Al Qaeda vs SK? Seriously? Why? The Enemies List isn’t Long Enough Yet?

Posted on by
4

Most of the work on terrorism says that al Qaeda is an intelligent, serious organization of dedicated loyalists deeply committed to the cause. In the language of Cindy Combs, AQ is not a crazy or a criminal but a crusader.

This is an important insight, as our reflex is to respond angrily by denigrating them as  mad, crazy, nihilists. During WWII, we used to caricature Hitler as chewing the carpet in wild rages that almost certainly never happened. The reality is that AQ – and Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, and most of history’s horribles – are rational, strategic, and intelligent. These various opponents of liberal democracy have different values and pursue different (ie, awful) political goals, but they are rarely stupid or simply nihilistic.

So if AQ is rational, I don’t understand the value of attacking South Koreans. Why are the South Koreans, of all people, now ‘infidels’ too? I understand of course that in a maximal binladenist reading, a vast swathe of humanity, including Shiites, are the enemy. But if AQ is in fact acting strategically, can’t the Koreans wait their turn for elimination after the more proximate and threatening opponents (the West/Christianity, Israel/Jews, India/Hindus)? More practically, shouldn’t AQ just simply be trying to survive the GWoT right now, rather than adding another opponent?

AQ appears to see the world as a clash of civilizations. Islam, in this view, is encircled and already in conflict with errant pre-Islamic monotheisms (Christianity & Judaism), polytheistic Hinduism, and ‘pagan’ African animism/naturalism. Why open another potentially huge front by targeting Buddhist-Confucian states? It seems like a gigantic risk, especially if Japan and China read this as a religious assault on Confucianism and/or Buddhism (which seems to be the point, as AQ refers to the S Korean victims as ‘infidels.’)

The answer is likely that SK is a US ally, but this doesn’t seem like enough to explain 2 quick attacks and the infidel rhetoric. SK is an American ally, but it is hardly involved in the GWoT. Koreans know little about Islam, and there are less than 100 Muslims in the whole country. Given the NK menace, its forces can hardly deploy out-of-area anyway. Although it has a sizeable Christian population now, its deep religious roots are Buddhist-Confucian. And Buddhism and Confucianism are scarcely germane to  the fiery theistic conflicts that divide deep partisans of Judaism, Islam, Christianity and Hinduism.

I suppose we can only hope that AQ and radical Islam are foolish enough to declare war on all the world’s (non-Sunni) non-Muslims simultaneously.

How Come Walt’s top 10 IR books weren’t Assigned in my IR Program?

Posted on by
1

So Walt published his top 10 IR books at FP. It is a good list, except that I was not required to read any of them in my grad program. Hah! Pieces of a few of them were listed in secondary suggested reading. By FP’s own ranking, I attended a top 20 IR PhD program. Why is this so?

1. The most important ‘books’ in IR at any one time are not this or that actual book, but the latest issue (book-length) of International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, or International Security. 75+% of my IR reading in grad school was articles. This is where the most recent research was (critical to know because it made you sound smart and ‘cutting edge’ at department gatherings), and the articles usually summarized the major arguments from previous work. So you didn’t need to read books or previous articles unless you had the time, which of course you never did. A lot of the IR books I like and recommend below, I read before or after my course work. Then I had time to actually ‘soak’ in the work and not just plow through the theory chapter as fast as possible so I could get to the next reading assignment.

2. No one had time in grad school to read books. Books are for wimps and generalists; plowing through dense, turgid article prose is the mark of a real social scientist! Besides, they were way too long, and you were already exhausted and out-of-shape from living in your basement, eating badly, rarely going into the sun (your implacable enemy), and binging on the weekends in breakouts of ‘freedom.’ I think I read only 3 IR books cover-to-cover in grad school – Waltz’ Theory of International Relations, Schelling’s Arms and Influence, and Gilpin’s War and Change in World Politics. I read these in my first year when I still thought books were to be read in their entirety. That fantasy disappeared quickly.

3. Walt stress lots of history and history of ideas stuff – like Guns, Germs and Steel or The Best and the Brightest. I would love to have had him as a professor, because these are the sorts of ‘big idea’ books with exciting history attached to them that made me go into IR in the first place. But that is hardly what I read. It was all theory, formalism, and models. This stuff made me a sharper abstract thinker, but it sure wasn’t as exciting as Walt’s list. So I can drone on about escalation dominance or the ideational structures of the ‘new regionalism,’ but undergrads and basically the rest of the world zone-out pretty fast when you shift into ‘social science voice.’

4. Here are my top ten IR books, in order:

Waltz, Theory of IR

Wendt, Social Theory of IR

Fukuyama, End of History

Thucydides

Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations

Carr, 20 Year Crisis

Gilpin, War and Change

Gilpin, Global Political Economy

Huntington, Clash of Civilizations

Schelling, Arms & Influence

The Imminent Death of ‘Democratic Realism’

Posted on by
Reply

Obama’s bow to the Saudi king may go down as one of those moments when Americans, or at least its foreign policy elite, realized the dead-end of the new realism of the post-Bush Democratic Party. Obama was probably just trying to be polite, and bowing is a common, albeit declining, practice in much of Eurasia. It is pretty uncommon to Americans, so it is easier to overread its significance. (Its so ingrained in Koreans, eg, that I have seen people bow instinctively after a phone conversation.)

But it is also true that it is a not a democratic or egalitarian practice. It is rooted in aristocracies like those of Prussia, France or Britain. It does signify some deference, and those lower on the food chain are supposed to bow more deeply than those higher up. (You learn the intricate gradations of bowing in Asian cultures.) And Obama’s bow was awfully deep (about 90 degrees). Honestly, he probably should not have done it.

It looks pretty awkward for the leader of the world’s most successful democracy to bow to one the world’s most reactionary monarchs. And this mini-flap is part of the larger debate stirred up by Obama’s outreach to some of the nastier regimes on the planet – including Iran and Russia. Not only the American nationalist right, but most Americans will eventually sour on it.

The reason is that realism is not the instinct of Americans when it comes to foreign policy. Most Americans like think that US foreign policy is doing good in the world, and we recite our history to ourselves in that manner. I see it in my undergrads all the time. They love movies like Black Hawk Down or Band of Brothers (Americans dying to do the right thing for others), or just go watch the History Hitler Channel’s constant celebration of WWII, the ‘good war.’ In US foreign policy mythology, Eurasians are gutless, insipid dealmakers (EU countries trading with Iran and yakking at the UNSC) or progenitors of world-breaking fanaticisms (fascism, communism, Islamic fundamentalism) the US has to stop. The US is the city on the hill needlessly dragged in by Pearl Harbor or 9/11 to clean up Eurasia’s inability to leave in peace with itself. (For the long explanation of all this, try William Russell Mead’s Special Providence; the title alone tells you enough.)

Nor is realism really the position of the Democratic Party or Obama in their hearts. Obama is too much the social liberal – a supporter, eg, of gay and abortion rights – at home to really believe that the US should ‘respect’ dictatorships, theocracies and other closed states. Nor is realism the traditional foreign policy stance of the Democratic party. Since Americas ‘rise to globalism,’ the Democrats have traditionally argued that the US should promote human rights, expand aid, avoid alliances with nasties, limit the use and scope of force, etc. One of the great, and underappreciated moments, in the Democrats’ foreign policy history is C Vance’s principled resignation.

It is the GOP that is supposed to be the heartless defender of US interests, cold pragmatists, willing to expend ‘blood for oil,’ and all that. But actually, the GOP has never been so thoroughly realist either. Nixon and Bush 1 were the most ‘realist’ GOP presidents, but Reagan, the great GOP folk hero, was decidedly not. Reagan thought nuclear weapons, MAD, and the Cold War were a moral bane on mankind. He was as crusading as W on the promotion of US values abroad. And W of course argued that democracy promotion should be the whole point of US foreign policy.

My guess is that the newfound realism of the Democrats is simply a reaction to W, whom the left loathed. N Pelosi represents the city with the largest population of homosexuals in the country. She can’t honestly believe that Iran, whose president said there are no homosexuals in his country, is just another country we can deal with. At some point, she, Obama, HRC, and the others will turn from NK, Russia, Iran, etc. in disgust. They won’t be as obnoxious about it as W was, but I predict we will be nagging the Chinese about human rights again soon, re-containing Iran, squabbling with Russia and NK, etc. This trend will only accelerate as it becomes clear that pragmatic engagement doesn’t work much anyway: http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE53B0Y020090412 and http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/04/116_43165.html.

How to Deal with NK? More of the Same

Posted on by
4

There has been lots of good commentary since the missile launch on how to respond. Ideas have included a big bang deal to create a breakthrough, malign neglect, confrontation, and just neglect. Most of it castigates Washington officials for policy incoherence, lack of cultural understanding, lack of guts, etc. All that strikes me as pretty unfair though, especially now that, living in SK, it has become far more clear to me just how unpredictable NK really is. So give Washington (Seoul and Tokyo) a break. Like the financial crisis, no one really knows what to do. NK is just too erratic, opaque and downright weird. (Remember Kim Jong Il is on record saying long hair on men is bad for socialism. Also: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4157121.stm.)

All the handwringing overlooks that the likely response is probably more of the same – tedious, torturesome negotiations, with a huge amount of skepticism that the North Koreans are probably negotiating in bad faith and cheating, and a general goal of slowing down as much as possible the nuclear and ballistic march and more broadly containing NK bad behavior as much as possible.

This uninspiring ‘muddling through’ is probably about the best course anyway. If this feels incoherent, then so be it, because the NK problem is too messy and unpredictable for some big aggressive framework. If we must give it a title so that it can be called a ‘strategy,’ how about, “chronic threat management through skeptical negotiation”?

In other words, its pretty clear that NK probably won’t meaningfully de-nuclearize or de-missile-ize (as S Africa or the Ukraine did). As Brian Meyers has noted, the confrontation with the US has become central to NK existential justification. Without that standoff, NK just becomes a poor man’s SK, likely to last about as long as the GDR after the Wall fell. Any ‘big deal’ is likely to die in artificial NK objections over this or that detail, etc., etc. Even if they agreed to some big deal, they’d probably cheat anyway. Simply ignoring them is not an option, because S Korea and Japan simply can’t.  Similarly, confrontation risks 20 million people in Seoul (SK’s proximate city-hostage gift to NK that makes a hard stance almost impossible).

15 years after the Agreed Framework, it is pretty obvious that obfuscating, stalling for time, flim-flamming the 6 party talks, asking for favors with faux-goodwill, etc. is not just a negotiating strategy for the North, it is its foreign policy goal. The process, and keeping the process going indefinitely, is the whole point. It keeps NK relevant in the world, coughs up gifts from time to time, justifies domestic misery to its people. As JL Gaddis said about the SU, we are probably just going to have to hang tough on this one until NK finally implodes on its own.

The big factors in NK foreign policy – NK elite and Chinese opinion – are simply out of our (SK, Japan, US) hands. So the best attitude is the same we have always pursued – cautious long-term crisis management, sticking close to the allies, trying to get deals if possible, shooting for small betterments like family reunifications, trying to stop the worst, most threatening security externalities (like dealing with AQ Khan or Syria) unilaterally if necessary. Its sloppy and headache-inducing, but the alternatives are worse.

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

Posted on by
1

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

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

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

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

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

Careful with that ‘Decline of the West’ Riff – We’ve Heard It Before

Posted on by
5

The conventional wisdom on the financial crisis is that it symbolizes or accelerates a transfer of power from West to East, from the US and EU to China and India. I think this is wildly overrated.

1. We have heard this before – and not just in the 20th century, but the West has proven extremely (frustratingly, if you’re from somewhere else) tenacious in leading the world pack since its breakout in the 16th century. Here are a just a few examples. Long before bin Laden, Islam was supposed to replace errant western Christianity, but failed at Vienna in 1683. Politically, Islam has never properly recovered. In the 19th C, the Chinese thought the western marauders a troublesome nuisance who would eventually recognize the superiority of the Middle Kingdom. It took 50 years of humiliation for that fantasy to finally fade. At the same time, pan-Orthodox/pan-Slavic Russians like Dostoyevsky and Alexander II thought the West would sink under its own corruption and decadence; instead that happened to the Romanovs. 1917 ignited the communist revolutionary wave (‘we will bury you’) that was supposed end capitalism and imperialism. After 75 years of unparalleled effort and bloodletting, it failed practically and morally. 1929 too supposedly revealed the inanity and shallowness of gilded age capitalism which macho fascist vitalism would sweep away. Despite exhaustion and disillusionment from WWI, western democratic capitalism hung on again, emerging stronger than ever, arguably, in 1945. By the 1960s, the new non-western future was supposedly in decolonization. The huge populations of the third world would modernize and turn the global system upside down. Instead they fell into Huntington’s decay and begged for debt relief. In the 1970s, the US failure in Vietnam and stagflation supposedly made the world multipolar, helped the Soviets to parity, and sparked a New International Economic Order. Reagan ended that sham. In the 1980s, came the declinism of Paul Kennedy and Walter LaFeber, this time based on massive US trade and budget deficits. The wholly unanticipated Clinton-dotcom boom put that fiction to rest too. And 9/11 of course was to spark an umma-wide uprising to humiliate the US as jihad had humbled the USSR in Afghanistan. Inside it pulled the US even more deeply into the Middle East.

2. China and India have huge hurdles before they even approach US/western power. They have massive internal structural problems – corruption, stifling bureaucracy, poor courts, bad information (propaganda and lack of disclosure), mediocre education systems for generating human capital, irregular treatment of foreigners and FDI. Development-at-all-costs too has resulted in enormous environmental liabilities that are now affecting lifespans. Do superpowers really have to spray-paint their grass green before an Olympics? They also lack the cultural software of entrepeneurialism and individualism that encourage the ‘animal spirits’ to take chances (worse in Confucian China than more liberal India). And finally, China is not democratic yet, which means a wrenching and usually expensive transition still has to come (think SK in the 80s, plus Indonesia in the late 90s, plus the end of the USSR all rolled into one). This will include restive provinces that will inevitably try to take advantage of the transition to push for autonomy. India of course is already, thankfully, liberal democratic, but it has found embracing wealth-generating capitalism extraordinarily difficult. There is no national consensus for it; all those tech companies that fixed Y2K have to keep redundant energy generators on-site in case there is a power failure. Finally both are still extraordinarily poor by OECD standards (to which neither belong). Between them both they account for half the world’s poorest people (most of the rest are in Africa). Don’t let Thomas Friedman’s stories about a zillion IT engineers in Bangalore or individual Chinese cities just focused on the production of cardigans or baseballs mask the reality that India and China together have something like 800 million people living in subsistence agriculture. Both economies are wildly unbalanced with relatively weak currencies, semi-dysfunctional politics, terrible corruption, and huge unresolved social resentment and poverty. That is not the future, at least not yet.

3. I think the best analysis of the geopolitical fallout of the crisis is here. Walter Russell Mead argues that actually the crisis will encourage states only tepidly committed to capitalism to once again turn toward statist, populist alternatives (think Chavez). Predatory elites will use the crisis as cover to resist liberalization. This will only continue the economic stagnation and political confusion of the Middle East, Russia/central Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The question is whether the Asian rimland states will go this way too. (I don’t think they will.)

So geopolitically, it is better to think of the crisis as a deck-clearing exercise, a shake-out of weak players and also-rans that will reinforce the leaders rather than damage them relatively. The leaders will slide, but the weakest will slide even more. As an analogy, think of how the dotcom bust killed off lots of wannabes on the internet. Only the strong survived that bloodbath. And my guess is that will be the real effect here. The crisis will reinforce the value of those very qualities that have catapulted the West to the top – market pricing, clean courts and banks, transparency, a free press (to spotlight failure), democracy (to insure the peaceful aggregation of conflicting interests and citizen grievance), etc, etc.

The Tragicomedy of US Soft Power: Exporting Banality to Korea (1)

Posted on by
2

The term soft power seems to have a acquired a good amount of play in the last few years. Nye of course is the major exponent, but the EU openly uses the term and the Obama people seem to have picked up it too. (The IR scholar in me, of course, is green with envy over the extra-academic success of Nye’s work; that is how you get the real dollars, cool gigs, and policy relevance in this field. And Nye is a great scholar to boot. Very nice.)

Basically, the soft power argument is: hard power coercion is expensive. Militaries costs money, violence destroys lives and economies. Isn’t it much better if we re-make others ideologically to want what we want? This is actually a social constructivist, 3rd face of power argument. If we can reshape their preferences, then our interests will align, not collide. So the US should broadcast its exciting, fun, liberal-democratic, modernist, universalist cultural tropes to the world. Others will see the attractions, and a secret lifestyle yearning will arise. Frictions with the allies will decline as they ‘Americanize.’ And if those living in repressive authoritarian or traditional societies can pick up this stuff up too (and it is awfully hard to be isolated in the globalized world), then there will be a slow grassroots revolution of rising expectations that pressure the state’s elites to soften toward the US. My own sense is this theoretic logic is basically correct.

Consequences from this argument include:

1. Liberals like soft power, because it suggests it might be substitute for hard power (especially attractive if you don’t want to pay for a military). Hence one can be a ‘civilian superpower’ (EU, Japan). NK, the Georgian war, 9/11, etc. have disproved this idea, but the EU doesn’t seem to have gotten the message.

2. Diplomats and academics like soft power. a) It means that diplomacy isn’t just gabbing, but can serve a national security purpose (trying to open closed states so that western/American culture can get in), and it keep things like Voice of America and al-Arabiya alive. b) Maybe our academic work means something! Someone on the other side might read it and be influenced by it, and then maybe bring those new preferences to the state. This is the idea that Gorby’s reformers read US IR, realized that we weren’t so bad and didn’t want to invade the SU, and therefore winding down the Cold War would not destroy the USSR.

3. American Conservatives like it because it lionizes the US way-of-life as the envy of everyone else and confirms that immovable and deeply-held US belief that everyone else really, secretly, in their heart-of-hearts wishes they were like us. (They they just won’t admit it to our faces – those damn French.)  Specifically, it reinforces post-Cold War liberal-democratic triumphalism. There’s a ‘we-won-the-Cold-War-and-that’s-a-helluva-good-thing’ feel to it that American exceptionalists and nationalists (basically, most of the country) just love. It’s pretty cool when an esteemed liberal academic tells you that we really are the last best hope for mankind living in a city on the hill in the greatest country on earth at the end of history.

4. There is a nice inevitability to soft power’s triumph over tyranny. As T Friedman would say, closed systems fall behind rapidly, because technology improves and diffusion ensures wide adoption. This puts authoritarian systems in a terrible dilemma. Opening up risks exposure to soft power forces like the influx of West German or SK TV shows. But perpetual closure means decay and irrelevance. Cuba and NK opted for decay. The USSR tried opening, but so late, that it blew up. The PRC too is trying opening, but no ones knows if it can avoid a Velvet Revolution-style popular revolt. And there does seem to be growing empirical evidence that soft power can work in long ideologcal stalemates. Liberals have generally argued that the CW ended not because Reagan spent the SU into the round, but because the Helsinki accords opened a chink in the Iron Curtain, through which flowed lots of liberalism. Or think about the painful opening of NK civil society and growing paranoia of the DPRK because of the flood of SK VHS from China after the introduction of DVDs in SK in the 1990s. Consider also the slow burn of the youth movement in Iran, desperate to connect to modernity.

5, But no one seems to pay much attention to a) the internal colonialist dimension of soft power, or b) the possibility of blowback from those who resist. 

a. I agree that it is cheaper for us to get our way if ‘they’ are like ‘us.’ (I think Nye is correct.) But isn’t it culturally imperialist to make them like us and to baldly say that this is a US foreign policy goal? Should they be like us? Do they want to be? Shouldn’t we care about that? It is astonishing hubris and arrogance to say we should try ‘remake’ others to be like us. That’s Americanism on steroids. And just how much Americanism do we want them to share? How far down should this Americanization go? Is it enough that they are liberal, democratic and capitalist, or do they have to share other US values like individualism, wide social tolerance of minorities, protestantized religiosity, consumerism, sports, food, Pimp My Ride, etc, etc? Just how totalist is this project? Whenever I hear liberals praise soft power, I always think of 1) the song “America, F— Yeah!” from Team America: World Police, and 2) that colonel in Full Metal Jacket who says, ‘we are fighting this war, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out.’ How different is the logic?

b. Also, what if they really actually don’t want to be like us (contrary to point 3 above)? Won’t there be blowback? I am thinking here of the Arab-Muslim Middle East and the Islamic revival ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to al Qaeda. Remember that Sayyad Qutb went to the US and came home convinced that the Middle East should absolutely NOT become like the US. The intellectual descent from Qutb to bin Laden is very clear. If the Iranians set up the ‘Voice of Shiite Islam’ in Toronto and beamed it into the US with declared intent of converting Americans in order to improve US-Iranian relations, we would flip out. Foreingers will be a lot more recpetive to American cultural inputs if those inputs seem casually available and selected by the conusmer. If transmission of our lifestyle looks like a brainwashing plot to reduce friction to US power in the world, they will be far more resistant. And shouldn’t they be?

Next, I want to look at the South Korean case as a study of US soft power.

That ‘Significant’ EU-Korea Relationship – Yawn…

Posted on by
4

Last week I attended the opening of a study center on the European Union at my university. The EU apparently opens these things all over the world at universities. The irony is just how weak the relationship between Korea and the EU actually is.

Consider:

1. The EU ambassador to Korea doesn’t speak Korean. (By contrast the US consul in Busan can.) He spoke in English to a room with less than 10 westerners, and 100+ Koreans. Nor did he bow before speaking, nor even say ‘hello’ or ‘thank you’ in Korean (even I have learned that stuff). Come on already.

2. He told us about the ‘significance’ of the EU-Korea relationship, but two days later the EU-Korea FTA collapsed. I quietly laughed at that one…

3. These sorts of speeches usually reel off a list of statistics about how much such-and-such western state trades with Korea and vice versa. I am guilty too, but at least when Americans talk, we can expand on combined defense, shared values, a long-standing alliance. (I try to.) The EU ambassador, to his credit, didn’t even bother, because the EU just isn’t even trying out here anymore. After a few perfunctory words about the EU’s ‘commitment’ to peace on the Korean peninsula, it was all just economics and trade (how ‘bout those Samsung TVs?). If the significant relationship is just utilitarian, then the relationship with SK is not much different than that with Iran with whom European firms trade also.

4. The ambassador couldn’t even cough up a few words of solidarity over the imminent NK missile launch. That was a pretty glaring and sad omission.

All this made me think about my previous post about EU’s slow self-neutering of its hard power capability and its growing propensity to navel gaze. A few European states fought in the UN coalition of the war, but today it is all an American show. Does anyone really expect the Europeans do do anything to help SK if things get really hairy with the North, or worse, with China? The South Koreans surely don’t.

All this is a pretty disappointing commentary on the EU, its posturing about soft power, and its language of human rights and multilateralism against cowboy aggressiveness. Liberated from the Soviet threat, the EU can’t seem to find a few good words about another democracy threatened by the last bastion of stalinism. Liberalism in Korea is a philosophical transplant of European values. This is high praise for Europe’s heritage, as Confucian societies have struggled a good deal with the pluralism liberalism implies. How about a little Enlightenment solidarity with one of its strongest outposts in Asia?  

Where are those European Troops for Afghanistan already?

Posted on by
3

For years under W, I understood the European desire to avoid American military adventures. We were openly contemptuous (‘Old Europe’) and simply ignored them (Iraq) when it was useful. I remember reading a paper by William Wohlforth once, where he noted how revolutionary it was that the Bush administration simply ignored the allies because the transaction costs of corralling them to do anything were higher than the benefits to be gained! And living here in SK, it is easy to see the benefits of those good alliances Obama and Biden want to restore. The ROKA is first class military, and if it weren’t for NK sitting right on top of it, I have the feeling it would be a more reliable allied military force than some of the European allied militaries.

So what is it with the European militaries and deployments anyway?

1. Sarkozy was supposed to bring France back to the game with the military reintegration. He certainly talks big, so where’s the beef? Sure, its nice that France is back in the military integration, but if they won’t go in the field, then what’s the point? It has one of the few power-projectable militaries in the alliance. And reintegration should not let NATO become ideological cover for French illusions of a semi-militarized loose Francophonie alliance [gang?] in Western Africa.

2. If reintegration is supposed to be the big story from the 60th anniversary this week, then the Europeans really are insular. None of the members in North America, Eastern Europe, or Turkey really gives a hoot about that. Nor do they much care for the greying symbolism of Franco-German enmity overcome. That’s nice, but at this point, continuing to celebrate it so really represents Western European navel-gazing and self-importance.  If I were the new eastern members, I’d be pretty miffed at having to constantly genuflect at this relic, when the real action was on my doorstep. DeGaulle and Adenauer are almost 50 years past, the Wall has been gone 20 years now, and both Germany and France have aging, welfare-state-coddled populations hardly willing to engage in peacekeeping in the Balkans, much less attack each other. France and Germany are an old story now, one that is well-known and not that interesting anymore. Let’s get to what really matters – out-of-area operations, the Balkans, Russia, Afghanistan, the ME. Kagan really nails it when he notes how few NATO states actually meet their required defense spending minimums, and how parochial their publics are about hard power capabilities. I cringe at his assessment that Europeans are from ‘Venus,’ but Obama has removed the W excuse. If they don’t seriously burden-share sometime soon, the US can hardly be blamed for going around them.

3. At what point is the alliance just a sham if they can’t provide for a force that is even authorized under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty? That is crucial here. Iraq was our show, but after 9/11, NATO voted that an attack on a member had occurred. The Europeans are treaty-obligated to at least try to do something in Afghanistan.