreign policy community’ response of more force, more intervention, more effort. If all you read all day is stuff from think-tanks and policy institutes like Brookings, Rand, or the Council of Foreign Relations, you’d think the US should be the world’s first problem solver. But Walt is probably right that that is recipe for overstretch, and Greenwald is probably right that that puts a lot of blood on US hands.
So I am going wobbly on Afghanistan first:
Like Friedman and Kupchan, I am starting to think this is a bridge too far – at least right now. I am not so sure, but the costs of this thing seem pretty high, and likelihood of failure too, and it is not clear how much the US needs a victory in Afghanistan defined by a decade of nation-building (the McChrystal approach). Why my change of heart?
1. US finances are a mess, even worse than usual, and US unemployment just broke 10%. This constraint is worsening as the budget outlook worsens. It should condition ALL new foreign policy outlays, especially those involving the military, as wars usually out-cost expectations. A major counterinsurgency ramp-up may be the ‘imperial’ indulgence that pushes the US into a financial crisis. Think about the parallel of Johnson’s expensive Vietnam build-up and the costs it brought in the 70s.
2. The US partner in Afghanistan is really bad. Karzai is so obviously corrupt now. The stolen election may be the last straw. US troops are now in the bizarre position of tacitly protecting warlords, as well as the drug growers who supply opium in the US. How can we win if the government is a lost cause? Isn’t that oxymoronic?
3. The US Army is badly overstretched by any reasonable measure. Recruitment is problematic. Gear has worn down faster in hard conditions of Afghanistan (and Iraq) than expected. The Army and Marines need some pretty serious institutional downtime to rebuild capacities and absorb GWoT lessons.
4. International cooperation on Afghanistan is pathetic; this is a coalition of the unwilling. The Europeans are wholly disinterested. They just want to come home. Obama can’t get anything more from them than W got. America’s Asian allies (Japan, SK, Australia) are not enthusiastic at all. Korea will go, but they will be non-combat forces. Japan won’t go, and is even probably going to stop its Indian Ocean refueling operation. Australia won’t go either. Not even the UN can really function in Afghanistan now either after last week’s bombing. And Pakistan’s role is downright pernicious.
If this sounds like I am flip-flopping, that is somewhat correct. Try here for my argument 2 months ago in favor of the Afghan COIN. I am genuinely unsure of the right course – as is Obama apparently, so at least I am in good company.
This is an article proposal for the Asian Studies Conference Japan. A friend works there; its a good outfit. You should take a look.
Proposal: “It is a commonplace in research on international security and economics in Asia to call for greater, thicker institutionalization similar to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe or the European Union. Not just East Asia, but most of the continent is comparatively poorly institutionalized. The Six Party talks on North Korea collapsed rather than evolve into a hoped-for ‘Northeast Asian Concert.’ The Association of South East Asian Nations is weak, having failed to coordinate well against either the Asian Financial Crisis or the Great Recession. ASEAN spin-offs like the ASEAN Regional Forum or Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) have done little. In South Asia, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation has essentially been sidelined by, rather than help to alleviate, the Indo-Pakistan competition. In the Middle East, the Gulf Cooperation Council is a self-protection club for monarchs, not a multilateral forum for dispute resolution or integration. This paper investigates today why even Africa is today even more institutionalized than Asia, especially East Asia. Repeated calls for thicker institutions fail for reasons local elites are loathe to admit. Deep divisions over territory, religion, ideology, and memory divide states across Asia. Territorial issues like Dokdo/Takeshima, Kashmir, or the West Bank are similar across the continent. Historical issues like the conflicts over Japanese colonialism or Israeli behavior are similar as well. Accelerating democratization will only worsen these divides as entrepreneurial politicians fire populism for electoral and legitimacy gain. Despite regular academic calls to institutionalize Asian security, this – much less security communities as we see in Europe and the Western Hemisphere – is unlikely.”
I could cut out the bit on SE Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East, and only focus on NE Asia. But it strikes me that security institutionalization across ALL of Asia is pretty bad.
I am pretty pessimistic on institutionalization out here. Those who say that Asia’s future is Europe’s past seem right to me. East Asians just don’t seem ready to really build a serious multilateral forum. They just don’t like each other enough. It is pretty politically incorrect to say that, but things like the EU, NAFTA, or the OSCE require a modicum of good will and shared values among the participants. Simply trading for greater profit is not enough. SK and Japan, and Taiwan and China trade, but they still loathe each other. As long as my Korean students tell me they are ready to go to war over Dokdo (!) and they watch Japanobic movies like this, then you can forget an Asian or East Asian Union. South Asia too isn’t ready; the Indo-Pakistan conflict – including its talibanic addendum in Afghanistan – paralyzes everything. And it hardly needs to be said that regional integration is utopian in the ME.
It took the Europeans 3-4 centuries of bloody brutal conflict before they agreed to seek security through integration and cooperation rather than domination. You’d think after Asia’s violent 20th century, they would have learned that too. I guess not. As another western scholar out here said to me in extreme irony, ‘they’re just one more good war away.’ Sad but true, perhaps?
This is a letter to the editor of Foreign Affairs. In the endless blizzard of commentary on what to do about NK, I thought this recent essay was excellent.
“Three of Andrei Lankov’s arguments – “Changing North Korea” (Nov/Dec 2009) – deserve expansion.
First, doves miss that the Kim regime is highly unlikely to meaningfully denuclearize – ever. The regime unprecedently starved its own people to get to here. Without nuclear weapons, it becomes a fourth world outcast state ignored by everyone, a social catastrophe in the Confucian worldview. Given the radical dysfunction of its economy, shilling, again and again, its nuclear weapons for assistance is central to economic survival. As Lankov correctly notes, economic liberalization is impossible, because NK would go the way of the East Germany, not China. There is no final deal waiting to be clinched by a kinder, gentler administration in Washington or Seoul. Kim’s response to Obama’s election was a nuclear blast. Endless bargaining and threatening for favors is the foreign policy objective of NK.
Second, hawks overestimate the utility of pressure or coercion on NK. It is already so isolated, that further sanctions mean little. The NK regime has already acclimated itself to a level of poverty, brutality, and isolation that might have frightened even Saddam Hussein under sanction in the 1990s. But so long as personal goodies for the regime elite come from the China connection, further sanctions will only punish the population.
More importantly, Seoul is badly exposed to extreme NK retaliation, even without nuclear weapons. This obvious fact is widely under-remarked. The Seoul National Capital Area (greater Seoul) contains a staggering one-half of SK’s population (25 million), and it lies just 30-40 miles from the DMZ. South Hwanghae, the nearest NK province, has 10-20,000 rocket launchers and artillery tubes pointed southward. It is simply impossible for allied air power to indentify and destroy them all. In a war, Seoul would be, as NK regularly promises, a ‘sea of fire.’ Given high population density, Seoul residents live vertically in high, concentrated apartment blocks. 9/11 demonstrated the potential of explosive projectiles colliding with non-hardened skyscrapers. Imagine a repeat of the World Trade Center collapse dozens of times; NK shelling would kill tens of thousands of civilians in minutes.
No US commander or SK administration is willing to run this risk. NK knows this. And the problem is only worsening. Seoul exercises a role akin to Paris over the rest of France. Paltry decentralization efforts have failed, and neither the national nor municipal government has tried to slow its expansion for national security purposes. Despite Seoul’s enormous size, it is still getting bigger, as everyone seeks to ‘move up’ to Seoul. The next largest metropolitan area is great Busan with 4 million people, but it is contracting due to the out-migration to Seoul. The urban-sprawling (both up and out) national capital is a proximate city-hostage gift to NK negotiators
Third, Lankov generously underplays the low interest in SK for unification. As with West Germans by the 1980s, SK youth increasingly see the internal border as a real one. NK refugees in the South are an invisible and isolated population. As SK has grown into a consumer society and trading state, its population’s willingness to sacrifice for unification, much less war for it, has diminished dramatically.
The three constraints are nearly immovable, and Lankov is right to demand strategies that accept, rather than ignore, them.”
Robert E Kelly 