Daryl Morini, an IR PhD candidate at the University of Queensland whom I know, has put together an interesting global survey for undergraduate and graduate students of international relations. It looks pretty thorough and might make a pretty interesting student couter-point to the Teaching and Research in International Politics (TRIP) report on scholars’ attitudes. Eventually the goal is an article on our students’ attitudes toward the discipline; here is the full write-up of the project at e-IR. So far as I know, nothing like this has been done before (please comment if that is incorrect), so this strikes me as the interesting sort of student work we should support. Daryl’s also made an interesting effort to use Twitter as a simulation tool in IR, so I am happy to pitch this survey for him. Please take a look; Daryl may be contacted here.
I am happy to invite my friend Tom Nichols to guest-post about the continuing Iraq War debate. Tom responded so substantially to my original post series on the war (one, two, three), that I invited him to provide a longer write-up. Tom is a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor in the Harvard Extension School. His blog can be found here, his twitter here. His opinions of course are his own, so whenever he says I’m wrong, you probably shouldn’t listen… REK
I’ve been reading Bob’s thoughts – cogent as always – on the 10th anniversary of Iraq. I reject Bob’s exploration of the “culpability” of the IR field for providing any kind of intellectual infrastructure for the war, mostly because I don’t think anyone in Washington, then or now, listens to us, and for good reason. Joe Nye long ago lamented that lack of influence elsewhere, and others agree (by “others” I mean “me”). So I won’t rehearse it here.
Bob and I sort of agree that the outcome of the war doesn’t say much about the prescience of at least some of the war’s opponents: there were people whose default position was almost any exercise of U.S. power is likely to be bad, and they don’t get points for being right by accident.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the war this month. I’ll be teaching it in the next few weeks at school because of the decade anniversary (March 20). To my mind, it is the most important geopolitical event, for the US, possibly the planet, since the USSR’s collapse. It also pre-occupies me to this day, because I initially supported it, and didn’t really turn against it until 2008/09. I had students who told me, late in the war, that I was the only instructor they knew who still supported the invasion. Finally, I gave in, and accepted the by-then conventional wisdom that the war was a ‘fiasco.’ I will argue in my next post in a few days, that there was in fact an at least minimally defensible argument for the war, but the execution of it was so awful, disorganized, mismanaged, and incompetent, that any moral justification was lost in the sea of blood and torture we unleashed.
The whole episode became just shameful, and regularly teaching and conferencing with non-Americans these last few years has made this so painfully clear. My students particularly are just bewildered to the point of incredulity. Again and again, the basic thought behind the questions is, ‘what the hell happened to you people? 9/11 made you lose your minds there?’ *sigh* (NB: when Asians ask me about guns in the US, the ‘what the hell is wrong with you people?’ bafflement is the same.)
Hence, the post title purposefully implies that the invasion was a bad idea. But to be fair, that should be the first question: what, if any, arguments at this point can be mustered to defend the war? IR should try to answer this seriously, because I’m all but positive that the journalistic debate will be not be driven by the state of Iraq or US foreign policy today, but by the high personal reputational costs faced by so many pundits supportive of the war. It would not surprise me at all if folks like the Kagans, Krauthammer, or Thomas Friedman miraculously found that the war was worth it after all. McNamara-style mea culpas only happen at the end of a career (so I give Sullivan and Fukuyama credit for theirs on Iraq). But academic international relations (IR) should be more honest than that.
You can’t defeat a rebellion with counter-insurgents like these
Technically, I am supposed to be on vacation, but I couldn’t miss this.
An international relations theory website I also write for has gotten into an excellent debate with Wired’s Spencer Ackerman on the Empire’s blown opportunity to stamp out the Space Vietcong Rebellion at Hoth. William Westmoreland spent 5 years trying to nail down the VC in set-piece battles where US firepower could be brought decisively to bear and end the Vietnam war. Here was the Emperor’s similar chance, but Darth Vader and Admiral Ozzel blew it (mostly because the Empire’s officer corps was filled with grandstanding self-promoters, as Ackerman rightly points out).
But as the respondents noted, the larger context does a better job explaining why the Empire’s massive advantages seem to fail repeatedly (Yavin 4, Hoth, Bespin, Endor), beyond just the poor tactical leadership at Hoth. The larger strategic context is counterinsurgency, and obviously the Emperor spent too much time cackling in the Senate to watch The Battle of Algiers. So here are the five big structural problems in the background:
1. Trusting the Bloated, Showboating Navy to do Counterinsurgency
Navies are big, blunt instruments with hugely expensive platforms vulnerable to swarming, as at Yavin and Endor, and only useful for large, ‘target-rich’ enemies. They scream national vanity, and they’re terrible for hunting rebels. Why does the Empire need a massive, and massively expensive, fleet after the Clone Wars? Probably because the army was staffed by clones – genetically-designed to be dull-witted – who couldn’t push their bureaucratic interest, while the navy had lots of fully human, showboating egos like Tarkin’s Death Star council.
I was going to write on the Biden-Ryan debate, but it wasn’t that interesting. Biden came off like that aggressive uncle at Thanksgiving family dinner who takes over the conversation, and Ryan seemed pretty out of his depth on foreign policy. I’d say Biden won, but not by as much as Romney won last week.
So this is just a bits & pieces post instead about the first time I ever spoke on TV (yikes!).
This is the first time I ever spoke on TV. Unnerving…
In July, when Vice Marshal Ri Young Ho of the DPRK was sacked, BBC news asked me to speak. I didn’t realize until about 20 minutes beforehand that it would be on TV, and it was 2 am EST. Good grief. So I’m not even wearing a tie, and I sat in my parent’s living room . Good thing they didn’t see the bar behind me!
On September 10, I did a full hour radio interview on my trip to North Korea. Go to recording 169 here. For my write-up of my NK trip impressions, go here.
On August 27, I published an op-ed in Korea’s main and centrist newspaper, the JoongAng Daily. I am happy to say that Real Clear World picked it up too. The long version is here (one) and here (two). Basically I argue that even though America is broke, foreigners are so desperate to hold dollars, that we can still fight long, unnecessary wars and borrow incessantly without a financial crisis. To paraphrase Mel Brooks (sarcastically), ‘it’s good to be the hegemon – you can do whatever the hell you want.’
Yeah, I don’t really know either. I always hear the expression ‘SSCI’ thrown around as the gold standard for social science work. Administrators seem to love it, but where it comes from and how it gets compiled I don’t really understand. Given that we all seem to use this language and worry about impact factor all the time, I thought I would simply post the list of journals for IR ranked by impact factor (after the break).
I don’t think I ever actually saw this list before all laid out completely. In grad school, I just had a vague idea that I was supposed to send my stuff to the same journals whose articles I was reading in class. But given that I haven’t found this list posted on the internet anywhere, here it is. I don’t know if that means it is gated or something, or if my school has a subscription, or whatever. Anyway, I thought posting the whole IR list would be helpful for this site’sreadership.
Note that a bunch of them are published in Asia, and 3 alone are about Korea (Korean Journal of Defense Analysis, Korean Observer, and NK Review) – so get to work!
But I have a few questions. First, why does Thomson-Reuters create this? Why don’t we do it? Does anyone actually know what they do that qualifies them for this ? And don’t say ‘consulting’ or ‘knowledge services’ or that sort of MBA-speak. The picture above includes some modernist, high-tech skyscraper, presumably to suggest that lots of brilliant, hi-tech theorists are in there crunching away big numbers (but the flower tells you they have a soft side too – ahh), but I don’t buy it. Are these guys former academics who know what we read? Who are they? Does anyone know? The T-R website tells you nothing beyond buzzwords like ‘the knowledge effect’ and ‘synergy.’ I am genuinely curious how T-R got this gig and why we listen to them. Why don’t we make our own list?
Next, I am not sure if the SSCI and the Journal Citation Reports from T-R are different or not or what. Click here to see the SSCI list; and here is the JCR link, which is probably gated, but ask your administration; they probably have access. There are 3038 journals in the whole SSCI list (!), 107 listed under political science, and 82 under IR. There is some overlap between the last two, but the PS list does not completely subsume the IR list, as I think most of us would think it should. For example, IS is listed only under IR, not political science, but ISQ is listed under both, even though I think most people would say IS is a better journal than ISQ. Also, there is no identifiable list for the other 3 subfields of political science. I find that very unhelpful. More generally, I would like to know how T-R chooses which journals are on the SSCI and which not. It doesn’t take much effort to see that they’re almost all published in English…
Next, I thought the SSCI was only peer-reviewed, but Foreign Affairs and the Washington Quarterly (which I understand to be solicited, not actually peer-reviewed – correct me if I am wrong) are listed on the IR list, and even Commentary and the Nation magazine are on the PS list. Wow – your neocon ideological ravings can actually countas scholarship. Obviously FA should be ranked for impact factor; it’s hugely influential. But does it belong on the SSCI? Note also that ISR is listed on the IR roster, as is its old incarnation, the Mershon ISR. Hasn’t that been gone now for more than a decade? Also when you access the impact factors (after the jump),T-R provides an IR list with its ‘Journal Citation Reports’ that has only 78 journals listed for IR, not 82. So the SSCI for IR (82) does not quite equal the JCR for IR (78). Is that just a clerical error? If so, does that mean the super-geniuses in the futuristic skyscraper are spending too much time looking out the windows at the flowers? I guess if you double-count M/ISR, you get 79, which is pretty close to 82, but given how definitive this list is supposed to be, it seems like there are problems and confusions.
Anyway, I don’t really know, so I just thought I’d throw it out there. Check the IR rankings on the next page.
It’s grad school acceptance season, so here are a few thoughts if you are considering the PhD plunge. Try this genre also on the Duck of Minerva, where I also write. Enjoy your last summer to read as you choose, without following a peer reviewer or a syllabus. Such lost bliss…
Generally speaking, yes, I like being an academic. I like ideas and reading. I like bloviating at length. The sun is my enemy, and exercise bores me. I would really like to be a good writer/researcher. Including grad school, I’ve been doing this now for 15 years, so clearly I could have switched. I am committed. But there are at least 7 things I didn’t see back in my 20s when I had romantic ideas that if I got a PhD, I’d be like Aristotle or John Stuart Mill – some great intellectual with real influence on, what a Straussnik once called to me, ‘the Conversation,’ which I took in my heady, pre-game theoretic youth to be this (swoon).
1. It’s lonely.
I didn’t really think about this one at all before going to grad school. In undergraduate and graduate coursework, you are always very busy and meeting lots of people. You live in a dorm or fun, near-campus housing, you have lots of classes, you hit the bars on the weekends, you go to department functions. Girlfriends/boyfriends come and go. So even if you didn’t like 9 of the 10 people you met, you were meeting so many, that you eventually carved out a circle and did fun stuff that kinda looked like the 20-something comedies you see on TV. But once you hit the dissertation, you are suddenly thrown back on your own, and you really re-connect, or try, with your family, because they’re the only ones who’ll put up with your stress. You spend way too much time at home, alone, in a room, staring hopelessly at a computer screen. You don’t really know what you’re doing, and your committee, while filled with good, smart people who are almost certainly your friends, can’t really do this for you, even though you try to push it off on them.
Greatest Movie Line Ever on Academia: “How the Social Scientists Brought Our World to the Brink of Chaos” Hah!
If academia’s taught me anything, it’s that the real world is flawed not theory, and that facts should change for me, not the other way around. As Marxists would say, ‘future is certain; it’s the past that keeps changing,’ and Orwell famously quipped that academics would love to get their hands on the lash to force the world fit theory. (I guess Heinlein agreed; check the vid.) So I am pleased to say that the world meet its obligations to abstraction this week a little: Japan and Korea edged a little closer toward a defense agreement (here and here). A little more of this, and I can safely ignore – whoops, I mean ‘bracket’ – any real case knowledge…
Last week I argued that Korea and Japan seem like they’d be allies according to IR theory, but weren’t. I wrote, “Koreans stubbornly refuse to do what social science tells them;” obviously they don’t realize that abstraction overrules their sovereignty. I thought this was fairly puzzling, but got an earful from the Korean studies crowd about how I was living in the clouds of theory. I also learned that area studies folks really don’t like it when you throw stuff like ‘exogenous’ and ‘epiphenomenal’ at them. Once they figure what ‘nomothetic’ actually means, they think you’re conning them. D’oh!
So for those of you argued I didn’t know anything about Korea but was just blathering on about theory that had no necessary time-space application to this case, I thought I’d put up this bit from Starship Troopers. It’s hysterical – when PhDs rule the world, apparently the military has to step in to prevent us from running it over a cliff. Didn’t Buckley once say he’d rather the first 2000 names of the Boston phone book run the US government than the faculty of Harvard?
NOTE: The following was actually written before Dan Nexon posted a good piece on exactly the same essay. I’m not sure if that coincidence means anything, but here’s my take:
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So I just read Orfeo Fioretos’ “Historical Institutionalism in International Relations” (International Organization 65/2, 2011). It’s very good – erudite and sophisticated, the kind of dense, abstract writing that makes me wonder if I can keep up in our uber tech-y scientistic field. In it (fn. 18), he defines ‘institution’ as “rules and norms that guide human action and interaction, whether formalized in organizations, regulations, and law, or more informally in principles of conduct and social conventions.” Wikipedia has the nice, punchy: “An institution is any structure or mechanism of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of individuals within a given human community.”
So here is my question: What is really ‘institutional’ about these definitions? Aren’t they staying that pretty much an human behavior that occurs more than once can be an ‘institution’? And isn’t that counter to common-language usage?
I have been asked to revise and resubmit (r&r) an article submitted for an IR journal. But it’s a big r&r; the editor even said it would be “a great deal of work” (groan). While I must make the changes to the manuscript, I must also submit a letter to the editors and reviewers to explain my changes. That’s normal of course, but I wonder how the community would appraise the proper length of a letter to the editor for a major r&r? In my last r&r, thankfully a minor, I wrote 2-3 pages. But for a major r&r that “needs a great deal of work’’, I was thinking around 10 pages. Is that too much? Would that you bore you to tears ? (Actually, don’t answer that.)
More generally, I think this is an interesting, undiscussed question for the field, because I have no idea if there are any norms at all on this. I can’t recall discussing this issue ever in graduate school (probably because I couldn’t have gotten an r&r anyway and didn’t even know what r&r meant). Nor can I recall seeing anything on this in all those journals we get from APSA (so many…). So whadda ya think?
Here are some other odds and ends:
NB1: Here is an thick response from a PNU colleague to my argument that Americans don’t care enough about Asia to support the pivot. I like this.
NB2: If you are interested in Korea-EU affairs (that one’s burning up the conference circuit, baby!), I just wrote a summary at the East Asia Forum of a longer argument in the current IRAP. (Asia junkies should check out EAF if they don’t know it already.) The bumper-sticker version is that Korea and the EU relations won’t go beyond the FTA that got lots of press here, because the loss of strength gradient is so high. They just don’t interact enough to care that much. Isn’t it nice that you don’t even need to read my abstract now? It’s all about the bumper-sticker.
NB3: I got a few pieces on CNN recently – short versions of stuff already on the blog. The comments are a laugh riot, including names like ‘Shazam=Evil,” “F – — k usa,” and “Hot Downloads.’ Isn’t that why you love the internet?
Here is part one, where I noted Walt, the Duck, and Walter Russell Mead as the IR blogs I read almost always despite the avalanche of international affairs blogs now. Here are a few more:
Martin Wolf: Here’s a grad school education in IPE, op-ed by op-ed, better day-to-day than either Krugman or the Economist. Not being an economist, but facing regular student questions for years about the Great Recession and the euro-zone crisis, I have found Wolf indispensible in explaining what happened in the last 5 years – and without that ‘bankers as masters of the universe’ schtick coming from CNBC, Bloomberg, and the WSJ. Wolf is a delight to read. Like Andrew Sullivan, he is measured, changes his mind when information dramatically changes, references theory but not as ideology or fundamentalism, and has a good touch for what can realistically be accomplished in actual democratic politics.
If there is one constant to modern social science, it is that you are always under-read. There is always some critical book you missed, some article you never had time for, some classic of which you only read the first and last chapters in grad school. And this is just the modern work immediately relevant to your field. After college you all but gave up on reading the ‘great books’ in the Chicago sense – Plato, Augustine, Mill, Nietzsche, etc. That’s the stuff that really got you interested in social analysis – you’ve still got a marked up copy of Aristotle’s Politics somewhere – but if you cite these guys today, it’s usually just a lifted quote from someone else’s modern social science book that you are reading. Your own black-edged Penguin Classics are collecting dust. If it wouldn’t be so uncomfortable, it would be fascinating to hear what ‘obligatory’ international relations or Asia studies classics readers haven’t actually read and why not.
Ok, I am going to Mi-Guk-istan for the summer. I need a break. The editors of an unnamed IR journal are ruining my health with the biggest r&r (revision for resubmission of an article) of my career. Like everyone else, I say I believe in peer-review, but in reality, I am convinced it is massive conspiracy to keep me out of print by telling me to read more. Hah! So much work… So that guy in the picture will be me reading game theory at the beach.
So let me ruin your summer too. I thought a list of good articles on Asia security might be a valuable halfway-through-the-year exercise. Here is a list of some important newspaper reports on the region’s security that I have found so far.
January:
SK-Japan military cooperation: This gets kicked around all the time but seems more serious this time. If this happens, it’s ground-breaking, and China will pay attention.
War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe by Victoria Hui is most definitely not beach reading, but it’s the best book on Asian security I’ve read this year. By the end, it reaches for a unified theory of political science as a whole. Breathtaking.
As for beach fun reading that isn’t completely stupid, I recommended Rising Sunlast year. That still applies, if only because its hard to find fun books on Asian security. After that, you could try Freakonomics, or Starship Troopers. You’ve probably already read the former, so try the latter. It is easy enough for the beach but has enough politics to be relebvant. Creepily, it is the closest you’ll ever find to a major American intellectual embracing fascism. It has none of the wit of the film, and even more of the militarism and machoismo. Avoid The DaVinci Code like the plague. I finally read it, and it was worse than Tom Hanl’s mullet in the film.
Shameless Self-Promotion:
I recently published a bunch of op-eds and other stuff:
Joong Ang Daily op-ed on why the EU should be disqualified from running the IMF for awhile.
Korea Timesop-ed on why SK doesn’t need nuclear weapons yet
Korea Timesop-ed on releasing the Korean economy from the vise of it mega-conglomerates
Ok, so I can’t imagine this category has too much good stuff in it. The Matrix would probably qualify, but I can think of only one decent ‘fusion’ film so far this year: Shanghai. I liked it. It’s not great, but it’s hard to find many pictures at all about Asia that are meant for a western audience. So take what you can get.
Random final thought:
I have become addicted to the euro-meltdown-Greek soap opera. Is anyone else watching every day to see if the ECB will finally come out and say that Greece should get out? I find it increasingly hard to believe Greece can stay in. I bet Greece is out by the end of next year. Anyone else?
Regular readers will know that I part-time consult for a geopolitical consulting firm called Wikistrat, and this competition is a cool idea, especially for the IR types who likely read a blog like this. Graduate students especially should sign up for it. (And if you think you can hack it as an analyst, and you have some decent credentials, contact them. Good analysts are always in demand.)
It’s great practice for big thinking, as if you’re Clausewitz or Spykman or something, but always remember the well-know adage: “Amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics.” Before you argue that China should fix Africa or the US should fix the Middle East, remember to figure out how to pay for it, and to plan your way to that outcome (i.e., avoid America’s mistakes in Iraq). For my own version of US grand strategy in Asia, read this.
I will be a supporting judge in the competition too, so please bring your good ideas so that I can repackage them as my own. Anyway, give it a spin; the blurb is below:
Select teams representing leading academic institutions from around the world are invited to participate in the first ever wiki-based grand strategy competition. Managed by Dr. Thomas PM Barnett, this competition will provide participants with the opportunity to test their skills with global counterparts and network within that community. Participants can demonstrate their capacity for strategic thought to agencies, institutions and firms seeking to recruit up-and-coming analytic talent.
We are currently reviewing applications by groups representing top Universities and Think Tanks worldwide. There are still open spots available for this exciting event.
To nominate a team, or to see if you institute has been invited, contact us HERE.
Participation is free, and winner team will get a $10,000 prize.
Some of the issues we will cover in the Competition include (Download the full PDF OUTLINE):
I have been writing at lot here on the growing likelihood that the US will be forced to pull back from its many commitments. So on May 16, I published an op-ed on the issue in the Korea Times. It captures most of my major points. Any comments would be appreciated.
I also thought this blog-post from Walt captured the retrenchment problem pretty well.
Finally, the graph below gives you a nice breakdown of the current $1.5T deficit. It comes from here:
No one in academia talks this way to undergraduates…
In this website’s continuing tradition of reducing difficult issues to ridiculous YouTube videos (here, here, here ), the above is a nice follow-up to my previous post on teaching the Apocalypse in Asia. Didn’t you know that American academics regularly berate their students’ beliefs, plot against Christians on campus, and openly criticize students’ parents to their faces? Enjoy the above for the ideology, but maybe the director should sit in on an actual class sometime…
Back in the 1990s, I worked for moderate Republicans and donated to GOP candidates; my 1996 vote for Bob Dole for president is still the most heartfelt vote I ever cast. So I still get the occasional right-wing email, and none better than this recent one pitching the movie above:
Fellow Patriot–
I wanted to forward this message about The Genesis Code, the conservative movie of the year! It deals with some important conservative issues that deserve to be discussed: the intersection of faith and science, the right to life, and discrimination against people of faith in American higher education.
When paleontology student Kerry Wells is told by an academic advisor that she’ll need to choose between her faith and her career in academia, she begins a search for truth that will touch the hearts and minds of everyone around her.
Despite the fact that university studies are purported to be a marketplace of intellectual diversity, Kerry’s constant inquiries in class and involvement in Christian campus ministry lead the faculty to consider her unfit for a life of science. Can her determination and academic talents overcome the department’s prejudice against religion?
For the actual website, try here. To be fair, I have not yet seen the film.
For Asian readers, I post this stuff once in awhile just so you have a sense of where the bizarre US stuff you see in the news comes from. I get lots of questions out here like, wth Palin is about, what is up with loopy Tea party, why do Americans think Obama is Hitler, etc. I have warned before that the American Right’s extreme reaction to Obama’s election is delegitimizing America’s global leadership. Why would anyone follow the US when 1 in 3 Americans think Obama is a Kenyan imposter or something? Not only is all the paranoia unnerving in itself, but it has real foreign policy consequences – namely that the rest of the world – which US conservatives claim we lead – thinks we are batty. The above vid is yet another demonstration of the kind of creationist idiocy that Asian science institutions simply would not tolerate.
I also feel compelled to note the unbelievably ridiculous portrait of academia yet again on display in film. That Chinese professor ad (plus Dr. Strangelove, Wargames, and Fail Safe) got people thinking we are fascists; network TV shows show us regularly sleeping with our students; Indiana Jones and Michael Crichton make us into skilled gunmen and adventurers; Bret Easton Ellis thinks we’re lazy druggies (also sleeping with our students); Michael Bay apparently thinks we can rant out authoritarian sexual innuendo without students/faculty noticing or caring; theSocial Network treats us as behind-the-curve prigs; in Animal House, we’re tedious ballonheads; Tom Clancy turns us into lefty traitors; and of course the absent-minded professor is a stock character across media. In the Christian apocalyptica genre, we are written in as postmodern stalinists responsible for tyrannizing our conservative students (while secreting pining to sleep with them presumably) and de-Christianizing America.
Yet none of this even close to accurate; I am still waiting for a movie with professors who actually look and talk like what I know. I’ve been in academia for more than decade and my father’s been in it for 40 years, and I can’t think of one good movie that actually shows what professors really do and how we really interact with our students. Sure, individual professors do dumb things, but I challenge anyone to find quantitative data to support the classical stereotypes listed above, much less the Christian right view that university is some kind of liberal concentration camp. The portrayal of the professor in the media is so routinely inaccurate, I feel compelled to say something, especially to the Christian righties who are convinced we’re tenured atheists stripping patriotism and faith from students. To see what we really do, in all its boring, nerdy scholasticism, take a look at the sort of dry, Tylenol-PM-in-print articles that fill the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The vast majority of our time is spent in fairly mundane office work – meetings, grading, research. Most of the professors I have known take this stuff reasonably seriously, and come to work on time and dressed properly to do their jobs with no more or less level of commitment than other knowledge workers. Yet almost no movie portrayals of academia actually show this; the most realistic portrait of higher education I have seen in the last few years in a film was in Knowing.I have never known a colleague who slept with a student or schemed against them, lost his a glasses on his forehead, got in wild adventures in the field, or fought ideological wars against student groups. The latter can get you in a lot of trouble, as students have grievance recourses the above vid clearly doesn’t show.
Very rarely do we get students coming to our office to simply to talk about ideas and life and what not; the Kerry character described in the third quoted paragraph is extremely rare. Far more common student behavior, and real issues that universities grapple with, are illustrated here or here. When students do come to see us, it is usually some need or grievance: grades (why did I get an F even though I never bought the book?), attendance (can I get the last 4 weeks of classnotes?), recommendation letters (how can I get into Yale on 2.5 GPA?). And we certainly don’t get into personal criticisms and harsh career counseling like in the vid above. The professor’s behavior is shockingly unprofessional, and I dare the director to find real evidence that this is common.
My point is that, yes, we are usually secularist, not Christian, and cosmopolitan, not nationalist. But students almost never come to our classes to fight for God and nation against us. Their needs and concerns are far more banal and everyday. Far more of our interaction with students is coaching them through hard material (I know you loathe the book, but Wikipedia is not really a substitute), trying to professionalize them (you can’t just cut class for a week or two and expect a bailout), begging and pleading with them to read (cliff notes are a high school gimmick you have to give up now), encouraging them to study and not just party away the four years (even though we did that too). It’s a lot more about management, mentoring and helping than about ideology. And if students raise their hand to discuss God and evolution, our response is to rejoice that students want to participate on a meaningful, exciting topic, not to stomp on them like some KGB of atheists.
So please, before yet another insulting, idiot, ideological, or conspiratorial portrayal of academia, someone make a movie that actually looks like college. That would be a real ‘revelation’…
I am happy to announce today that I am partnering with the international politics and economics consulting firm Wikistrat. Wikistrat provides geopolitical analysis, some of it at cost, but it is a good site for readers of this blog. Its foci and temperament are close to mine, so I am pleased to be an affiliate. I encourage you to take a look. Readers will find it more digestible and less theoretical than my writing here, as it is meant for policy-makers and corporate clients (i.e., regular people). So, mercifully, it is not formal IR theory. I will join the Wikistrat family of blogs and analysts that includes most notably Thomas Barnett.
Close readers will note that I cite Barnett probably around once a month here and that he is on my blogroll. I find him an excellent analyst especially of globalization, the US military, and China. His book The Pentagon’s New Map is an well-known interpretation the relationship between globalization and conflict after the Cold War. It has enough IR theory to satisfy the academic in you, while enough policy-relevance that laymen could read it too. Very nice. It was one of those books, like the The End of History or the World is Flat, that caught the zeitgeist well and gets cited all the time (including critically). I can comfortably recommend that book to to any reader of this website. I taught it in class, and the ‘core-gap’ map has become pretty famous.
FULL DISCLOSURE: Besides being a Wikistrat blog affiliate, I am a partner analyst as well, so this is a relationship I believe in. It should be said though that I do receive a small commission if readers click through on the Wikistrat advertisement on this website and then sign-up for its for-pay services. However, there is NO editorial control exerted. The Wiki folks are professional and committed enough to respect and solicit independent input.
For part 1 of my thoughts on the Egyptian revolution, go here.
4. China shot its own people; Egypt has not. Much of the analysis has focused on possible parallels with Iran 1979. But another more recent parallel, especially relevant to this website, is Tiananmen Square 1989. In their moment of crisis, the Chinese turned their guns on themselves, and the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) will be forever stained by the blood of its own citizens en masse. This strikes me as major moment in the evolution of dictatorships. All dictatorships suffer from legitimacy problems, of course, but none want to openly rely on naked force. Militaries are usually the hidden albeit central prop in dictatorships, but they don’t actually want to do the dirty work themselves. That is for the paramilitary thugs and secret police. No officer wants to think the primary enemy of the a state’s military is its own people, not some foreign enemy. Their dignitary and right to rule is based on the whole idea that thy are defending the people, not massacring them; in fact this is the myth of 1952 Free Officers coup in Egypt itself. Hence the call by a dictator in dire straits to shoot the citizenry is a rubicon for any army that cannot be uncrossed. In 1989, the eastern European militaries balked; in China, the PLA did not. My sense is that the social costs to the PLA were lower though, because China is so big. The CCP purposefully brought in rural PLA units for whom Beijing was like another planet. But in small countries like Poland 1989 or Egypt today, army repression in the capital would immediately be felt and transmitted everywhere. So hear, hear to the Egyptian military (I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence). For all its corruption, despotism, and insulation, it still did the right thing when the chips were down. Did anyone imagine even a month ago that we’d be speaking of the moral superiority of the Egyptian military to the PLA?
5. Beyond this evident parallel to Beijing 1989, this is whole things isn’t really that relevant out here. The news media coverage has been thin. The current El Nina cold snap in Northeast Asia has gotten more press time regionally than that Egypt. Not surprisingly the Chinese haven’t discussed Egypt much, but I am disappointed the the Korean and Japanese press seems so disinterested. Initial Korean media coverage focused on the possible loss of ME export markets (groan). From this I would draw two conclusions. First, for all the talk about a flat world, cultural hurdles still matter a lot. The parties caught up in the war on terror (the West, Israel, the Arab/Muslim ME) are riveted by this, but East Asian’s just aren’t, sadly. My experience in East Asia is that locals don’t really care much about the developing world. It’s far away, the languages and religions seem unintelligible, and the societies look backward, especially to East Asians obsessed with development. East Asians worry a lot about the US, and some about Europe, but there is tremendous ignorance of places like Latin America or Africa. Second, I think this disinterest is as much political as it is cultural. Newly wealthy places like Korea or China demonstrate their earned, rightful place in the OECD through an almost purposeful disdain for the third world. Koreans love to demonstrate how worldly they are by spending a year in the US or West; I’ve never met a student or teacher who thought a year a in developing country would be vastly more interesting. (It is.) So Barnett’s ‘new core’ flaunts its new status by forgetting its roots in the third world: disinterest as a mark of superiority.
6. A comment about the commentary: Frank Rich is right that far too few people have any idea what to say on Egypt because so much of the commentary is really about the US (or Israel). This Amero-centrism is why so many are saying the US should do this or that: the working assumption is that that US guides the world and can easily direct events. This is no longer true, so the mountain of US, rather than Egypt, -focused commentary creates unrealistic expectations that we can direct this thing.
Rich also makes the excellent observation that if Americans could actually watch al Jazeera, they might actually learn something about Egypt itself. Instead the mainstream commentary has revealed the embarrassingly nativist ignorance of much of the punditocracy on anything beyond US borders. In general I was very pleased to see how well academics requited themselves in the blogosphere on this; I think especially Walt, Mead, Cole and the Duck of Minerva have been super.
But if you read the op-ed pages, you got recycled banality and the usual suspects: Friedman gave you his typical, ‘this-is-a-defining-moment-in-the-ME’ schtick; Bush neocons desperate for rehabilitation strove to take credit and somehow blame Obama for…what exactly?; Palin blithered; Parker told us that the big story was really about the US media and Cohen that it was about Israel; Colbert King forgot the rest of the world exists; and Beck, well, you already know – just watch the loopy video from part 1. Score yet another point for blogging.
Without the informed blogging voices of people who actually know something about Egypt and revolutions, you really wouldn’t learn much about the events at all. You’d have just gotten an endless series of stories from a royalist, uncosmopolitan press in which Washington was the real story, because that’s all the pundits know how to talk about. Douthat, for example – and whom I think is a pretty good writer usually – clearly had nothing to say, so he just gave up and wrote about Obama yet again under the guise of Egypt. How easy; this is how the press for a nation of untraveled monolinguists infatuated with their own power evolves. Its all about us. By contrast, here is an example of a non-expert, trained in traditional Washington self-obsession, who nonetheless tried.
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ADDENDA:
The Japan Security Watch (JSW) blog of the New Pacific Institute has taken to cross-posting some of my stuff. JSW is a good review of Japan, and a nice a compliment to my over-focus on Korea and China. They do on a lot on the nuts-and-bolts of hardware and deployment. Mil-Tech junkies on Asia will love it. JSW and I are working on some cooperation in the future. I want to thank them and commend readers to take a look at their good website.
BusanHaps, the big expat newspaper for Busan, SK, has also reposted some of my stuff. I want to thank them too and commend their site. Busan readers almost certainly know it already, but non-local readers will find it a good window on the way expats live here.
Finally, I want to point out that a published version of my remarks on North Korean shelling of Yeonpyeong Island is now available here (RINSA 15) from the Korean National Defense University (KNDU). If you really want to get into the details of SK defense against N, KNDU is the place to go. I want to thank them for soliciting me and thank readers for all the helpful comments that went into the final product.
First, Chalmers Johnson has died. This happened in late November, but the Yeonpyeong shelling captured the attention of my blogging. But given how important he was to the study of East Asia in political science, this should be mentioned here. This is very sad for our field. Two years ago, when Samuel Huntington died, I felt the same way. These guys are what we all aspire to in political science. I can’t think of one thing I have written in my career that I would recommend over an article by someone like Johnson or Huntington. Every time I whine about Asian mercantilism, Johnson’s work is in the back of mind (as is Robert Wade’s). I read Johnson’s Asian political economy stuff in grad school, and I see it living in Asia all the time. That is what our field is supposed to produce – these sorts of durable, well-researched insights that make our world a little more understandable. Very nice, and a genuine loss. (This is why we have political science, by the way.)
To be sure, Johnson jumped the rails in the 2000s with Bush and the Iraq War. I read the Blowback trilogy after the Iraq invasion. The first one is the best, but by the time he gets to the last book and starts musing about a military takeover of the US, you’re wondering if this is the same guy who wrote path-breaking research on Asia. Johnson was in good company though. Lots of other good left-wing foreign policy writers were pushed over the edge by W also; Chomsky and Bacevich spring to mind. Read Michael Lind’s useful deconstruction of how the foreign policy left kinda lost its head over W. But still, I think this stuff is quite valuable. It is a useful check on US neo-con fantasies that unipolarity and American exceptionalism mean rules don’t apply as much to the US as to others. It is hard in retrospect to think the Bush presidency wasn’t a disaster for the US, and Johnson, corrected for overstatement, will tell you why on foreign policy. (For an example, of lefty criticism that maintained better perspective on the Bush years, try here.)
2. Living in Asia means I missed the full coverage of the Wikileaks flap. My sense generally is that they don’t tell us too much we didn’t already know. I think Carpenter gets it about right here, and Yadav gives an excellent IR take here. I would only add 2 things:
A. Occasional random revelations like this might actually serve a foreign policy purpose. They remind others in world politics that for all our diplomatic niceties, we can see right through them and know they are flim-flaming us. This brings a certain (inappropriate to be sure) pressure on these guys to get their act together. It is kinda nice to see the Russians reminded that we are under no illusions about Putin’s closet semi-dictatorship, or for the N Koreans to know that we are thinking about a world beyond their nasty, civilian-murdering slave state, or for Robert Mugabe to know that we basically think he’s bonkers. Secretary of State Clinton is absolutely correct that this stuff should not have been leaked, but didn’t anyone else find it refreshing to hear US diplomats speaking honestly and insightfully? Wasn’t it pleasing to hear US officials trenchantly blow off the world’s buffoons? I was pretty impressed actually at the quality of their off-the-cuff analyses, and pleased to see my tax payers dollars contributing to this work.
B. I worry about the long-term build-up of secrecy in the US government under the cloak of national security. Lefty writers like Johnson or Bacevich will even tell you we live in a National Security State now. A healthy democracy requires openness and transparency. Over time, stuff really should get declassified. It is the property, in the end, of the taxpayers and the voters, because it is our government. Assange himself seems to be drifting toward toward some bizarre hexagonal conspiracy theory stuff, but I am sympathetic to the general notion that the US is too secretive and that the presumptive prejudice in the US bureaucracy should be for declassification unless otherwise demonstrable and clear national security grounds can be established. An Economist blogger captures my concerns pretty well, and of course, the Bush administration, once again *sigh*, is responsible for much of the recent fear of secret government in the US. Greenwald, as usual, nails the hypocrisy of those defending spiralling classification.
3. This is unrelated, but if you haven’t read this description of the 30 worst pundits-turned-hacks in the US, you should. It is a great dissection of everything wrong with journalism masquerading as social science, too frequently in the service of ideology. It is left-biased, but so what. It is punchy, trenchant, humorous, and good warning to everyone with a blog (me too) to do you homework and not just recycle your prejudices. It illustrates one of the great benefits of the Internet – independent bloggers and others can fact check and hit back in real-time. It makes me worry that maybe I recycle stuff here…
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.
Crunchy numbers
The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 17,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 4 fully loaded ships.
In 2010, there were 99 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 220 posts. There were 192 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 10mb. That’s about 4 pictures per week.
The busiest day of the year was November 25th with 980 views. The most popular post that day was The North Korean Shelling.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were rjkoehler.com, facebook.com, blogs.the-american-interest.com, en.wikipedia.org, and lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for asia security blog kelly, asian security blog, expatriate tax, robert kelly asian security blog, and stag hunt international relations.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Daryl Morini, an IR PhD candidate at the University of Queensland whom I know, has put together an interesting global survey for undergraduate and graduate students of international relations. It looks pretty thorough and might make a pretty interesting student couter-point to the Teaching and Research in International Politics (TRIP) report on scholars’ attitudes. Eventually the goal is an article on our students’ attitudes toward the discipline; here is the full write-up of the project at e-IR. So far as I know, nothing like this has been done before (please comment if that is incorrect), so this strikes me as the interesting sort of student work we should support. Daryl’s also made an interesting effort to use Twitter as a simulation tool in IR, so I am happy to pitch this survey for him. Please take a look; Daryl may be contacted here.
. Good thing they didn’t see the bar behind me!
