Will that ‘Groundbreaking’ Japanese Election Actually Change Much?

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183px-Democratic_Party_of_Japan_svg I have not said anything about the most important event in Asia in the last month, because I am still stumped as to just what meaningful changes the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) intends to initiate. It has been a month now since the election, and I am pretty disappointed at how little ‘change we can believe in’ is forthcoming given Japan’s truly catastrophic fiscal condition.

All the talk about how this election is making Japan more democratic is correct. It is clearly healthy for Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to be out of power – and for awhile. Korea’s democracy jumped forward when opposition leader Kim Dae Jung got elected president (1998), and Mexico’s democracy improved when the Party of Institutional Revolution (PRI) lost the presidency for the first time (2000). Japan’s party system is now fuller and more serious. But this is an institutional, long-term improvement.

I am more curious about what policy changes the DJP will pursue, and my Japanese colleagues out here can’t quite tell me. I keep asking at the conferences I go to, and I keep hearing macro-level stuff – Japan will be more democratic, more accountable, etc. That is correct, of course, but I don’t actually see that much room for policy change, because what change Japan does need is pretty painful and not what the electorate wants.

So, the DJP says they will pursue a foreign policy more independent of the US. Lame. Grumpy American allies always talk like this, and it is possible, but unlikely. France and Germany speak this way every few years, but never really do much. SK President Roh (2003-2008) campaigned on anti-Americanism and flirted with China for a little bit. But ultimately, the US guarantee of SK sovereignty against China’s looming hugeness pushed SK back to the US. Japan is stronger than SK, but what kind of independent Japanese foreign policy is conceivable? Japan, for all its money and strength, is conspicuously lacking in friends. It has a long-standing territorial dispute with Russia that has blocked serious relations since WWII. The two Koreas and China are convinced that militarism is lurking in the Japanese psyche and want post-Holocaust German-style apologies for Japan’s wartime behavior. But the Japanese just can’t see to fully apologize and really mean it. So if they want to leave the US orbit, fine. But where will they go? Do they really want to stand against China (plus the unhappy Koreas and loose-cannon Russia) alone in the future? I doubt it. Just like France felt compelled to rejoin NATO’s military integration despite all of Jacques Chirac’s Iraq War anti-Americanism, Japan will come back after some populist-nationalist noises for a year or so.

Domestically the DJP says they want help for farmers and the poor and provide more money for childcare, worker protection, etc. All these are nice social democratic goals (sorta like Obama). Everyone likes to help the poor, and if childcare assistance will get Japan’s birthrate up, that would be excellent. But there is no money for this. Japan’s debt is absolutely out-of-control. It is at 175% of GDP now – that is roughly a $8.75 trillion debt on a $5 trillion economy. (US debt is $9T on a $15T economy.) Here is a 2001 description that captures just how bad it is in some detail. Money quotes: “Japan’s Runaway Debt Train” and “Japan’s Public Spending Orgy.”

Most foreign IPE (international political economy) observers say what really needs to happen is an assault on the bureaucracy that really runs Japan under the hood of its parlor-game politics. Yet the LDP under Koizumi could not do this, and the DJP has scarcely talked about it.

So while the election is good for long-term democratic institutionalization, I still see the same wishful thinking as under the LDP – more public money (except for families now instead of construction companies), more subsidization of wildly expensive and inefficient Japanese famers, no moves to tame the bureaucracy and open the economy, and most importantly, no serious plan to get the staggering deficit and debt down. Instead its just more red ink – just this time from leftist-populists instead of business-conservatives. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Bleh…

UPDATE (Oct. 1, 2009): I feel vindicated in my assessment.

China is Feeling Its New Strength – and It will Structure Korean Unification

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I have been to four conferences on East Asian (EA) security this year. All have had Chinese colleagues. This has been hugely helpful in my thinking on Asian security. In the US, I rarely met Chinese scholars. Studying Asia from a distance reduced it to a pool of cases to rummage through for evidence of this or that theory. Living here has given me a much greater sense of sharpness of the local disagreements, and especially of the punchy, rising strength of China.

David Kang has argued repeatedly that China’s rise is not spurring counter-balancing behavior in EA and that predictions that Europe’s past (nationalism, sharp territorial disputes, war) will be Asia’s future are overblown. I am certainly not the Asia expert he is, and in the US, I agreed with him. But after living here 15 months and going to these conferences and teaching Chinese (and Korean) students on these issues, I am really starting to think he is wrong.

Instead, I think this op-ed by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times really nails it. (Rachman is excellent. You should read him regularly.) I think he really catches how much more assertive the Chinese are becoming, including toward the US (which we deserve, of course, because we can’t get our house in order). I certainly see the ‘rising China’ vibe here when I listen to the Chinese scholars at the conferences. At the last one, three Chinese participants all stressed how the US was becoming dependent on China and that China was becoming “rich and strong.” I should say that the scholars I meet are usually polite and pleasant in personal conversation over a beer or dinner, but in the presentations, they talk with new found, newly enjoyable strength given US troubles and China’s continuing growth through even this Great Recession. In August I attended a panel entitled ‘China is Back!: East Asia after the Beijing Olympics.’ That sums up the vibe quite well.

After hearing this now for a year, I worked it into an argument about Korean foreign policy in Seoul two weeks ago (see my last 3 blog posts). The Chinese think they are on the up-and-up. They see the US in decline. And they are ready to push harder now for “our legitimate national security interests in Asia.” In the Korean case, I think this means the Chinese are going to become heavily involved in the structuring any final settlement on the Korean peninsula. When NK does finally explode/implode/collapse/whatever, it seems increasingly unlikely to me that SK alone will set the terms of unification. China is growing, and it seems natural that they do not want a democratic, nationalist, unified, American-allied Korea on their border. China already has Russia to the north, India to the south, Japan and the US to the east. It is reasonable therefore to expect them to prop up NK as long as possible (which is what they are doing), and when the inevitable unification does come, they will clearly push to formulate its terms to their liking as much as possible.

Instructive here is the German re-unification case. The USSR was falling apart, and the US was at a peak of postwar relative power. West Germany was a great power with a larger economy than the Soviet Union’s. This balance of forces clearly favored German unification on West German and US terms. In the end, unified Germany was kept in NATO. The USSR had wanted its neutralization, but it was too weak to get it, and West Germany basically bought Soviet compliance.

Little of this applies in Korea. China is rising, and the US is in real trouble. The USSR was dependent on western credit and oil sales; today, the US is dependent on Chinese credit (purchases of US debt). And South Korea does not have nearly the strength that West Germany has. So if China pushes for unified Korean neutralization, as the USSR pushed for it in Germany, the Chinese are lot more likely than the Soviets to get their way. I argued this publicly two weeks ago, and it was controversial enough that it landed in Korea’s foremost newspaper. But honestly, I am surprised. Doesn’t it seem obvious that big, rising, neighboring China would try to structure Korean unification to fit its preferences?

Anyway, Rachman is right. The Chinese are getting stronger, and they are starting to talk that way to the rest of us. They are feeling their oats and starting to throw their weight around. Of course, that will hardly stop the US suicide course of borrowing $20 billion a month from them. *Sigh* We’ve been warned.

“Forging Autonomy in a Tough Neighborhood: Korea’s Foreign Policy Struggle” (3)

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This is the conclusion of my last two posts. It is the oral synopsis of a conference paper on Korea’s strategies to escape its harsh geopolitical neighborhood.

“Finally, what is the likely future course of Korean foreign policy? For the South, the answer is easy. Barring unification, the Southern Republic will almost certainly retain the US alliance as the ultimate guarantor of its autonomy. Going your own way is hugely risky, as NK will find out if the 5 other parties of the 6 party talks can ever coordinate a common front against it. Striking out independently from the US risks Chinese subordination. President Roh’s brief flirtation with China (2004-2007) was more to flatter South Korean ego that the country was a ‘player’ or ‘mediator’ between the US and China. The Chinese blithely rebuffed this, and their Dongbei Manchurian history project and treatment of NK refugees quickly drove the South back to the US under the current conservative President Lee.

The North is clearly much more exposed. Going it alone is extraordinarily difficult for small states, and NK’s economic contraction makes this even harder. Clearly the nuclear program is an extreme measure to preserve autonomy from Chinese encroachment particularly. Unlike the SK’s US alliance, if the NK bandwagons openly and clearly with China, it will be absorbed or dominated. The Chinese have neither the geographic distance nor the democratic scruples to preserve NK autonomy.

A unified Korea would change these calculations. I see two possibilities. One, a unified ROK could aspire to stand on its own, particularly if Russia and Japan continue their relative decline. Massive demobilization would follow unification – the NK People’s Army alone has one million soldiers. That newly freed manpower could fuel a production and baby boom that could put a unified ROK within striking distance of still struggling Russia and Japan.

But that still leaves China, rising China. So possibility two is the increasing likelihood that the Chinese price for unification will be the finlandization of united Korea – strict neutralism. Given the US’ relative decline vis-à-vis China, it is unlikely the US will be able to counterbalance this pressure. When Germany unified, West Germany was stronger than South Korea, and East Germany was not as bad off as North Korea. The US was stronger then than now, and the USSR was much weaker than China is now. So the balance of forces today favors a more sinified outcome, and the likely Chinese price for unification is the termination of the US alliance and the withdrawal of the USFK.”

This conference got some press coverage, as have the others I participated in here. That is quite a change from the US, where no really seems to care much about academic conferences.

My argument that the Chinese will likely force Korea to choose between unity and the US alliance went down badly. People didn’t seem to like that, but the Chinese are certainly taking a a tougher line on Korea. I have been to four of these sorts of conferences with Chinese colleagues this year, and the vibe is increasingly: ‘the Olympics went well; the US is a mess; we’re on the up and up; you will need to start to account for us.’ In fact, one of the Chinese scholars at this conference bluntly said in the discussion, “We are big and rich now. Why should we listen to the US?” By extension, that would include Japan and Korea.

NORTH-EAST ASIAN NATIONAL POWER STATISTICS 

Country Population(Millions) Birth Rate Land Mass(km2) Gross Domestic Product (GDP in billions of US Dollars) GDP(Purchasing Power Parity in billions of USD) Economic Growth Rate Budget(in billions of USD) Military Spending (% of GDP & absolute value in billions of USD) Military Manpower(millions) Army Manpower(millions)
China 1,350 +0.7% 9,569,901 $4,300 $8,000 9% $900 4-4.5%      $200 3 2.2
Japan 127 -0.2% 364,485 $4,900 $4,400 0% $1800 1%              $50 0.250 0.148
Russia 140 -0.5% 16,377,742 $1,800 $2,300 6% $275 4%              $80 1 0.4
ROK 48.6 +0.3 96,920 $900 $1300 2.5% $222 2.7%          $24 0.65 0.5
DPRK 22.6 +0.4 120,408 $26 $40 -2.3% $3 N/A 1.2 1

“Forging Autonomy in a Tough Neighborhood: Korea’s Foreign Policy Struggle” (2)

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This is the continuation of my last post. It is the oral synopsis of a conference paper on Korea’s strategies to escape is harsh geopolitical neighborhood.

“If this seems gloomy, it is instructive to note how many other states have wrestled with this dilemma and fared far worse than Korea. As Kenneth Waltz tells us, states are ‘self-regarding units.’ They want domestic and foreign policy autonomy – for whatever purpose: cultural promotion, economic growth, individual liberty, ideological reconstruction, etc. But it is easy to get bullied. A few examples are helpful here. In the late 18th C Poland was partitioned three times – in 1772, 1793, and 1795 – by Russia, Austria, and Prussia. After the 1795 partition, it ceased to exist until 1918. But it was partitioned yet again in 1939 between the Nazis and the Soviets.

Paraguay and Mongolia suffered similar, if less well known, fates. From 1864 to 1870, Paraguay fought its much larger neighbors Brazil and Argentina, as well as Uruguay, in the War of the Triple Alliance. Inevitably the Paraguayans lost and were stripped of 25% of their landmass. After centuries of being kicked back and forth between czarist Russia and imperial China, Mongolia finally threw in its lot with the Soviet Union in the 1920s. It was a less an ally than a protectorate and became a forward staging base for the Red Army during the Sino-Soviet split. Like East Germany, Mongolia might easily have been the center of superpower war with little actual control over its fate and that of its citizens. This did not happen to Korea.

This prompts the question why, or rather why not? Why hasn’t either Korea been absorbed or otherwise bullied into submission since WWII? It happened frequently in Korea’s history before 1945. It has not happened since, and today with rising China on its doorstep, it does not appear to be happening again.

I propose two hypotheses to answer this question. One for each Korea. NK has learned to successfully play its opponents off of each other. NK is the weaker of the two Koreas, and it is the most likely to be subverted – by the USSR in the past, and by China since the early 90s. But it has hung on tenaciously. SK by contrast has recruited an external patron – the United States. The Republic of Korea has leveraged US power to push back on local encroachments quite successfully.

In some ways, the North’s ability to prevent domination is more remarkable than the South’s because the North is so much weaker. Its GDP per capita is low $1700 per annum. Yet NK has never been a proper satellite of either the Soviet Union or China. During the Cold War, Kim Il Sung regularly played the two communist behemoths off against each other for gains. Most spectacularly of course, Kim maneuvered both Stalin and Mao into support for his unification war. Material from the Cold War International History Project shows how wary both Stalin and Mao were. Both feared a major American response, including the use of nuclear weapons. Stalin worried about a distraction when the heart of the conflict was in Europe, and Mao feared that his long-sought, newborn revolution would unravel. So unprepared was the People’s Republic that its some of its ‘volunteers’ were sent into Korea without rifles. They were commanded to pick them up from fallen comrades.

Since the Soviet implosion, Northeast Asian geopolitics would suggest that China overlord NK. It is the last serious ‘friend’ of the regime. Without Chinese trade and aid, NK poverty would be so much worse. If the PRC wanted, the People’s Liberation Army could easily eliminate the Kim Jong Il regime. But this has not happened. And China’s much-touted ‘leverage’ over NK has not prevented its various missile and nuclear weapons tests, nor resulted in meaningful sanctions on food, fuel, and luxury items.

The moral of the story is that the Kims have done a masterful job keeping the other five members of the 6 party talks divided and unsure. The Kims have constantly juggled and separated their opponents, and NK has lived in the geopolitical ‘spaces’ created by all this confusion.

The Southern strategy differs. Rather than zig-zag on its own, the South chose to bandwagon with an external party. SK has acquiesced to an asymmetric patron-client relationship with the United States. But the benefits to the South have clearly outweighed the benefits to the Americans. Indeed, the US is an ideal ally for the South, because it is strong enough to project power to NE Asia and so resist local encroachment on Southern sovereignty. But the US is also too far away to really control Southern internal affairs. To which must be add a deep cultural gap which raises the costs of any US domination of Korea, and US liberal-democratic values, skeptical of imperialist expansionism. In short, the US is big enough to help SK, but geographically and culturally distant enough, and democratic enough, not to dominate it.

So Republic of Korea (ROK) received extensive assistance throughout the 50s, although US officials were unable to dissuade President Rhee from either his import-substitution industrialization plans or his constitutional shenanigans. Under General Park, the US had no role in emerging Korean miracle – the US would hardly have supported the oligopolistic cartelization of the Korean economy that created the chaebol. Nor was the US able to redirect Park’s constitutional misbehavior. In the 1980s, the US leaned on President Chun, but again, it hardly structured the emerging democratic politics of the Republic. It is highly unlikely, for example, that the US would have ‘approved’ the semi-presidential system Korea choose. Even the Kwangju suppression – frequently touted as proof of US domination by scholars like Bruce Cumings – occurred mostly by Korean special forces under local control. And certainly since the 1990s, no one would meaningfully suggest that the US Forces in Korea (USFK) dominate or secretly control the South Korean state. Finally, never in the alliance history did the US pursue anything remotely similar to the cultural genocide committed by Soviets in the Baltics, China in Tibet, or Japan in Korea. If Korea is Americanized, that process is driven by Korean consumer demand and interest in things like rock-and-roll or Hollywood films, not by enforced US cultural imperialism.

These two hypotheses from the Korean case suggest explanations for how a middle power with tough geopolitics can retain its autonomy. Other examples such as Benelux, Switzerland, or Canada would be usefully investigated as comparative cases.”

“Forging Autonomy in a Tough Neighborhood: Korea’s Foreign Policy Struggle” (1)

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Part two is here; part three is here.

Last Friday I spoke at the Korean Association for International Studies’ conference on “Sino-US Relations and the Korean Peninsula.” I spoke on a panel entitled “The Future of Sino-US Relations and Korea’s Security Strategy.” I was requested to write about Korean foreign policy and the Sino-US relationship. This was a challenging mission, as I am not a Korean. It required a mental displacement, and one of my arguments – that a united Korea will probably ‘finlandize’ – created a stir. My paper’s title is the name of this post. Below is the first part of my short oral presentation. Here is part 2 and part 3; if you want the whole thing, email me at rekelly@pusan.ac.kr.)

“As I sat to write a paper about Korea’s foreign policy toward with the United States and China, it struck me that the central trouble Korea faces in dealing with these two very large states is the asymmetry of national power. And indeed, this asymmetry applies to Korea’s whole neighborhood. Korea, as I argue in the paper, has possibly the worst political geography on the planet. It is surrounded by three much larger powers – three great powers no less – with little chance to catch-up to those powers, economically or militarily. As such, much of Korean foreign policy must focus on retaining freedom of movement against the encroachment of larger, nearby powers, or as I entitled my paper, Korea must carve autonomy out of a very tough neighborhood.

This will be a struggle, and it is a struggle Korea frequently lost in the past. Today, the greatest threat to Korean autonomy is China, and its greatest guarantor is the United States. With Japan and Russia both stagnating at the moment, China and the US will dominate Korean foreign policy choices for the foreseeable future.

So I want to begin my paper with 2 basic IR theory insights. First the Republic of Korea is a middle power. Second, small and middle powers are frequently pulled into the orbit of larger powers.

First, Korea as a middle power. I provide some basic statistics in the paper on Korea’s neighborhood that bear repeating. These numbers are all drawn from the CIA World Factbook, which is updated every 2 weeks. SK’s population is 49.6 M. By contrast, Japan’s population is 127 M, Russia’s is 140M, and China’s is a staggering 1.3 B. That means Japan is 2.5 times Korea’s size; Russia almost 3, and China 26 times Korea’s population. If we include the 23 M N Koreans, Japan and Russia are still twice Korea’s size, and China is still 18 times bigger. Economically, Korea’s GDP (not PPP-adjusted) is $900B; Russia’s is $1.8T, China’s is $4.3T,and Japan’s is $4.9T. So Russia is twice Korea’s size; China is almost 5 times, and Japan almost 6. NK’s GDP is a crushing $26B, so its addition would not change these proportions much.

This is not to denigrate the miracle on the Han. Korea’s GDP per capita exceeds both China’s and Russia’s, and the rapidity with which Korea raced from African levels of poverty in the 40s to the OECD in the 90s is remarkable. Nevertheless, my point is that Korea is comparatively small, and downright tiny compared to China. As Kim Il Sung said, Korea is a shrimp among whales, and this is the central challenge to Korean foreign policy.

My second IR insight – that small powers often gravitate toward bigger ones – is aggravated in the Korean case, because that gravitation is even more likely to happen if, 1. those larger powers are great powers, and 2. if those larger powers are direct neighbors. Both of these conditions apply to Korea, and perhaps uniquely, Korea abuts 3 great powers. Not even Mongolia or Poland faces such harsh geography. Imperial Germany used to refer to the ‘ring of steel’ around it before WWI. Korea is in similar but worse position. Germany, a great power itself, could contemplate a breakout, and one may read WWI and WWII as German attempts to crack its encirclement. Korea has no such opportunities. It is simply too weak to pursue military resistance.

The great threat then to Korea is its domination by its much larger neighbors. Frequently large states intimidate, encroach, or otherwise bully smaller neighbors. Indeed, they may even absorb them outright. Korea’s own history gives us many examples of this dynamic. In the Choson dynasty period, Korea was a reliable vassal in the Sinocentric order. In the late 19th C, as Chinese power receded, Korea fell increasingly under the sway of Russia and especially Japan. In 1910, it was absorbed completely, and the Japanese pursued thoroughgoing japanification, including the elimination of the intelligentsia, restrictions on language and culture, and even encouraged the taking of Japanese names. Although Japanese power was smashed by 1945, it was locally replaced by the expansion of Soviet, Cold War power. And unfortunately for Korea, Japan rebounded quickly too. By the 80s of course, China’s rise had begun, so even as the USSR imploded, Korea’s entrapment continued. Throughout its history, its 3 larger neighbors have risen and fallen, but never fallen simultaneously. Korea seems doomed to a rotating list of hegemonic local threats. Today, although Japan and Russia are struggling, Korea faces the looming threat of China.”

Iraqi Lessons We Should Have Learned in Vietnam? Nope… Korea!!

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The conventional wisdom on our 2004-2007 failures in Iraq is that we did not learn the lessons of Vietnam about counterinsurgency (COIN). The Army, under officers like Colin Powell, reconstructed itself after the humiliation of Vietnam to fight big wars (i.e., against the USSR), not small wars (messy third world ‘brushfires’). The Army would simply not be structured to fight COIN – precisely to create a bureaucratic-structural block on the use of the Army in such situations. By willfully not developing COIN, the military could prevent the POTUS from seriously considering it. Instead such duties would be given to local allies – hence the US support for the Contras and UNITA in the 1980s, and the disastrous ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident of the 90s. The logic was captured in the famous ‘Powell Doctrine’: 1. a clearly defined objective for any war, 2. use of overwhelming force, and 3. a clear exit strategy.

The obvious problem is that this binds (blackmails?) the White House to fight only the kinds of wars that ‘fit’ the Army’s posture. But of course, that inverts reality. The Army does not tell the world, ‘give us the wars we are prepared and prefer to fight.’ Instead, the messy, complicated world throws all kinds of crises at the US, and its military should at least try to plan and prepare for various foreseeable scenarios. The Army can’t command that wars the country fights only be in a certain shape it prefers. What happens if there is a war we need to fight that doesn’t fight the Powell Doctrine? We can’t just ignore that national security imperative can we? Well, we did, and this is why SecDef Rumsfeld was bureaucratically cornered to admit that ‘you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want.’ The military was purposefully not structured to fight the COINs that emerged in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so things were a mess in Iraq until Petraeus forced COIN through the ‘Powell-ized’ Pentagon bureaucracy. Here is the unlearned lesson of Vietnam. Instead of learning from Vietnam how to do COIN better, we decided to learn not to do it all. That was a huge and costly error.

But then as I was a writing a paper on Korean foreign policy, I stumbled onto this gem, by a US general who served in the Korea War, about the hasty, unplanned, overzealous US involvement in Korea. It is truly disturbing to read just how many errors we made then that the Bush people made again 50 years later. So if you thought Vietnam was the lesson we didn’t learn for the GWoT, add Korea to your list. Just be sure to read the article. Substitute ‘Iraq’ for ‘Korea,’ and its list of problems is astonishingly, depressingly familiar.

Money quotes (practically the whole article is a money quote for the GWoT):

“[The Korean War] begun with an air of excessive expectation based upon estimates which were inspired by wishful optimism.”

“From first to last the failure to budget the expenses of the Korean War, as if keeping them from sight would make the experience less painful, has been symptomatic of a national ailment.”

“In the first summer, we plunged on a sure thing, though the axiom has it that in war nothing is sure. We said we did it because there was no alternative to precipitate action; the future of collective security was at stake, and aggression left unchecked would soon ring the world with fire.”

“But no move toward even partial mobilization accompanied it. The reserves were not called. An ammunition build-up was not programmed, though in some types the stocks were nil. For three months thereafter the Defense Secretary continued to hack at our fighting resources. Relations between State and the Pentagon remained as cold as if they represented opposite sides in a war.”

“The original planners mistakenly calculated that they were dealing with a gook army and an essentially craven people who would collapse as soon as mobile men and modern weapons blew a hot breath their way. But the play didn’t follow the lines as written.”

“Strategy was then at its wishful best; it was wishing out of existence a Red Chinese Army which was already over the border.”

“The war could be properly described as a tactical stalemate. We had the power and they had the push and the people. For two years the situation remained in equipoise mainly because we were motorized and had a tremendous advantage in air and artillery.”

“United States, which was the major power holding the command seat, accepted a drawn war as inevitable simply out of unwillingness to raise a sufficient infantry. An additional four solid divisions—meaning approximately 60,000 men—might have made all the difference.”

“The deliberate political design by which two Administrations treated the Korean War as if it were an insoluble military problem served to achieve one major object. It confused the American public and, confusing it, dulled its memory.”

“The initial [US] forces had been kept too long and pushed too hard; not to have afforded them relief would have been inexcusable. But rotation, as it came in full flower under the seeming promise of a quick truce, was a glorified game of musical chairs… Rotation is also a killer of men rather than a saver. There are never enough experienced men to fill the rugged assignments and let the new hands break in gradually.”

“The new hope which came to bloom…was that by building a still stronger ROK Army we would shortly find an easy exit from our Korean venture. The history of this effort, and in particular the tardiness of the decision, shows conclusively that it was inspired by dreams of liquidating our commitments.”

“Yet the Army of the United States did not so much as send one headquarters battery to Korea to initiate a training establishment for ROK artillerymen.”

“To attempt to make a backward nation catch up with the present, while assisting in the revitalizing of its economy, is quite a reversal of the normal processes of history.”

“Since South Korea is, for the time being, invalided and dependent on us largely for military supply and what is needed to keep life in a now surplus population, we more or less vaguely see that for some years ahead we shall have to fill the vacuum, serving as backer, banker, and supplier. Either that or South Korea, left a hopeless derelict, will be salvaged by Communist neighbors.”

“Korea is a strategically profitless area for the United States, of no use as a defensive base, a springboard to nowhere, a sinkhole for our military power. We don’t belong there.”

Some of these insights I disagree with; some are accurate. But what must strike any reader is how easily they can be transferred to the GwoT. Last week argued that we should give McChrystal a chance in Afghanistan, because presumably US planners can learn from Vietnam, the USSR in Afghanistan, and Iraq how to fight a better COIN. Then I read this article, and it really drew me up short. We seem to make the same mistakes again and again – Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. Maybe Stephen Walt and Christopher Layne are right, and we should stay out of these sorts of wars, because we muck them up so bad. This article really shook my confidence.

US Right-Wing Meltdown Watch: “I’m so American I don’t want the President Talking to my Kids!”

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(I must credit a friend for coming up with that title.)

I am getting really nervous about what is happening to the American Right. The paranoia is getting really, really bad – Death Panels, Obama the racist non-citizen, Hitlerian healthcare. Now Obama is feeding “Marxist propaganda” to the nation’s schoolchildren?! Does anyone really believe that? WTH is happening to US conservatives? He’s black with a funny name so he’s a Muslim socialist Nazi whatever? How did we possibly get to this point?

And this is starting to leak out to the rest of the world now, you know. South Koreans heard about that guy who brought a legal firearm to a health care townhall, and it’s downright embarrassing to try to try explain it: ‘well you know, that’s the way we are; those wacky Americans.’ The ‘Obama is Hitler’ riff from the summer is also starting to filter downstream.

You can’t talk like this and expect people to take US superpowerdom seriously. If we are going to lead, and not just be some sallow, pathetic, self-involved empire-in-decline (like 1914 Austro-Hungary), we gotta clean up this kinda stuff. Don’t conservatives see this? They love American empire and dominance more than anyone, yet their post-Bush rhetoric tells the world we aren’t fit to lead, or at least, they aren’t fit to lead the US. Most rich countries have state health care; they think it’s kinda weird we don’t. That doesn’t mean we have to have it, but it does mean when opponents flip out and say ObamaCare is the beginning of the Fourth Reich, they think we’re bananas. Last week some guy got his finger bitten off at a health care townhall?! C’mon! Please! I have to explain you people to Asians out here, and it’s killing me!

Democratic systems need healthy coherent opposition parties. Especially in a 2-party system, a functional, serious opposition is a crucial check & balance. But the US conservative freak-out just goes on and on, even after 8 months of Obama’s presidency. Andrew Sullivan argued in The Conservative Soul that the GOP was at risk of becoming the first religious party in US history. In similar manner, one might say it is becoming a regional party, as it contracts to a Southern rump. Christianist rural paranoia has replaced reflective seriousness.

And stories like this are exactly why the GOP continues to contract. Does the Fox News right really believe the POTUS should not speak to the nation’s children? Isn’t that going wildly overboard? And besides, isn’t it kinda cool that the president wants to talk to kids? Isn’t that good for citizenship? And when he says he is asking for their help, doesn’t that have a ‘we’re-all-in-this-together,’ ‘ask-not-what-your-country-can-do-for-you’ vibe to it? Isn’t that a GOOD thing? Besides he’s the POTUS. Doesn’t he have the right to to speak to the citizenry, including the next generation? He did get elected; he is the PRESIDENT, right?

Oh, I forgot… he’s not a citizen, so of course he shouldn’t talk to the children! How nicely one conspiracy theory dovetails into another to create that FNC echo chamber.

*Sigh* I am running out of things to say on this. It’s just too weird. Go read Richard Hofstader’s classic The Paranoid Style in American Politics. You’ll learn about all the other wackjobs in the history of the American right – like Father Coughlin who thought the New Deal meant FDR was in league with Stalin. How nice.

Give McChrystal a Chance in Afghanistan

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In the last week, Steve Walt, George Will and Charles Hagel have all come out to say that Afghanistan is a losing effort and that we should get out or retrench in one way or the other.

Isn’t this jumping the gun a bit? Obama has only been in there 8 months, and McChrystal for less than 2. I know we all think it could become like Vietnam or the Red Army when they were in Afghanistan 25 years ago. But not necessarily. Presumably US planners can read history and learn from previous mistakes. Heavy and indiscriminate use of firepower was the big civil relations problems faced by both the US in Vietnam and the USSR in Afghanistan. But we seem to have learned not to do that (although the Russians haven’t – look at Chechnya). Predators and local airstrikes, for all their errors, are not like Arclight in South Vietnam or, worse, the Soviet scorched earth policy in Afghanistan.

It is true that large bureaucracies learn slowly, and the the US Army seems particularly insistent on fighting war in only one way. However, the Army did learn counterinsurgency after 4 years in Iraq, and it did, sort of, turn things around there.

I am also not so sure that if we leave AfPak, it wouldn’t cause so much trouble that we’d have to go back in again later. Walt is correct that the ‘safe haven for al Qaeda’ argument for staying in South Asia is weak, but it does hold some water, and there are other reasons for staying.

1. Without a US commitment, Afghanistan will melt-down, and that will increase the chances of the same thing happening in Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons, and a lot more people, conventional weapons, and jihadis.

2. Without the US in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence will almost certainly go back to its old tricks there. It will make trouble so that Pakistan can semi-control Afghanistan and gain greater ‘strategic depth’ against India. (This was the Pakistani strategy before 9/11.)

3. India will flip out if we cut out of South Asia. It will certainly feel less secure, and so be more likely to build more nukes, not compromise on Kashmir, and strike a much harder line on Pakistan and terrorism. Do we really want India to feel isolated and hence pressed to use military force next time they are targeted by terrorists with Pakistani connections? India is an emerging US ally, and if we leave South Asia just like that, we will lose them.

4. If we can get some kind of stable government in Afghanistan and more or less defeat/repress the Taliban, we might then be able to interrupt the huge flow of opium out Afghanistan. Even if you believe in light drug liberalization (I do), it is hard to be comfortable with legalizing opium, which is the base of heroin.

5. Just like in Vietnam, US credibility is at stake. The biggest problem we have in counterinsurgency is that the Afghan locals don’t think we’ll stay, so they won’t rat out the Taliban. If we bail, the Afghans will never trust us again, and we’ll have trouble convincing other similar populations (Muslim, tribalized) should we have to fight somewhere else (like Somalia or Yemen). So yes, we may have to give up later, but let’s at least give it a try before we burn our bridges so badly in South Asia. It will be a lot harder to fight there later if we give up now.

I realize that saying we have to fight for credibility can be a black hole. If you have to defend every domino to defend anyone of them, then you have to fight everywhere. That’s what happened in the Cold War and lead to Vietnam. But we are nowhere near that point in the GWoT. The Cold War pulled us all over the world, but the GWoT is mostly limited to the Middle East and South Asia. We have only just begun to divert resources to Afghanistan from Iraq. As the cost of the latter goes down and the former goes up, hopefully we won’t have to pay any new costs. Yes, I realize the GWoT has already been a budget-breaker, but our Afghanistan venture will likely be less expensive than Iraq. Our costs should begin to decline.

In short, there are costs to giving up in Afghanistan, and benefits if we win. In Vietnam, we learned after Tet, that the benefits of victory no longer outweighed the costs of the effort. In other words, by 1969 it was cheaper to lose in Vietnam. But we are not near that point in Afghanistan yet. Bush basically ignored the place as Iraq took over his presidency. Obama has only just begun the effort that should have taken place in 2002. So let’s give him and McChrystal a chance. Deployments and wars are not forever. If the costs balloon, and benefits recede and become ever more ethereal (as happened in Vietnam), we can always leave. This is not the end of the discussion. But for right now, let’s give Obama a chance, as we gave W his hail mary pass with the surge.

Russian Imperial Paranoia Update – Putin Thinks He’s Rambo!

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Ah, the entertaining hysteria of Russian imperial decline. A few months ago, it was Stalin battling aliens to save the world. Today, it is another machoismo photo-op by the Pootie-Poot (George W Bush’s nickname for Putin). Now he’s shirtless in Siberia. Cuttin’ brush just like W! I bet the ladies just love this sorta stuff…

I’ve written before about the psychology of resentful post-imperial Russia. Vice-President Biden basically nailed it this summer when he said the Russians were suffering from a severe postimperial “hangover,” and Philip Stevens at the FT gets it right too, that endless, tiresome Russian bitterness has made it friendless. Another FT op-ed basically tells you why 20 years after the USSR, eastern Europeans still want NATO as a bulwark against Russian neo-imperialism.

Old glories die hard – although ‘glory’ hardly defines gray, dingy Soviet imperialism – and in Russia’s case the ‘hangover’ has been more severe than normal because the fall from imperial greatness happened so fast – less than 5 years. This rapid fall followed by a consequently more extreme nationalist reaction characterized Weimar Germany too, so this is pretty worrisome actually. At least Britain had a long time to retrench from empire, so Britain’s public and elites could slowly adjust to its declining power. Even Enoch Powell, who loathed the Americans during WWII for their secret intention to break up the Empire by releasing India, came to advocate no further British commitments east of the Suez.

By contrast no figure in Russian political life speaks this way. It is competitive, macho, one-upsmanship in foreign policy. Bullying and bitterness are the order of the day, and national ideology is Weimar-esque resentment. Even as Russia is depopulating, the strut and overconfidence insecure powers require in IR now dominates Russian foreign policy. This is the route to national suicide, and given how unhelpful Russia has been for 15 years on everything from NK to Chechnya to Iran, I guess we should be ‘happy’ they’re on this kamikaze course. Still, they are one of the great cultures on the planet, having produced Dostoyevsky, Shostakovich and the rest, so it is disturbing and tragic to watch them destroy themselves. Sad…

Does State Hostage-Taking Work ?

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An interesting quirk of authoritarian states’ foreign policies is a tendency to take western hostages when they wander onto their territory. Iran, China, and North Korea do this quite regularly. Burma too has gotten into the act lately.

Iran has repeatedly detained Iranian-Americans and journalists on all kinds of ridiculous charges like threatening the honor of Islam. Right now, it is holding three US hikers, who incredibly were hiking in Kurdistan and accidentally wandered into Iran. Call their destination choice a brain failure – a chronic disease among Americans traveling.

NK this year alone held two Americans for 3 months and a South Korean for 6. In the 1990s, after Tiananmen, China used to imprison Chinese-American human rights campaigners.

The first, most obvious question, is how these people wind up in these places. Usually, it is out of stupidity. It looks increasingly like Laura Ling and Euna Lee did in fact land, if only for a moment, on the NK side of the Yalu. And the American who swam to see Aung San Suu Kyi probably deserved some jail time or a fine. And the same goes for those hikers now held in Iran. Who goes back-packing for leisure along the Iran-Iraq border?! One can only imagine Bill Clinton or Jim Webb shaking their heads in disbelief when they are called upon to get these people out.

But there is a larger IR question here too. These accidental penetrations are usually mishaps or stupidity. So when they are convicted as ‘spies,’ it is almost always farcical, and the West knows it. This begs the question then, why do it? The process has become ritualized: arrest, followed by CNN & world news overexposure, then lots of backroom haggling, finally a trip by some dignitary to ‘win’ the release, concluding with a weird photo-op in-country, and then another overexposed media frenzy on the ‘prisoners’ return. (I heard Lara Ling is already looking for a book deal.) Here are a few thoughts why authoritarian states draw out this song-and-dance as much as possible:

1. The more closed your state is the more paranoid you become about any foreign intrusion, no matter how ridiculous, minor, or foolish. This is why the USSR was able to casually destroy KAL 007 in 1983, and Iran accused the BBC of sparking the recent post-election riots.

2. In the world of globalization and the Great Recession, no one really cares much for the bad behavior of NK or Burma. They are international headaches most of us like to forget about. So these sorts of incidents, with all their ritual, hysterical family outbursts, and Larry King interviews, are a great way for small, irrelevant states to garner rare global attention. Use whatever you’ve got to whip up a storm of attention. When China used to do this in the 1980s, China hands called it ‘gong-banging.’

3. Authoritarian states can simultaneously use these accidental intrusions for domestic prestige-taking. North Korea and other rabidly antiwestern regimes can periodically demonstrate to their own people the importance of the struggle against the US. This stuff helps justify the deprivation and international isolation.

4. Your can always garner a few nice concessions by trading these people back. If you are dirt-poor North Korea, you can trade SK or other hostages for all sorts of goodies – whiskey, dollars, cigarettes. If you are Iran, ask for spare parts for you collapsing industrial plant.