Theory Talks #52: Iver Neumann

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When foreign policy pundits analyze Santa Claus

Santa is the most damning piece of evidence yet that we live in a G-Zero world.  This stateless actor commands a vast intelligence apparatus, an apparent slave army of little people, and is not above working animals long past their breaking point.  By any stretch of the imagination, he’s a rogue actor.  And yet, despite these flagrant violations of international norms, there isn’t even a nascent effort to combat, contain or regulate his activities.  The G-20 continues to dither, revealing itself yet again as toothless and pointless.  This would never have happened back when the U.S. was the hegemon!!

Niall Ferguson:

On this day of Christ’s birth, I will tell you something that the New York Times, which is so in the bag for this administration that one of their columnists kept predicting an Obama victory despite overwhelming mispeception to the contrary, will not:  Santa Claus is a force for good in the world.  Developing countries will cling to their indigenous Christmas heroes, foolishly hoping that these local legends can guide their country towards peace and prosperity.  Wake up, rest of the world!!  Yes, Santa can seem a bit domineering with his black-and-white dichotomy of naughty and nice.  Let’s face it, however — those countries that have embraced St. Nick are better off.  If anything, Santa’s problem is that he’s not being mean enough to the naughtys of the world.  Only when he is prepared to deploy the elves to places like Syria and the Congo will Santa be able to honestly wish all a good night.  I hope ole Saint Nick acts in this expansionist manner — but I worry that the Obama administration, to distract from the fiscal cliff, will declare some kind of “war” on Christmas.  Food for thought….

Donald Rumsfeld:

Beltway pundits, serenely sipping their eggnog at those Georgetown Christmas cocktail parties, will offer soothing patter about the merits of a white Christmas and the inherent goodness of Santa Claus.  And other powerful interest groups, like retailers and the Catholic Church, will argue in favor of celebrating the birth of Christ on December 25th.  Some clever liberal pundits will go so far as to point out that it was an American corporation created the modern-day Santa.  Don’t let these lobbies fool you — celebrating Christmas on December 25th and welcoming Santa Claus onto our soil is a breach of American sovereignty that can no longer be tolerated.  Why should Americans celebrate this most American of holidays the same time as everyone else in the world?  Is it American for our government offices to be closed on this day because of some unelected bureaucrat based in that oldest of old Europe cities, Rome??!!  Is it American to have some foreign actor — a.k.a. Kris Kringle — make decisions about whether our children have been good or bad?!   Americans don’t need some foreign list to determine who’s naught and nice.  I believe that there’s a document that already takes care of everything we need, and it’s called the United States Constitution.  Our elected oficials must take action to protect the Constitution of the United States from these global efforts to affect our daily lives.  We’re an exceptional country with exceptional children — we don’t need Santa to tell us what they deserve.

Jennifer Rubin:

It is on Christmas more than any other day that we can appreciate how wrong Chuck Hagel would be for the Secretary of Defense position.  The former Senator from Nebraska seems all too willing to compromise in the War on Christmas, suggesting that perhaps “some” public spaces should be free of mangers.  This is fully consistent with Hagel’s past waffling on various threats to the American way of life, as evidenced by [MINIONS-- PLEASE INSERT LAZY, INACCURATE HYPERLINK HERE--JR].  I’ve heard exclusively from a top GOP source whose last name rhymes with “Fristol” that Senate Republicans have a master file of statements Hagel made at a Senate Christmas party years ago where he raged against the “rank commercialism” of the holiday.  It’s this type of anti-free enterprise statements that clearly demonstrate that Hagel is out of the American mainstream in his views on Christmas — and America’s place in the world.

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

There are many things to admire about Christmas — and yet I’m left wondering why, on this most nurturing, this most feminine of holidays, it’s a fat, aging, affluent white man who traipses around the world offering gifts to children.  It could be that Mrs. Claus simply doesn’t want to leave the North Pole — or it could be that she’s trapped there by the hidebound traditions of this holiday.  Clearly, the current model of delivering everyone‘s presents on one night makes it impossible for women to have it all.  Perhaps we should rework how Christmas operates to make it a more family-friendly model for the Clauses.  Instead of everyone getting their presents on one night, it should be staggered throughout the year.  This would allow both Santa and Mrs. Claus to participate in the making of the list, the checking it twice, and the bestowing of presents to the world’s children.  Let’s face it — the more that women take an active part in the management of this holiday, the better for everyone involved.

Merry Christmas, foreign policy wonks!!

Is the scholar-policy gap really so big?

Something is seriously wrong in the relationship between universities and the policy community in the field of international relations. The worlds of policy making and academic research should be in constant, productive conversation, and scholars and researchers should be an invaluable resource for policy makers, but they are not.
One hears perennial laments from those in academe that their valuable work is being ignored by policy makers. And, on the other hand, policy makers complain they can get nothing useful from the academy. They may all be right.

Now your humble blogger has explored this topic again and again and again and again and again.  I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that while a gap still exists between these two worlds, the bigger gap is between the perception of people like Gallucci and actual reality.  Also, to be blunt about it, I also suspect that no one will actually say this to Gallucci’s face, because, well, he’s got the money.  Why argue against a gravy train?
Consider the following:
1)  There is pretty clear evidence that academics are becoming more copacetic with the media through which policy advice can be communicated.  It’s also worth noting that two of Time’s top 25 blogs this year are run by political scientists *COUGH* self-promotion *COUGH*.
2)  We are beginning to see routinized channels through which academics are learning how to affect the policy world.
3)  On the policy side of the equation, Joshua Foust notes that the Ph.D. is both highly valued and increasingly de rigeur inside the Beltway.  Whether that’s a good thing or not is a topic for a later post, but Foust’s observation cuts against Gallucci’s assertions.
So I think Gallucci’s claim is exaggerated.  But what’s interesting is why he believes that the theory/policy gap has gotten worse:

There has been a theoretical turn across the social sciences and humanities that has cut off academic discourse from the way ordinary people and working professionals speak and think. The validity and elegance of the models have become the focus, rather than whether those models can be used to understand real-world situations. Conferences and symposia are devoted to differences in theoretical constructs; topics are chosen for research based not on their importance but on their accessibility to a particular methodology. Articles and books are published to be read, if at all, only by colleagues who have the same high regard for methodology and theory and the same disregard for practice.

Look, I’m not going to deny that there’s a lot of abstruse research in the academy filled with lots of seemingly impenetrable jargon.  That said, I would humbly suggest that the pattern of recent published work does not match Gallucci’s observation.  I would also note that it is way too simplistic to divide political science research into “policy relevant” and “not policy relevant.”
There is still a gap between scholars and policymakers.  But Gallucci’s essay suggests a bad situaion that’s getting worse, whereas I see a mediocre situation that’s trending in a positive situaton.
Still, let me also confess that I might be a victim of sample bias here.  Over time I’ve found greater and not fewer pathways that connect scholarly international relations research and real-world policymaking.  That might be because I’ve got a bit more girth gravitas than I did a decade ago.
So I’ll ask this question to the crowd:  do Gallucci’s assertions ring true?  What do you think?

Deploying political science to the Middle East

STEP 1:  Take actions that radicalize the Palestinian population — particularly in the West Bank;
STEP 2:  Have Fatah look less and less like a credible negotiating partner, have the world acknowledge that Hamas now represents the median Palestinian preference on peace talks;
STEP 3:  Have Likus win Israeli election without changing its policy position, which suddenly doesn’t look so bad to Israeli voters.

Actually, I’d posit that there’s an element of this in the Israeli’s right’s strategy of the past decade, but it seems to be particularly blatant this time around.
2)  Has Hamas been reading Stephen Walt?  And if so, which Stephen Walt?  No, I don’t mean that Stephen Walt.  I mean the author of The Origins of Alliances and Revolution and War.  I bring this up cause those books would offer contrasting takes on what Hamas would expect the rest of the Middle East to do.  It seems pretty clear from the press reportage that Hamas believed that This Time Was Different:  the Arab Spring had eliminated authoritarian despots who had used the Palestinian issue as a useful vent for domestic unrest.  Newly democratic regimes would — according to Walt’s Revolution and War — be more likely to identify with Hamas’ cause, thereby taking more aggressive action to undermine and isolate Israel.  And, indeed, at the rhetorical and symbolic level, this has happened.  Libya is sending a “solidarity delegation” to Gaza, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has labeled Israel a “terrorist state,” and Egypt’s Morsi governmment has been pretty plain in blaming Israel for the latest hostilities.
The thing is, my bet would be on Walt’s Origins of Alliances playing the larger role here.  What’s interesting about Arab government’s reactions to this Operation Pillar of Defense is that they seem…. an awful lot like how Mubarak et al would have reacted.  It would seem that once Islamic movements are charged with running a government, they suddenly start to care about things other than the occupied territories (this appears to be Dennis Ross’ take as well, by the way).  For example, I’d argue that these negotiations matter far more to the Morsi government than brokering a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.
3)  Does the Israeli right really want to make U.S. Middle East policy a partisan football?  CNN polled Americans on the conflict in Gaza, and just like every other poll on this question, Americans backed Israel pretty strongly.  57% of American sympathize with the Israelis; only 13% side with the Palestinians.  But as The Weekly Standard‘s Daniel Halper notes, there’s a catch:

CNN’s poll director, Keating Holland, finds that there is a great discrepancy in which Americans think the action is justified, however. Of particular note is that only about 40 percent of Democrats believe the self-defense measures are “justified.”
“Although most Americans think the Israeli actions are justified, there are key segments of the public who don’t necessarily feel that way,” Holland tells CNN. “Only four in ten Democrats think the Israeli actions in Gaza are justified, compared to 74% of Republicans and 59% of independents. Support for Israel’s military action is 13 points higher among men than among women, and 15 points higher among older Americans than among younger Americans.”

Now, you can speculate all you want about the source of this partisan divergence —  *COUGH* Netanyahu gambled on Obama being a one-termer and lost *COUGH* — but friends of Israel should be disturbed by this growing split.  If Israel becomes a partisan issue, it’s not really going to help Republicans all that much, because all it will do is mobilize the evangelical vote — which they’ve already pocketed.  And eventually, Israel will have to face a Democratic president with a base that no longer cares about Israel’s security.  That’s not going to be a good day for Israel.
[Yeah, we still liked the Onion story better--ed.  Yeah, me too.]

The irony of global economic governance: the system worked

The 2008 financial crisis posed the biggest challenge to the global economy since the Great Depression and provided a severe “stress test” for global economic governance. A review of economic outcomes, policy outputs, and institutional resilience reveals that these regimes performed well during the acute phase of the crisis, ensuring the continuation of an open global economy. Even though some policy outcomes have been less than optimal, international institutions and frameworks performed contrary to expectations. Simply put, the system worked

Now you’ll have to read the whole thing to see if I’m blinkered or not.  There’s a decent chance that I am, mind you, but I’m pretty comfortable with the empirics of my case.  What I’m uncomfortable with is the reasons why things have played out the way that they have.  More on that as I work it out in my own head.
Now I’ve been just as skeptical as the next guy when it comes to some dimensions of global economic governance.  Still, this is one of those times when stepping away from the day-to-day of the blog and looking at the overall situation provides some valuable perspective.
Still, feel free to point out where I’m wrong.  Cause I suspect that this paper is going to drive some Very Serious People in the foreign policy community absolutely bonkers.

Dear realists: please explain Russia

A respected Moscow-based military think tank has published a report that is likely to fuel more questions about the wisdom of Russia’s uncompromising support for the Syrian regime. It concludes that Russia really has few – if any – fundamental national interests to defend in Syria….
Russian support for Syria appears to be more emotional than rational, according to the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a consultancy with strong links to Russia’s defence community. It characterised the Kremlin’s Syria policy as a consensus of elites who “have rallied around the demand ‘not to allow the loss of Syria’ ”, which would cause “the final disappearance of the last ghostly traces of Soviet might” in the Middle East.
“The Syrian situation focuses all the fundamental foreign policy fears, phobias and complexes of Russian politicians and the Russian elite” said CAST.
Russia’s actual stake in Syria is not massive, according to CAST. It described Russia’s arms exports to Damascus as a “significant, but far from key” 5 per cent of total arms exports last year, and characterised Tartus, Moscow’s last foreign military base outside the former USSR, as little more than a pier and a floating repair shop on loan from the Black Sea fleet.

Now, it sounds an awful lot like CAST is arguing that Russian foreign policy leaders are wildly inflating their interests and acting in a — dare I say it — neoconservative fashion towards Syria.
I’d be very curious to hear from realists if they concur with this assessment.  If it turns out that Russia is not acting in its national interests, it would be a body blow to both realism as policymaking advice and as an objective paradigm to explain world politics.  Realists would no longer be able to say that the United States was the only great power not acting in its national interest.  More significantly, if lots of great powers act to advance their emotional, historical, or ideollogical interests, then the world doesn’t look very realpolitik at all.

Gee, it’s almost like political scientists are relevant or something

How Game of Thrones found its political groove

I enjoyed the first season of Game of Thrones but was somewhat underwhelmed with efforts to use it as a window to understanding world politics today. The second season, which concluded this past Sunday, however, did much better on this score. I think this is because in season one the primary narrative dealt with one ruler of Westeros coping with stupendously naive staff contending factions, whereas this season dealt with a more variegated set of leaders, which worked far better for the show. Two signs of this: First, whereas the Daenerys Targaryen plot in the first season was fun and diverting, I found season two’s Dany sections distracting and deadening. Part of this might have been because Dany was whining more, but it was also because she was largely operating in a political vacuum and therefore less interesting. Second, whereas Cersei Lannister seemed like a master Machiavellian in season one, in season two she appeared to be just a little out of her depth. It’s not because she got dumber, but because the protagonists who interacted with her were wiser or more powerful than Ned Stark.
Season two’s War of the Five Kings allowed for greater contrast between different styles of political leadership and political culture — and was therefore all the richer for it. Leadership ranged from Stannis Baratheon’s humorless determination to Tywin Lannister’s stolid competence to Joffrey’s sadism to Robb Stark’s efforts to preserve humanitarian norms to Balon Greyjoy’s sheer bloody-mindedness. The staffers were great too. I’m sorry that Tyrion Lannister and Davos Seaworth never got to share a scene together — that would have been a hoot. Similarly, the interactions between Tyrion and Varys — especially this one — were delicious.
Indeed, the final episode alone is so rich in its contemplation of political leadership alone that it made up for the less comprehensible parts of the plot (why the hell did Bran, Hodor, and company need to abandon Winterfell?) Tyrion’s explanation for why he wanted to stay in King’s Landing was one of those rare moments in television in which a character was honest about his enjoyment of politics. As Alyssa Rosenberg shrewdly observes, the Throne Room scene in which much political kabuki theater transpired was a powerful reminder of how the victors write the history. And the Varys-Ros alliance bodes well for political machinations in season three.
For all of this — and zombies too! — the finale was great. What put it over the top, however, might be the best rejoinder to the Great Speech Theory of Politics that I have ever seen — Theon Greyjoy’s efforts to rally his troops in the face of overwhelming odds during the siege of Winterfell:

Anyone who calls for better political “leadership” should watch this again and again and again. Yes, leadership matters on the margins — but power and purpose matter one whole hell of a lot more.
The end of the episode promises an even wider array of political actors — Mance Rayder, the White Walkers, a returning Dany — influencing activities in Westeros. This bodes very, very well for season three.
What do you think?

Is it unreasonable to expect simple logic?

NATO has kept the peace in Europe for more than six decades. But today, the alliance is at a crossroads. It is time to speak candidly about the challenges facing the United States and our allies and how to rise to them.
In a post-Cold War world, territorial defense of Europe is no longer NATO’s one overriding mission. Instead, the alliance has evolved to uphold security interests in distant theaters, as in Afghanistan and Libya. Yet through all the changes to the global landscape, two things have remained constant about the alliance. For it to succeed, it requires strong American leadership. And it also requires that member states carry their own weight….
At this moment of both opportunities and perils — an Iranian regime with nuclear ambitions, an unpredictable North Korea, a revanchist Russia, a China spending furiously on its own military, to name but a few of the major challenges looming before us — the NATO alliance must retain the capacity to act.
As president, I will work closely with our partners to bolster the alliance. In that effort, words are not enough.
I will reverse Obama-era military cuts. I will not allow runaway entitlement spending to swallow the defense budget as has happened in Europe and as President Obama is now allowing here.

I really like his first paragraph… and then we run into a whole mess of problems.  In ascending order of importance:
1)  What the f**k does NATO have to do with either North Korea or China?  Seriously, I get that NATO has expanded to out-of-theater operations, but does anyone seriously think that German forces are going to be deployed along the Pacific Rim?  I didn’t think so.
2)  In what way is Russia “revanchist”?  Oh, sure, the Russians are chatty, but does anyone seriously believe that, right now, Moscow poses any kind of security threat to the rest of Europe?  One semi-competent victory over a former Soviet repiblic does not constitute revanchism, and swelling domestic discontent and the Mother of All Demographic Crunches suggests that Vladimir Putin will be way to preoccupied with the problems within his own borders to be much of a problem in Europe.
3)  There’s an oldie but a goodie of an article on NATO by Mancur Olson and Richard Zeckhauser entitled “An Economic Theory of Alliances.” Romney’s advisors should take a gander.  The basic point is that in an alliance containing a single superpower, the rest of the alliance members will tend to free-ride off of the hegemonic actor.  In essence, Romney’s op-ed doubles down on that free-rider logic.  If Romney commits to boosting U.S. defense spending, exactly what incentive does this give our NATO allies to boost theirs?
4)  So Romney wants to “speak candidly about the challenges facing the United States and our allies and how to rise to them”?  OK…  and apparently the way for NATO to face these challenges is to “work closely with our partners to bolster the alliance.”  That, and reverse Obama’s defense cuts.
To which I have to say:  that’s it?!  Really?!  If this is Romney speaking candidly, then this SNL skit is more true-to-life than I realized.
Am I missing anything?  Seriously, am I?  I don’t like it when a guy with a 50/50 chance of being president in January 2013 has abandoned the Logic Train.

If the Exodus took place today…

U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL MEETING ON JEWISH EXODUS ENDS IN CHAOS:  Permanent Five split on who to sanction for loss of life

Colum Lynch, Foreign Policy

NEW YORK:  Attempts by the U.N. Security Council to reach consensus on an approach to the situation in Egypt came to naught earlier today, as different members of the Security Council blamed different actors in the region for the growing human rights and humanitarian disaster.
U.S. Ambassdor to the United Natuons Susan Rice, addressing the Council, blasted China and Russia for their “addiction to obduracy.”  She concluded, “Over the past decade we have continually raised the repeated human rights abuses and acts of genocide committed by the Phaaroh’s regime against the Jewish population in Egypt.  Each time, China and Russia have vetoed even the mildest of condemnations, arguing that it was a matter of Egyptian sovereignty.  Only now, with the desperate escape of that minority from the Phaaroh’s clutches, do the governments of Russia and China take such an acute interest in the welfare of the Egyptian people. ”
The United States, France, and United Kingdom have indeed introduced thirteen separate resolutions on human rights abuses in Egypt since the advent of the Phaaroh who knew not Joseph.
Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin delivered a blistering response, arguing that it was the radical Jewsish leaders who had escalated the situation by resorting to weapons of mass destruction and demanding that Moses be indicted by the International Criminal Court as a war criminal:  “It was not the Phaaroh who imposed unspeakable sanctions against the Egyptian people.  It was not the Phaaroh who slaughtered every first-born male child in Egypt — except the Jews — in a flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions.  Surely, not a house in Egypt was spared from this , this plague.  It was not the Phaaroh who resorted to trickery in the Red Sea, luring innocent Egyptian troops into the kill zone before massacring them.  Both sides are equally guilty in the bloodshed, and until both sides renounce violence, a peaceful solution will be nothing but a mirage of the desert.”
No agreement on any resolutions were reached.  British Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant flatly rejected many of the Russian assertions, arguing that only soldiers were afffected by the Red Sea disaster, and that it was not immediately obvious whether the Jews were actually responsible for the harsh sanctions that befell Egypt prior to the Jewish Exodus.
Doctors Without Borders upped the number of Egyptian dead into the five figures, but those figures could not be independently confirmed.  The Phaaroh’s government again rejected the entry of the U.N. Secretary-General’s fact-finding mission on the grounds that it represented an intrusion of sovereignty.  Russian and Chinese officials blamed this inflexible position on the civil society campaign to label the Egyptian Pyramids the “Slavery Pyramids.”
Humanitarian officials are not sure about the current status of the Jewish refugees.  According to unconfirmed reports from Egypt, the Jews left in such a hurry that they lacked basic provisions like bread or yeast, carrying only crude rations into the desert.  The disputed status of the Sinai makes drone overflights impossible in that area.  The “final status” of the Jews is also unclear, as the Assyrians, Moabites, and Philistines all declared the refugees to be persona non grata in their jurisdictions.
Outside the UN building, the NGO Inside Children annnounced that they planned to release a video entitled “LetMyPeopleGo2012,” demanding that the Phaaroh release all Egyptian Jews immediately.  The group rebuffed criticisms that this problem had been overtaken by events, saying that calling attention to the cruel despotism in Egypt was still “a worthwhile and noble cause.”

A just war on foreign policy neologisms

Should women get Ph.D.s in international relations?

I’m loving graduate school; it’s been on balance the best time of my life; and nevertheless there have been times when (to quote a colleague) I’ve wished I’d taken the blue pill and kept my job.

Or, as Steve Saideman phrases it:

[A] PhD in Political Science should only be for those who are passionate and curious and do not care where they end up living.  And that they need to be aware that the job market can be pretty challenging and stressful.

Checking my blog archives, I see that I’ve mused on this topic before — so, rather than repeat myself, here are some links.  If you’re wondering about the virtues of getting a Ph.D. vs. a policy degree like SAIS or Fletcher, click here and here.  If you’re really interested in politics and are debating between a Ph.D., a law degree, or going the apprentice route, click here.
But I want to blog about a question related to something buzzing about the foreign policy blogosphere:  what if you’re female?  Micah Zenko at CFR and Diana Wueger at Gunpowder & Lead have blogged about the underrepresentation of women in foreign policy positions in the government, think tanks or the academy.  Wueger asks readers to ”spend 10 minutes thinking about what you can do to help your female staff or friends or Twitterbuddies to advance in their careers.”
After ten minutes, I have some positive words and some cautionary, bordeline controversial pieces of advice.  Here goes.
My hunch is that, all else equal, the value-added of getting a Ph.D. might be greater for women than men.  Wueger blogs about a big problem:  the difficulty/trepidation that women have when seeking mentors, particularly if their field is dominated by men.  The advantage of getting a Ph.D. is that it pretty much forces the person to work hard at collecting mentors and advisors.  Furthermore, these relationships are forged through years of TAing, RAing, and pleading for dissertation advice.  So, even if women are shyer about seeking mentors/male advisors are warier about advising female students, these barriers can be broken down with time.
That’s the good news.  The bad news is two-fold.  First, Wueger argues that the assignments women get at the outset have a powerful effect on their later careers:

There’s a gap in the types of tasks women and men are assigned early in their careers. Intentionally or not, women tend to given more administrative or support work rather than policy or research work; path dependence takes over from there. I recall a prominent scholar regularly asking his female research assistant (RA) to pick up his dry cleaning and take his car to the shop—things he didn’t ask of male RAs.

OK, for the record, my male RAs were too forgetful to request as little starch as possible this is a problem, but I suspect it’s decreasing.  The more serious problem operates through a subtler channel – women might get shunted into research areas that are seen as more female-friendly.  For example, I believe that more women study international political economy or international organizations than international security.  Even within security studies, I suspect that there are more women studying “human security” than more standard guns & bombs kind of security.  This might be due to interest, but there are path-dependent effects at work, and so successive waves of women go into those fields in greater numbers.  So, that’s a thing.
The second problem is, I suspect, even greater and trickier to discuss, but here goes.  Unlike the apprentice or professional degree paths, the Ph.D. route to a foreign policy career has a few BIG decision-making nodes that have profound effects on a person’s career choice.  For the Ph.D., the first job after getting one’s doctorate matters a lot, particularly if said Ph.D. is pursuing the academic career track.  The first job can define whether you want to be thought of as a researcher first, a teacher first, a policy wonk first, and so forth.  Also, it usually requires moving — with the exception of Ph.D. granting institutions in-Boston-well-not-in-Boston-but-nearby-no-not-Tufts, universities do not hire their own.
The thing is, most people are between 27-32 years of age when they complete their Ph.D..  This also happens to be the peak demographic of the whole getting married/having children phase of life.  And, women tend to marry men a few years older than them.  The professional difference between 50 and 53 is negligible, but those few years can make a HUGE difference in one’s late twenties/early thirties.  It means that, on average and regardless of career choice, the man in the relationship is more firmly embedded down his career path.
For newly-minted women Ph.D.s, this can impose profound constraints on career choices.  Their best job offer might be inconvenient for their spouse’s career, and so they pass on it.  I saw this very dynamic play out multiple times with female colleagues when I was in graduate school.  There are a lot of good reasons to subordinate one’s first job choice to family considerations, but it has a negative impact on one’s long-term career trajectory.
[What about you?--ed.  As a man, the age effect was reversed.  My fiancee was younger and therefore at a more embryonic stage of her career, which meant she was more portable.  For the record, I accepted a post-doc that I otherwise wouldn't have taken for her career, but this was a minimal sacrifice.  It only delayed my first job by a year and I got a ton of writing done during those twelve  months.]
This problem is not unique to those earning doctorates.  Those with non-Ph.D. career tracks , however, have more career-decision nodes at later and earlier ages.  I suspect this problem is magnified for Ph.D.s in a way that it isn’t for those who pursue more apprentice-oriented or shorter-degree tracks.  But I’d be interested in hearing differing opinions on this in the comments below.
So, to sum up:  if you’re a woman and you’re trying to pursue a foreign policy career, there are some advantages by getting the Ph.D., but there are big pitfalls at the beginning and end of getting the doctorate.  I urge you to have a good sense of what you want to study before someone shapes that decision for you.  And have some good, long conversations with any potential spouse about what you want to do with your career.
Am I missing anything?  Seriously, am I?

Realism, Episode III: Return of the Realist Critics

Are There Neoconservative Wolves in the Realist Flock?

Dan Maliniak, Ryan Powers, and Michael Tierney

Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. —Matthew 7:15

Sebastian Rosato and John Schuessler recently argued that there is “a complete absence of bona fide realists inside the Beltway” and that if more policymakers employed realist thinking when making foreign policy, then we could expect the real “prospect of security without war.” They bemoan the criticism that realist theory receives within both the academy and, especially, in foreign policymaking circles. “This is unfortunate, as realists seem to turn up on the right side of history as often as not — the Vietnam and Iraq wars are prominent examples — and may do so again if the Obama administration stumbles into a foolish war with Iran (a war that prominent realists have opposed).”
Leaving aside the notion that we ought to strive for a foreign policy that is only successful “as often as not,” Rosato and Schuessler are correct that some prominent realists (e.g. Stephen Walt and Nuno Monteiro) oppose war with Iran. Several prominent realists also opposed the Vietnam War (e.g. Hans Morgenthau) and the war in Iraq (e.g. John Mearsheimer). But realists are not alone in their opposition. Many other non-randomly selected scholars representing other schools of thought also often oppose the use of force. For example, see liberals Joe Nye and Anne-Marie Slaughter or constructivists Marc Lynch and Colin Kahl who also oppose war with Iran.
Noting the policy preferences of a particular set of realists (or liberals/constructivists) does little to support the claim that having more realists inside the beltway would lead to fewer U.S. military interventions. An alternative way to assess the likely impact of inviting more realists into policymaking circles would be to survey all IR scholars and see whether self-identified realists are less likely, more likely, or no more or less likely on average than proponents of other IR paradigms to support the use of force abroad. As it happens, we’ve done that in a series of Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) surveys.
In 2004, we asked IR scholars in the U.S. a variety of questions about their support or opposition to the war in Iraq. Among dozens of other questions, we also asked scholars to report the primary IR paradigm that they employ in their research, their political ideology, and their substantive field of study. No matter how we asked the Iraq question (and we asked it four different ways), realists are no more likely than liberals or those who don’t adhere to a particular paradigm to support or oppose the war in Iraq once we control for political ideology. If we leave ideology out of the model, realists are actually more likely to have supported the war in Iraq. Constructivism is the only paradigm that is statistically significantly correlated with opposition to the Iraq war after controlling for ideology. Here we plot the predicted probability of favoring the Iraq war by paradigm after controlling for ideology (error bars represent 90 percent confidence intervals):

The 2004 Iraq results are consistent with results from the 2011 survey regarding the potential use of force in Iran. We asked scholars “Would you approve of disapprove of the use of U.S. military forces … if it were certain that Iran had produced a nuclear weapon.” Again, realists were no more or less likely than adherents of other paradigms to support or oppose the use of force against Iran after controlling for ideology and field of study. Again, if we leave ideology out of the model, realists are more likely to support striking Iran (We discussed the results of the 2011 survey in more detail in a recent guest post on the Monkey Cage).
Our 2006 results differ. We asked scholars “If Iran continues to produce materials that can be used to develop nuclear weapons, would you support or oppose the U.S. taking military action against Iran?” In this case, realists are more likely to support intervention, even after controlling for ideology and a number of other factors.
So, our results from 2004 and 2011 fail to support the claim made by Rosato and Schuessler and our results from 2006 are the opposite of what their argument suggests.
Proponents of a realist foreign policy may rightly point out that our discussion above is about individuals who self-identify as realists, not realist theory. Perhaps there are just a bunch of respondents in our sample calling themselves “realists” who don’t really understand the logic of their favored paradigm. And perhaps a more accurate reading of realist theory (as offered by Walt, Mearsheimer, Rosato and Schuessler) would lead to foreign policy prescriptions that are less bellicose and radically different from other IR paradigms. Perhaps. But it is individual realists — not some version of realist theory personified — who are appointed to policy posts in Washington to craft and implement policy, who write op-eds, blog posts, and journal articles to inform current policy makers, and who teach future policy makers at colleges and universities. And those realists (on average) were not less inclined to advocate the use of force in Iraq back in 2003 and they are not less inclined to advocate the use of force against Iran today.
In most of our tests above, it is only after controlling for political ideology that realists tend to fall in line with liberals and constructivists in opposing the use of force. The average ideology of self-identified realists in the sample helps to explain the gap between the realism that Rosato and Schusseler advocate and the “average” understanding of realism that is reflected in our surveys. As Brian Rathburn recently argued, there may be hawkish wolves within the realist flock — individuals who call themselves realists but who support policies that do not conform to the realism of Mearsheimer, Walt, Rosato, and Schuesster. As Rathbun explains, “The situation is…confused by the invocation of ‘realism’ as a guiding set of principles by both neoconservatives and conservatives.”
To put our cards on the table, we find the Rosato and Schuessler version of realism both sensible and consistent with our own descriptions of realism to our students. We also agree that the Iraq and Vietnam wars did little to advance the interests of the United States, and that a war with Iran would also be a bad idea. We show that many IR scholars also agree for reasons related to their scholarly commitments and/or personal views. Currently, many scholars who self-identify as realists are also conservative and it may be their ideology, rather than the logic of realism that shapes their policy preferences. If that is the case, and they are dressing up their ideologically driven positions in realist trappings, Rosato and Schuessler are right to continue their efforts to better communicate the logic and implications of realist theory. But perhaps they also ought to warn their readers, “Beware those who come to you in realist clothing, for they may inwardly be ravenous neocons.”

What do you think?

What the hell is going on between the United States and Israel on Iran? [UPDATED]

The assassination drew an unusually strong condemnation from the White House and the State Department, which disavowed any American complicity. The statements by the United States appeared to reflect serious concern about the growing number of lethal attacks, which some experts believe could backfire by undercutting future negotiations and prompting Iran to redouble what the West suspects is a quest for a nuclear capacity.
“The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this,” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared to expand the denial beyond Wednesday’s killing, “categorically” denying “any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.”
“We believe that there has to be an understanding between Iran, its neighbors and the international community that finds a way forward for it to end its provocative behavior, end its search for nuclear weapons and rejoin the international community,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Also this week, FP ran a story by Mark Perry describing Israel’s “false flag” operation to recruit Pakistani terrorists.  In the essay, Perry gets the following quotes from retired U.S. intelligence officials:

There’s no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we’re not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians….
We don’t do bang and boom… and we don’t do political assassinations.

Contrast this with the Israeli quotes in the NYT story:

The Israeli military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, writing on Facebook about the attack, said, “I don’t know who took revenge on the Iranian scientist, but I am definitely not shedding a tear,” Israeli news media reported….
A former senior Israeli security official, who would speak of the covert campaign only in general terms and on the condition of anonymity, said the uncertainty about who was responsible was useful. “It’s not enough to guess,” he said. “You can’t prove it, so you can’t retaliate. When it’s very, very clear who’s behind an attack, the world behaves differently.” (emphasis added)

I think the bolded section in the last paragraph suggests some intuition about what is happening.  If it’s true that ambiguity about who is responsible for covert action is useful, and the United States is categorically denying its role in the assassination part of the covert action, then the Obama administration is openly and clearly signaling to Israel to cut it out.
As to why the United States is doing this, I’d posit one or a combination of the following reasons:
1)  Washington might have moral or legal qualms with the assassination dimension of these covert actions;
2)  Such assasinations give the Iranian government cover to conduct its own assassinations campaign, which winnows the number of scientists the United States  can recruit for its own intelligence;
3)  The Obama administration thinks it can topple the regime, but these assassinations will be counterproductive;
4)  The Obama administration has been trying to get Iran back to the bargaining table, and this kind of covert action stops that from happening;
5)  The Obama administration is fragmented and therefore not entirely certain what it’s aims are in Iran, but the policy principals know that what Israel is doing ain’t helping.
I’m leaning towards (5) at this point, but I’d entertain other explanations in the comments below.
Developing… in some very bizarre ways.
UPDATE:  The Wall Street Journal has some further reporting that reveals a bit of the current uncertainty and the bureaucratic wrangling that appears to be going on.  Some key parts:

U.S. defense leaders are increasingly concerned that Israel is preparing to take military action against Iran, over U.S. objections, and have stepped up contingency planning to safeguard U.S. facilities in the region in case of a conflict.
President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other top officials have delivered a string of private messages to Israeli leaders warning about the dire consequences of a strike. The U.S. wants Israel to give more time for the effects of sanctions and other measures intended to force Iran to abandon its perceived efforts to build nuclear weapons.
Stepping up the pressure, Mr. Obama spoke by telephone on Thursday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and U.S. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will meet with Israeli military officials in Tel Aviv next week….
Mr. Panetta and other top officials have privately sought assurances from Israeli leaders in recent weeks that they won’t take military action against Iran. But the Israeli response has been noncommittal, U.S. officials said.
U.S. officials briefed on the military’s planning said concern has mounted over the past two years that Israel may strike Iran. But rising tensions with Iran and recent changes at Iranian nuclear sites have ratcheted up the level of U.S. alarm.
“Our concern is heightened,” a senior U.S. military official said of the probability of an Israeli strike over U.S. objections.
Tehran crossed at least one of Israel’s “red lines” earlier this month when it announced it had begun enriching uranium at the Fordow underground nuclear facility near the holy city of Qom.
The planned closing of Israel’s nuclear plant near Dimona this month, which was reported in Israeli media, sounded alarms in Washington, where officials feared it meant Israel was repositioning its own nuclear assets to safeguard them against a potential Iranian counterstrike.
Despite the close relationship between the U.S. and Israel, U.S. officials have consistently puzzled over Israeli intentions. “It’s hard to know what’s bluster and what’s not with the Israelis,” said a former U.S. official.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  Well, this is just peachy:

The IRNA state news agency said Saturday that Iran’s Foreign Ministry has sent a diplomatic letter to the U.S. saying that it has “evidence and reliable information” that the CIA provided “guidance, support and planning” to assassins “directly involved” in Roshan’s killing.
The U.S. has denied any role in the assassination….
In the clearest sign yet that Iran is preparing to strike back for Roshan’s killing, Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, the spokesman for Iran’s Joint Armed Forces Staff, was quoted by the semiofficial ISNA news agency Saturday as saying that Tehran was “reviewing the punishment” of “behind-the-scene elements” involved in the assassination.
“Iran’s response will be a tormenting one for supporters of state terrorism,” he said, without elaborating. “The enemies of the Iranian nation, especially the United States, Britain and the Zionist regime, or Israel, have to be held responsible for their activities.”

Intellectual clean-up in the realist aisle, please!

The best grand theories tend to be written no earlier than middle age, when the writer has life experience and mistakes behind him to draw upon. Morgenthau’s 1948 classic, Politics Among Nations, was published when he was 44, Fukuyama’s The End of History was published as a book when he was 40, and Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations as a book when he was 69. Mearsheimer began writing The Tragedy of Great Power Politics when he was in his mid-40s, after working on it for a decade. Published just before 9/11, the book intimates the need for America to avoid strategic distractions and concentrate on confronting China. A decade later, with the growth of China’s military might vastly more apparent than it was in 2001, and following the debacles of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, its clairvoyance is breathtaking.

Note to self:  start outlining awesome, earth-moving grand theory now. [Note to Drezner:  sorry, but you already dug your own grave when it comes to intellectual legacy--ed.]
It’s not surprising that Kaplan, a geopolitics wonk, loves Tragedy, with its emphasis on the “stopping power of water” and all.  The essay is worth reading in full — but seeing as how I’m quoted without attribution I’ve done a bit of research on realism, I can’t let this casual assertion go by without some pushback:

[I]n a country that has always been hostile to what realism signifies, [Mearsheimer] wears his “realist” label as a badge of honor. “To realism!” he says as he raises his wineglass to me in a toast at a local restaurant. As Ashley J. Tellis, Mearsheimer’s former student and now, after a stint in the Bush administration, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, later tells me: “Realism is alien to the American tradition. It is consciously amoral, focused as it is on interests rather than on values in a debased world. But realism never dies, because it accurately reflects how states actually behave, behind the façade of their values-based rhetoric.”…
For Mearsheimer, academia’s hostility to realism is evident in the fact that Harvard, which aims to recruit the top scholars in every field, never tried to hire the two most important realist thinkers of the 20th century, Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz. But at Chicago, a realist like Mearsheimer, who loves teaching and never had ambitions for government service, can propound theories and unpopular ideas, and revel in the uproar they cause. Whatever the latest group-think happens to be, Mearsheimer almost always instinctively wants to oppose it—especially if it emanates from Washington.

This notion of realism being alien to the United States has been a recurring theme of realists, since, well, realism asserted itself in the American academy.  It’s impossible to have a conversation with John Mearsheimer longer than 15 minutes without him bringing up this point.
The thing is, it’s a sloppy argument lacking in empirical foundation.  Just for starters, even realists acknowledge that Ron Paul’s campaign is doing well because it’s sympatico with the realist critique of American foreign policy.  More substantively, this canard is why I researched and wrote “The Realist Tradition in American Public Opinion“ a few years ago.  My principal conclusion from that essay:

Americans do hold some liberal aspirations for their conduct across the globe, and believe that morality should play a role in foreign affairs—in the abstract. However, surveys about foreign policy world views and priorities, the use of force, and foreign economic policies all reveal a strong realist bent among the mass American public. The overwhelming majority of Americans possess a Hobbesian world view of international relations. Americans consistently place realist foreign policy objectives— the securing of energy supplies, homeland security—as top foreign policy priorities. Objectives associated with liberal internationalism—strengthening the United Nations, promoting democracy and human rights—rank near the bottom of the list. On the uses of force, experimental surveys reveal that Americans think like intuitive neorealists; they prefer balancing against aggressive and rising powers while remaining leery about liberal-style interventions. On foreign economic policy, Americans think of trade through a relative gains prism, particularly if the trading partner is viewed as a rising economic power. Surveys and polling do suggest that Americans like multilateral institutions, but they appear to like them for realist reasons—they are viewed as mechanisms for burden-sharing.

It is somewhat more accurate to say that America’s foreign policy elites are more hostile to realpolitik — though even here, things can be exaggerated.  The recent TRIP survey, for example, revealed that realism might not be the most popular paradigm among IR scholars, but it still commands a healthy fraction of academics, and commands an even greater fraction of attention in international relations courses.
This might seem like a small point, but it’s an important one — because to be honest I’m fed up with realists whining that everyone is against them.  If there is one thing that academic realists have in common, it’s a strong, cultivated sense of victimhood.  “Our field despises us! Americans don’t like us!  The foreign policy community hates us!”
Cut it out already.  There is a long intellectual lineage in the American academy — starting with Hans Morgenthau and continuing with Mearsheimer and his students — that evinces realist principles.  There is an equally strong intellectual lineage of policy principals – starting with George Kennan and continuing with Brent Scowcroft and his acolytes — that walk the realist walk.  Realists advocate a doctrine that genuinely resonates with a large swath of the American mass public.  If realists fail to popularize their own ideas, then perhaps they should look in the mirror before invoking the “everyone hates us so we must be right” card.

So you want to know what international relations scholars think about Web 2.0….

a) 25% of respondents do think blogs devoted to international relations should count in evaluating a professor’s research output.  I guarantee you that number would have been much lower even a few ywars ago;
b) More than 66% of respondents thought such an activity should count in evaluating a professor’s service to the profession.
c)  90% of respondents believed that IR blogs had a beneficial impact on foreign policy formulation;
d)  More than 51% of respondents thought that IR blogs had a beneficial impact on the discipline of international relations.

There’s a lot more data to discuss, but I would say that this veeeeery interesting snapshot should be enough to generate some discussion for now.  For example, do readers think that these numbers will plateau, grow or recede over time?

Nominations are now being accepted for the 2011 Albies

I’m talking about any book, journal article, magazine piece, op-ed, or blog post published in the calendar year that made you rethink how the world works in such a way that you will never be able “unthink” the argument.

I know that this was a super-boring year for those interested in the global political economy, so it’s going to be tough to find good material.  Still, please try — this is, I believe, the only year-end Top 10 list that neither Time nor The Atlantic has comandeered.  Here’s a link to my 2010 list for reference.
The winners will be announced on December 31st.  In the meantime, readers are strongly encouraged to submit their nominations (with links if possible) in the comments.

The partisan politics of threat assessment

[I]t is to the risk of an EMP attack that Mr. Gingrich has repeatedly returned. And while the message may play well to hawkish audiences, who might warm to the candidate’s suggestion that the United States engage in pre-emptive military strikes against Iran and North Korea, many nuclear experts dismiss the threat. America’s current missile defense system would thwart such an attack, these experts say, and the nations in question are at the kindergarten stage of developing nuclear arms.
The Missile Defense Agency, an arm of the Pentagon that maintains an arsenal of ground-based interceptors ready to fly into space and smash enemy warheads, says that defeating such an attack would be as straightforward as any other defense of the continental United States.
“It doesn’t matter if the target is Chicago or 100 miles over Nebraska,” said Richard Lehner, an agency spokesman. “For the interceptor, it’s the same thing.” He called the potential damage from a nuclear electromagnetic pulse attack “pretty theoretical.”
Yousaf M. Butt, a nuclear physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who last year did a lengthy analysis of EMP for The Space Review, a weekly online journal, said, “If terrorists want to do something serious, they’ll use a weapon of mass destruction — not mass disruption.” He said, “They don’t want to depend on complicated secondary effects in which the physics is not very clear.”
Mr. Gingrich’s spokesman, R. C. Hammond, did not respond to e-mails asking for comment. But the candidate, a former history professor and House speaker, has defended his characterizations as accurate. At a forum in Des Moines on Saturday for military veterans, Mr. Gingrich said an electromagnetic pulse attack was one of several pressing national security threats the United States faced. “In theory, a relatively small device over Omaha would knock out about half the electricity generated in the United States,” he told the veterans.

I’m neither a security expert nor a rocket scientist.  After reading Broad’s article, the Space Review annalysis, the rebuttal to that analysis, and Sharon Winberger’s excellent FP write-up from last year, however, I’m reasonably confident that the threat posed by EMP is remote for the near-to-medium future.  The scenarios in which an EMP would affect the United States rely on a) rogue states making serious leaps forward in their ballistic missile technology and nuclear engineering; and b) those same actors deciding that it’s in their national interest to launch a first strike against a country with a reliable second-strike nuclear deterrent.
Nevertheless, I can see why Newt Skywalker would be concerned.  Most of the taking-EMP-threat seriously essays harp on the devastating effect of such an attack.  Surely, Gingrich would argue, even a small possibility of this actually happening justifies at least some investment into countermeasures and preventive actions.  Indeed, Gingrich has explicitly made that argument: 

Without adequate preparation, its impact would be so horrifying that we would basically lose our civilization in a matter of seconds…. I think it’s very important to get people to understand now, before there is a disaster, how truly grave the threat is.*

Fair enough… let’s be generous and say there’s a 10% chance of this being a real problem over the next two decades.  If that’s the case, maybe Gingrich is right to bring it up as an underestimated threat.
Here’s my question, however.  If we’re talking about threats to civilization as we know it, isn’t there another possibility that has a much higher probability of occurring — let’s say, better than 50% at least — and a similarly lax amount of preventive action?  Like, say, climate change?
As Uri Friedman and Joshua Keating have documented for FP, however, Gingrich’s assessment of that threat has changed recently.   Last month, on this issue, he said the following:

I actually don’t know whether global warming is occurring…. The earth’s temperatures go up and down over geologic times over and over again. As recently as 11,000 years ago the Gulf Stream quit for 600 years. And for 600 years you had an ice age in Europe because there was no warm water coming up. And then it started up again. Nobody knows why it quit, nobody knows why it started up. I’m agnostic.

This is fascinating.  On the one hand, you have a long-term cataclysmic threat to the planet that commands the consensus of an overwhelming majority of experts in the field.  On the other hand, you have a long-term cataclysmic threat to the United States that commands nowhere close to the same level of consensus.  Based on his rhetoric, Gingrich wants urgent action to be taken on the latter, but not the former.  Why?
I’m not bringing this up to suggest that Gingrich is a buffoon.  He could plausibly argue that a lot of people are harping on climate change while only Gingrich can call attention to the EMP possibility.  It’s possible that the costs of preventive action on climate change are much greater than dealing with EMP (though if that includes preventive attacks on Iran and North Korea, I’m dubious).
What I’m wondering is whether there is a partisan divide in assessing threats, as there is in assessing economic principles.  I wonder if conservatives are far more likely to focus on threats in which there is a clear agent with a malevolent intent, whereas liberals are more likely to focus on threats that lack agency and are more systemic in nature (climate change, pandemics, nuclear accidents, etc.)
What do you think?
*Incidentally, this is the same logic I used to justify greater research into the threat posed by the living dead.  Just saying….

Political leadership and the eurozone

“Europe is wealthy enough that there’s no reason why they can’t solve this problem,” Obama told reporters at the White House.
“If they muster the political will, they have the capacity to settle markets down, make sure that they are acting responsibly and that governments like Italy are able to finance their debt.” (emphasis added)

By and large, political scientists hate the concept of political will.  As I’ve said numerous times on the blog, “political will” is usually tantamount to saying, “if only politicians would completely ignore short-term political incentives and do the right thing!”  Or, to put a finer point on it, “if only politicians stopped acting like politicians!”  Because we as a profession tend to focus on structural forces and immutable preferences, “leadership” as a variable often (though not always) falls by the wayside.
Looking at the latest EU summit/eurozone machinations, however, I’m beginning to wonder if we need to think about “first image” explanations for what just happened.  As the Wall Street Journal, Felix Salmon, Financial Times, Paul Krugman,  and Economist are all reporting, it was pretty friggin’ disastrous.  Salmon provides the most complete autopsy — here’s a snippet:

[A]nother half-baked solution is exactly what we got. Which means, I fear, that it is now, officially, too late to save the Eur ozone: the collapse of the entire edifice is now not a matter of if but rather of when.
For one thing, fracture is being built into today’s deal: rather than find something acceptable to all 27 members of the European Union, the deal being done is getting negotiated only between the 17 members of the Euro zone. Where does that leave EU members like Britain which don’t use the euro? Out in the cold, with no leverage. If the UK doesn’t want to help save the euro — and, by all accounts, it doesn’t — then that in and of itself makes the task much more difficult.
But that’s just the beginning of the failures we’re seeing from European leaders right now. It seems that German chancellor Angela Merkel is insisting on a fully-fledged treaty change — something there simply isn’t time for, and which the electorates of nearly all European countries would dismiss out of hand. Europe, whatever its other faults, is still a democracy, and it’s clear that any deal is going to be hugely unpopular among most of Europe’s population. There’s simply no chance that a new treaty will get the unanimous ratification it needs, and in the mean time the EU’s crisis-management tools are just not up to dealing with the magnitude of the current crisis.
The fundamental problem is that there isn’t enough money to go around. The current bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, is barely big enough to cope with Greece; it doesn’t have a chance of being able to bail out a big economy like Italy or Spain. So it needs to beef up: it needs to be able to borrow money from the one entity which is actually capable of printing money, the European Central Bank.
But the ECB’s president, Mario Draghi, has made it clear that’s not going to happen. Draghi is nominally Italian but in reality one of the stateless European technocratic elite: a former vice chairman and managing director of Goldman Sachs, he’s perfectly comfortable delivering Italy the bad news that he’s not going to lend her the money she needs. He’s very reluctant to lend it directly, he won’t lend it to the EFSF, and he won’t lend it to the IMF. Draghi has his instructions, and he’s sticking to them — even if doing so means the end of the euro zone as we know it.

So, what explains this mess — the inexorable structural problems of the European Union, or the lack of political leadership?  At this point, I’m genuinely uncertain.  For example, the facile explanation for British Prime Minister David Cameron’s rejection of an EU treaty is catering to his domestic interests — namely the British financial sector.  Then, however, we get to this bit from the Economist:

After much studied vagueness on his part about Britain’s objectives, Mr Cameron’s demand came down to a protocol that would ensure Britain would be given a veto on financial-services regulation (see PDF copy here. The British government has become convinced that the European Commission, usually a bastion of liberalism in Europe, has been issuing regulations hostile to the City of London under the influence of its French single-market commissioner, Michel Barnier. And yet strangely, given the accusation that Brussels was taking aim at the heart of the British economy, almost all of the new rules issued so far have been passed with British approval (albeit after much bitter backroom fighting). Tactically, too, it seemed odd to make a stand in defence of the financiers that politicians, both in Britain and across the rest of European, prefer to denounce….
Britain may assume it will benefit from extra business for the City, should the euro zone ever pass a financial-transaction tax. But what if the new club starts imposing financial regulations among the 17 euro-zone members, or the 23 members of the euro-plus pact? That could begin to force euro-denominated transactions into the euro zone, say Paris or Frankfurt. Britain would, surely, have had more influence had the countries of the euro zone remained under an EU-wide system.

As for Merkel, well, my take on her leadership style has been documented already.  She’s dealing with an opposition that is castigating her for not taking swifter and more drastic action to resolve the eurocrisis.  In response, she’s pushing for changes that will take months, if ever, to accomplish — and, if they are accomplished, have no guarantee of actually solving the problem.  It doesn’t seem like the eurozone has that time.
As for Draghi, well, one could attribute his range of half-hearted measures to his excessively cautious leadership — after all the ECB is an ostensibly independent institution, so presumably Dragh has the greatest amount of autonomy.  It’s not that simple, however — Draghi wouldn’t have been selected as the new ECB head unless he demonstrated the kind of policy traits that made him acceptable to Germany in the first place.  Oddly enough, although Draghi currently has the most freedom of action, the structures that ensured he would become the new ECB head ensured he would be the least likely person to exploit that freedom.
So, stepping back, there appears to be a role for the quality of political leadership as an explanatory factor for the current eurozone crisis.  Properly defining that role, however, is beyond the capacity of this blog post.
What do you think?

Flows, stocks, leaders and allies

[T]he United States and Israel have an impressive list of common national interests; that Israeli actions make substantial direct contributions to these U.S. interests; and that wise policymakers and people concerned with U.S. foreign policy, while never forgetting the irreplaceable values and moral responsibility dimensions of the bilateral relationship, should recognize the benefits Israel provides for U.S. national interests

This argument has drawn criticism from the usual suspects, but it reaffirms my point that alliances rarely rise and fall due to individual leaders.

So think of dust-ups like the open mic gaffe as mild ripples in the flow of friendship between the two countries, while the stock of the alliance remains fundamentally constant.

Zombies!! Me!! Zombies AND me!!

A pedagogical plea regarding Theories of International Politics and Zombies

Welcome back, international relations students

Instead of a flurry of new thinking at the highest echelons of the foreign policy establishment, the major decisions of the past two administrations have been generated from the same tool kit of foreign policy ideas that have dominated the world for decades. Washington’s strategic debates – between neoconservatives and liberals, between interventionists and realists – are essentially struggles among ideas and strategies held over from the era when nation-states were the only significant actors on the world stage. As ideas, none of them were designed to deal effectively with a world in which states are grappling with powerful entities that operate beyond their control….
As yet, no major new theory has taken root in the most influential policy circles to explain how America should act in this kind of world, in which Wikileaks has made a mockery of the diplomatic pouch and Silicon Valley rivals Washington for cultural influence. But there are at least some signs that people in power are starting to try in earnest. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has openly integrated the search for a new paradigm into her policy making. In universities, think tanks, and the government, thinkers trying to grapple with this fluid world structure are finally getting attention in the circles where their ideas could shape policy.

Read the whole, provocative thing — if you agree with Cambanis’ arguments, then it certainly represents a data point in favor of Anne-Marie Slauighter’s vision of how world politics operates.
My onlytweak of Cambanis’ essay is that he repeatedly stresses the need for a new generation of strategic concepts and international relations theories to guide U.S. grand strategy, and then lists as examples the following:

Joseph Nye, a Harvard political scientist who served in the Carter and Clinton administrations and has advised Secretary of State Clinton, was one of the pioneers. In the 1990s, he coined the term “soft power,” arguing that sometimes the most effective way for America to promote its interests would be through influencing global health and the environment, or culture and education. His latest book, “The Future of Power,” counsels that America can preserve its influence if it reconceives its institutions and priorities to deal with a world where the energy is shifting from the West to the East, as well as from states to non-state actors. Michael Doyle at Columbia University, a seminal theorist whose idea of a “democratic peace” in the 1990s crucially inflected policy with the belief that democracies don’t fight each other, now talks about the notion of an age of the “empowered individual,” where lone actors can alter the trajectory of states and of history as never before. Stephen Walt, also at Harvard, argues that in the new era America simply needs to start by acknowledging its limits: that with less muscle and less extra money, the first step will be to streamline its goals in a way that so far politicians have been loath to do.

No offense to Joseph Nye, Michael Doyle, and Steve Walt — these are Great Men of interntional relaions thought.  The notions that Cambanis lists here, however, are not “new” in any sense.  Which leads me to wonder whether Cambanis has defined the problem correctly.  Is it that international relations theory has gone stale… or is it simply that the wrong set of existing theories are in vogue today?
What do you think?

Balancing or bandwagoning with deities?

I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’ Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending.

An interesting hypothesis!! So, there are three possibilities here. The first is that Bachmann was joking – in which case, wow, that’s a really tasteless joke given the loss of life and probably warrants a pretty big apology.
The second is that Bachmann is simply nuts wrong. Doug Mataconis points out,

I’m not sure how this computes given the fact that the storm largely spared Washington, D.C. and New York, while hammering a red states like North Carolina and a heavily Republican area like Virginia’s Tidewater region.

Well, socialist-supporting Vermont got hit pretty hard too, but still, this is a fair point, and “Bachmann being wrong” seems like another safe bet.
The third possibility is the one I want to explore, however — what if Bachmann is right? What if God really is using wrath to coerce humanity into implementing a particular set of policy preferences?
A God-fearing person would naturally decide to obey. However, this kind of coercive demand strikes me as a pretty massive intrusion into human sovereignty. The point of a democracy is for majorities of citizens and their elected representatives to decide matters of policy. Recent history suggests that neither sovereign governments nor their populations take kindly to coercive threats from other men. If we acquiesce to Divine demands now, don’t we just let God win?
Bachmann’s response suggests an obvious bandwagoning approach to the awesome power of deities: When God says jump, you should say, how high? And, indeed, if the Almighty really is omnipotent, this strategy has much to recommend it. Bandwagoning is generally recommended when the targeted actor is comparatively weak, has few natural allies, and believes that the targeting actor can be appeased with concessions. This seems to fit the Old Testament, monotheistic God to a tee.
On the other hand, however, might a balancing approach yield better long-term results? After all, God has a disturbing track record of making demands like this. We know from Genesis the Old Testament that the Almighty has a tendency to, well, you know, smite humans on a semi-regular basis. There’s the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, an awful lot of Egyptians, etc. This doesn’t even include the number of times God demanded death (the sacrifice of Isaac, Ninevah) only to relent at the last minute. Sure, God has some good reasons in some of these instances, but from a threat assessment perspective, it’s veeeeery disturbing.
Maybe the bandwagoning criteria don’t apply. If one operates along the monotheistic assumption*, humans should ask if there is a possible ally out there to help resist God’s will [Don't go there --ed.], an entity who is God’s enduring rival [You're really going there, aren't you?! --ed.] , one who might have the necessary power to make God think twice about all that smiting?
It’s time to wonder … would a temporary alliance with Satan really be that bad? [Yes it world!! --ed.] Winston Churchill once said, “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” Now I’m not sure I would even go that far … the whole selling souls thing sounds like a pretty big demand too. That said, a sober, realpolitik perspective would demand that making a deal with the devil has to be a policy option that stays on the table.
[How about a nice buck-passing strategy instead?--ed. Hey, I'd love to just force other creatures like, say, apes to go toe-to-toe with God, but I just don't see it happening.]
Readers are warmly encouraged to puzzle this out for themselves — or, instead, to buy the very entertaining Biblical Games by Steven Brams.
*The monotheism assumption is important when thinking about how to cope with a venegeful god. If the universe turns out to be polytheistic, then the question becomes whether us mortals can sow dissension among the gods before someone releases a Kraken.

Contagion in world politics

Rather than seeing the international sphere as a space for inter-state power politics, or as a space for networked common action, we can think of it as a space for contagion.That is, think of it as a space where ever-multiplying and ever-ramifying sets of networked relationships across border serve not to enable problem-solving DIY diplomatists, but instead to transmit social influences in ways that are difficult to predict ex ante. This would mean taking seriously the kinds of complexity theory and network theory arguments that Anne-Marie mentions, but following them to a quite different set of conclusions than she does.
The world that complexity theory and network theory depicts is one where actions have highly unpredictable consequences. This follows both from theoretical arguments about processes of contagion across large scale networks, and from empirical research conducted via e.g. experiments….
Just because the world has become more networked, it does not mean that states can either (a) easily use networks to pursue their policy goals, or (b) turn over responsibilities to networks that will self-organize around socially useful tasks and responsibilities. To the extent that networks’ politics are predictable, they will conform to the same kinds of (frequently unpleasant) politics as do states. That is, they will be characterized by power inequalities (sometimes gross), actors pursuing their self-interest while entirely blind to the needs of others, and the rest of the shebang. To the extent that networks’ politics unpredictable, they will be unlikely to be useful tools of policy.
This is a story with far fewer helpful policy lessons than either Dan’s or Anne-Marie’s. It points to plausible developments in world politics, without providing any very obvious tools to deal with them.

I need to process Henry’s arguments more before making a fully thought-out response.  This is a blog, a two half-assed thoughts should suffice for now.  First, Henry gets at something that was implicit in the exchange between Anne-Marie and myself:  the notion that powerful actors possess considerable agency in world politics.  Slaughter and I might disagree about who those actors are, but we assumed that power = agency.  Farrell’s point about contagion is that this presumption does not necessarily hold.  And the policy implications of that suggestion are rather jarring, to say the least.
Second, however, my own theoretical predilections lead me to wonder whether powerful agents can halt/regulate/control the spread of contagion more .  The Arab Spring suggests such possibilities.  So far, the general unrest in the region has toppled a regime in Tunisia, partially toppled regimes in Egypt and Yemen, led to a civil war in Libya, and led to… something in Syria.
This is not insignificant, but it’s worth remembering that the wave of unrest was much larger than those countries.  Early protests in Iran went nowhere — in no small part because the Iraniann state has gotten very, very good at cracking down.  Led by Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies have by and large kept populist demands at bay, going so far as to invite Jordan and Morocco to join the Gulf Cooperation Council.
I’m not trying to pull a Kevin Bacon here; the Arab Spring is Big Earthshaking Stuff.  My point, rather, is that not every contagion proceeds unimpeded — there are counter-contagions as well.  When and how those counterwaves happen is worthy of consideration.
What do you think?

Yes, Anne-Marie, there is a subtle realist

[T]he whole point of realism, as every first year IR student knows, is that structural realism (the school that holds as its bible Kenneth Waltz’s Man, the State, and War) says that international relations analysts can treat the world as if it were composed only of states pursuing their power-based interests.

In constrast, Slaughter advocates a “modern/liberal-social” because such an approach will:

[factor in] all the important social actors, from tribes to democracy activists, focus on the relationship between those social actors and their governments, then assess interests relative to other governments that are themselves enmeshed in domestic and transnational social networks.

Slaughter asserts that the second perspective is the superior approach despite its greater complexity, because it permits a greater focus on the “social and developmental issues” that Slaughter believes will the the primary drivers of world politics over the next decade.  As evidence for her more enlightened perspective, Slaughter compares her Twitter stream with my Twitter stream and concludes:

Going through these tweets actually offered an even more succinct contrast between how Dan and I think about foreign policy. Dan asked last week, addressed to all “IR tweeps”: “Is there a better international relations song than Tears for Fears ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World?’” He got some great responses, but for me, his choice says it all about how, his protests notwithstanding, he sees the world. (Many a truth is spoken in jest.) By contrast (and again, with much less humor!), I tweeted a link on Monday to a in the Financial Times by the Israeli novelist Etgar Keret on the J14 protests and quoted the following passage: “In our current reality, the political cannot be separated from the social.” The new foreign policy frontier is deeply social, as messy and unsatisfactory as that may be.

Slaughter’s historiography of realism is a touch problematic, but also a bit of a distraction, so I’ll leave it to others to address that question.  Instead, let’s start with the Twitter evidence.
Slaughter is clearly a huge fan of microblogging (despite its negative externalities) and its social networking capabilities.  As an earlier adopter of these technologies, I’m a fan too.  I do think there’s a danger of reading too much into this kind of data, however.  If I really didn’t care about the kind of social and economic issues that Slaughter embraces… well, I wouldn’t be following her.  Like any curious IR scholar, however, I do follow her.  Just because I don’t tweet/re-tweet about these things all that much doesn’t mean I don’t read/blog/write about them in other venues.  Slaughter assumes that I manage my Twitter feed the same way she does, as a natural extension of her research interests.  Trust me when I say that I value Twitter somewhat differently.
This might be a trivial issue, but it gets at a point I hinted at in my last post:  there’s a difference between what’s visible and what’s significant in world politics.  Twitter is highly visible, for example, but I think it’s significance might be exaggerated – or, rather, online networks merely replicate offline power structures.  The threat of coercion is often invisible — but it’s effects can be quite significant.
Slaughter’s more substantive point is her contrast between old-school realpolitik and new-school modern social-liberal foreign policy approach.  On this distincton, let me start by observing that another important modern strategy in world politics is the notion of issue-framing.  If they’re good, policy entrepreneurs will be able to take their issue and frame it in a manner most favorable to their preferred policy solution.   When their policy problem is pushed to the front of the queue, they are therefore likely to win the argument.
I bring this up by noting that I don’t accept Slaughter’s framing of our dispute.  She posits that only by adopting her international relations worldview is it possible to recognize the social and developmental issues that are bubbling under the surface in world politics.  Because realists primarily care about guns, bomb, and interstate security, they ostensibly will miss these problems.
Now, I know a lot of realists, and I can kinda sorta understand how Slaughter arrived at this caricatured version of realism.  Nevertheless, Slaughter conflates subject matter with how one models the dynamics of the subject matter.   In his last memoir, even über-classical-realist Henry Kissinger acknowledged the importance of human rights issues in modern diplomacy and staecraft.  I certainly agree that the economic, social and developmental issues that are near and dear to Slaughter’s heart are matters of import for world politics — indeed, this is a theme I’ve written and rambled spoken about for quite some time.  I suspect most realist IPE scholars believe these issues are important… or they wouldn’t be studying IPE in the first place.
Just because I agree with the importance of these issue areas, however, does not mean that I agree with Slaughter’s implicit model of how these issues get addressed.  Anne-Marie places great faith in the ability of transnational, networked, non-state actors to bend the policy agenda to their preferred sets of solutions.  I think that these groups can try to voice their demands for particular policy problems to be addressed.  I think, at the national level, that social movements can force even recalcitrant politicians to alter their policy agenda (see:  Party, Tea).  Where Slaughter’s optimism runs into my skepticism is the ability of these movements to a) go transnational; and b) supply rather than demand global solutions.  I’m skeptical about the viability of transnational interests to effectively pressure multiple  governments to adopt a common policy solution, and I’m super-skeptical that these groups can supply broad-based solutions independently of national governments.
There’s a “two-step” approach to world politics with which Slaughter is intimately familiar:  it posits that interest groups and social movements can influence national policy preferences, but that outcomes in world politics are driven by the distribution of power and preferences among national governments.  In her embrace of a new foreign policy frontier, Slaughter embraces the first step and mostly rejects the second.
That second step is really important, however, as most social movements are keenly aware.  Indeed, most of the protests that Slaughter keeps identifying on Twitter are not about solving problems on their own, but demanding that governments address or ameliorate their needs.
Slaughter can and will point to Very Important Initiatives like the Gates Foundation or the Summit Against Violent Extremism as examples of supplying such solutions.  These can matter at particular points in particular places, but I’ll need to see some powerful evidence before I think that these transnational groups are as potent as, say, nationalism as political force in the world.  All of the social movements and all of the online networks can agitate for policy solutions, but they’re not going to be able to alter fierce distributional conflicts that exist when trying to address many of the topline issues in world politics show no signs of abating.  The kind of non-state actors that Slaughter embraces have not been shy in engaging issues like climate change, Israel/Palestine or macroeconomic imbalances — but I haven’t seen any appreciable change in global public policies as a result.
Now, it’s possible that Slaughter will eventually be proven right.  That’s the cool thing about studying international relations, we keep adding new data with every passing day.  So, here’s my challenge to Anne-Marie — name three significant issue areas in which these kinds of networked actors will significantly alter the status quo (and I look forward to Slaughter falsifying me to within an inch of my life.).  Because I can think of far too many issues — including those listed above — on which their impact will be negligible.
One final point:  I agree with Slaughter that the issues she cares about are important, and attention must be paid to them.  That said, the realist in me is not quite ready to claim that the old security-focused approach to foreign policy is truly outdated.  Yes, traditional wars are much rarer than they used to be.  That said, we’re just one unsteady power transition away in North Korea, China or Pakistan for traditional concerns about militarized great power combat to return to the main stage of foreign policy practitioners.  I really hope Anne-Marie is correct about these new issues being the important ones — because that means the horrors of great power war continue to stay a distant memory.

A useful primer on higher education choices for international affairs

Over at Abu Muqawana, Andrew Exum and Erin Simpson provide a useful breakdown of the choices available for those misbegotten fools young people thinking about getting a graduate degree in international affairs of some kind.  Not surprisingly, the choice is highly contingent on a) your level of patience; and b) what you want to do with the degree afte you graduate.
Besides the criminal omission of The Greatest International Affairs Program in the World, I have only one cavil to their analysis.  When they discuss getting a Ph.D. in the first place, they note:

[H]ere’s the dirty secret about DC. Everybody wants to hire PhDs, but most people don’t know anything about them. They won’t read your dissertation, they aren’t going to call your advisor (thank goodness), and most won’t know until it’s too late whether you’ve actually been trained in anything useful. So if you just want the credential, stop reading now and just find the cheapest, quickest program and git ‘er done.

And here I must dissent on one minor point and one major point.   First, a small correction:  if you’re trying to get a job in DC and you’re a newly-minted Ph.D., damn straight your advisor will get a phone call.  This doesn’t always happen, but it’s more likely than not.  I’ve been on the receiving end of several of these since arriving at Fletcher.  True, one could always try not to list your advisor as a reference.  The thing is, that is a massive red flag signaling that your advisor doesn’t think all that much of you.
Now, the major point:  if your goal is to just get the Ph.D. credential, do not “find the cheapest, quickest program and git ‘er done.”  Instead, just run away — run away as fast as you can.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again — there is no such thing as grinding out a Ph.D.  People who think that can “gut out” a dissertation will never finish it.  Unless you love whatever it is you’re writing about, you’ll never finish.  You’ll hate the topic at some point — and without the love, you’ll find other ways to occupy your time than dissertating.  This is particularly true at lower-ranked Ph.D.-granting institutions, because all of them aspire to be higher-ranked Ph.D.-granting institutions and believe the only way to do that is to “tool up” their students to within an inch of their lives.
This is one way in which a Ph.D. is different from a JD, an MBA or an MA.  Coursework can be gutted out, as can exams.  Writing 75,000 words on a topic requires something else, and anyone who tells you differently is selling you something.
Because most traditional Ph.D. programs start out with coursework, I’ll understand, dear readers, if you don’t believe me.  To take advantage of the pedagogical tools of the Internet, however, here’s the best video I know that captures this decision:

And, just to be clear, aspiring Ph.D. students:  I’m the guy with the weird Scottish accent, the bunny is the Ph.D. program, and all y’all are the ones suffering from the blood and gore.
Unless you really want to kill that bunny, just walk away.

Meet the new foreign policy frontier…. same as the old foreign policy frontier

The frontier of foreign policy in the 21st century is social, developmental, digital, and global. Along this frontier, different groups of actors in society — corporations, foundations, NGOs, universities, think tanks, churches, civic groups, political activists, Facebook groups, and others — are mobilizing to address issues that begin as domestic social problems but that have now gone global. It is the world of the Land Mines Treaty and the International Criminal Court; global criminal and terrorist networks; vast flows of remittances that dwarf development assistance; micro-finance and serial entrepreneurship; the Gates Foundation; the Arab spring; climate change; global pandemics; Twitter; mobile technology to monitor elections, fight corruption, and improve maternal health; a new global women’s movement; and the demography of a vast youth bulge in the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia.
Traditional foreign policy continues to assume the world of World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the first and second Gulf Wars — an international system in which a limited number of states pursue their largely power-based interests in bargaining situations that are often zero-sum and in which the line between international and domestic politics is still discernible and defensible. Diplomats and statesmen compete with each other in games of global chess, which, during crises, often shift into high-stakes poker. It is the world of high strategy, the world that Henry Kissinger writes about and longs for and that so-called “realist” commentators continually invoke.

Well, this is… this is… I’m sorry, I got lost among the ridiculously tall strawmen populating these paragraphs.   I’ll go out on a limb and posit that not even Henry Kissinger thinks of the world the way Slaughter describes it.  Just a quick glance at, say, Hillary Clinton’s recent speech in Hong Kong suggests that actual great power foreign policies bear no resemblance whatsoever to that description of “traditional foreign policy.”
Slaughter knows this very well, given that she was Clinton’s first director of policy planning.  She also knows this because much of her writing in international relations is about the ways in which traditional governments are becoming more networked and adaptive to emergent foreign policy concerns.  One could quibble about whether this is really a new trend, but Slaughter was correct to point out that states are doing this.
So, let’s get to the main point of her blog post:  what does Slaughter think about this new frontier?

21st century diplomacy must not only be government to government, but also government to society and society to society, in a process facilitated and legitimated by government. That much broader concept opens the door to a do-it-yourself foreign policy, in which individuals and groups can invent and execute an idea — for good or ill — that can affect their own and other countries in ways that once only governments could.
In late June, I spent two days at the Summit Against Violent Extremism (#AVE on Twitter), a conference sponsored by Google Ideas, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Tribeca Film Festival that brought together more than 80 former gang members, violent religious extremists, violent nationalist extremists, and violent white supremacists from 19 countries across six continents. They came together with 120 academics, NGOs, public sector and private sector partners. The conference grew out of a vision developed by Jared Cohen, the head of Google Ideas, when he served in the U.S. State Department’s Office of Policy Planning together with Farah Pandit, who worked on countering violent extremism in the State Department’s Bureau of Eurasian Affairs and is the Special Representative to Muslim Communities. But, despite their role, bringing together this range of “formers” is something that Google Ideas and the Council on Foreign Relations can do much more easily than any government could. The range of projects creating networks to help build on effective, early intervention programs already working around the world, such as Singapore’s programs to deflect and deprogram Islamic radicals, will also be much easier to develop with a broader range of stakeholders, including some government participation, than they would be through government alone….
Skeptics argue that these kinds of initiatives are doomed to remain perennially peripheral and ineffectual. But, in case anyone hasn’t noticed, the traditional tools of fighting, talking, pressuring, and persuading government-to-government really aren’t working so well. Thirty years of urging reform produced next to nothing; 6 months of digitally and physically organized social protests and a political earthquake is shaking the broader Middle East. Twenty years of working toward a treaty to govern carbon emissions has barely yielded an informal “accord.” Yet measures taken by 40 cities organized by the Bloomberg Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative will have far more impact.

Outing myself as a skeptic, I’d make two points.  First, Slaughter’s weakness as an international relations theorist is to uncritically observe phenomena like the Summit Against Violent Extremism and then inductively generalize from them to extrapolate the future of world politics.  AVE is happening, but I’m gonna want to see a lot more evidence that it’s making a difference before calling it a success.  There are a lot of issue areas where this kind of initiative will not substantially alter policy outcomes.  Indeed, one could flip this around, look at new trends like sovereign wealth funds, national oil companies and and state-owned enterprises, and reach the exact opposite conclusions from Slaughter.  I don’t, but you see my point — world politics is about a lot more than a Muslim woman setting up a Twitter account thanks to her microfinance loan.
Second, Slaughter’s climate change example is a great one.  I don’t doubt that the initiatives she’s blogged about likely have accomplished more than the two decades of UN negotiations.  I also don’t doubt, however, that those accomplishments are a drop in the bucket compared to what has needs to be done.  Furthermore, I suspect these groups would strongly prefer joint government action to their own initiatives, as the only viable means to mitigate the effects of increased greenhouse gas emissions.  In which case, they will function like good old fashioned interest groups, which is not all that new.
Slaughter believes that these “bottom-up” movements represent the future of world politics — and she may well be right.  My own inclination is that DIY foreign policy represents a poor and underprovided substitute for effective state action global governance.  We’ll see what the future holds.
Concluding her post, Slaughter says that she’ll be, ”looking at the world through a very different lens — highlighting features of the foreign policy landscape that simply disappear if we examine only a world of opaque unitary states negotiating, pressuring, fighting, and ignoring each other.”  This is good, and highlights the value-added that such an approach can bring to thinking about world politics.  I’ll be looking at Slaughter’s musings as well through my own lens — one that is very wary of overhyped initiatives that do not accomplish nearly as much as suggested by their media hype.
Am I missing anything?