Part one of my response to Obama’s 2012 State of the Union is here.

3. The foreign policy section was weaker and more militaristic than usual. The opening bit about the Iraq war making us ‘safer and more respected around the world’ was jaw-dropping. I guess this really is a campaign speech outreach to the right, because I can’t believe any of the president’s 2008 voters actually buy that line. Does anyone really believe that anymore, except for the right-wing think-tank set or something (ok, I’ll admit I did until a few years ago, but not now)? Wow. Didn’t people vote for Obama because of exactly the kind of Bushian American hubris that can read an unjustified, unprovoked, unilateral assault on another state (which would have provoked howls of rejection by Americans if done by any other country in the world) as a great American victory? Veterans too got a pander wishlist – even though even Michelle Bachmann (!) has come to realize that VA benefits will have to be included in any budget deal.

Next came the deeply disturbing comparison of the US democratic body politic to a special forces team. Wow, again. Really? A wildly diverse, sprawling, open, liberal culture should look to JSOC for its model? We are not a nation of armies, and the discipline and anti-individualism of the military is exactly not what we want in our politics. We want our politics to be open, rich, boisterous, a bit chaotic, even fun; we want a social culture open and tolerant enough to create artists and musicians, entrepreneurs and eccentrics, poets and hippies and weirdoes and all that. This is basic Mill here, not Starshship Troopers. This reminds me of Huntington’s infatuation with a military lifestyle compared to pluralism in the Soldier and the State. The militarization of American culture since 9/11 is terrifying, and that even the president would deploy such analogies is all the more reason to end the war on terror and slow the growth of the military-industrial complex.

Finally, I guess Israel now is pretty much a state in the union: our guarantee is ‘iron-clad,’ which sure sounds a lot like a blank-check for Netanyahu to do something erratic. Iran, here we come! And you’ll notice there was nothing on the much-hyped ‘Asian pivot,’ which I am convinced is bogus, because Americans don’t care about Asia.

4. The 2010 GOP response was so reliably jingoistic, shallow, and self-serving, I gave it its own post. But was anyone else really pleased to see how restrained, polite, and professional Daniels was? I was amazed; I expected Tea Party-style hysteria about un-American influences, appeasement on ‘islamofascism,’ incipient erosion of the Constitution under ObamaCare, betrayal of allies, etc. (Where’s Glenn Beck when you need him?)

Instead Daniels was measured and his concerns reasonable. He called the GOP a ‘loyal opposition,’ rejecting the extremism of the GOP presidential debates about Obama as the greatest threat to American since WWII or something. He noted the president’s upright personal life. Ideally this wouldn’t make a difference in a liberal state’s politics. I couldn’t care less how many wives Gingrich has had, but the GOP has become worse than the nuns of my Catholic grade school on sex. The modern GOP wants to regulate the bedroom and the family, so it is nice to see Daniels admit that Obama meets that standard (hint: Gingrich,Limbaugh, and Rove don’t). He also noted how Obama didn’t create the crisis, even if he bucked how much W is actually to blame.

The criticisms that then followed were fairly reasonable. He’s right that we can’t just keep spending like this. Our status as a reserve currency printer does not permanently insure against a Greek-style run (although it does give us a lot more room to misbehave than anyone thought). The math on middle-class entitlements and debt is pretty terrifying over the next generation.

Here’s Sully again on Daniels, saying something similar. See how nice is to have a midwest Republican speaking like a normal guy? Kinda makes you like Ohio after all, huh?

Cross-posted at the Duck of Minerva.

Each year I try to write on the SotU (2010, 2011). I know they are preposterously scripted, usually forgettable, and almost meaningless as a guide for the upcoming policy season/budget debate. But the political scientist in me thinks that showing the whole panorama of democratic government in one room is hugely instructive for the both US citizenry and for foreigners interested in the US, as well as a great example of how democracies differ from oligarchies and dictatorships with their sycophantic, faux ‘legislatures.’ Let’s hope that somewhere some Chinese, or Burmese, or Syrians can see this and dream that one day they too can … play their own SotU drinking game.

Further the SotU’s often give insight into the presidential mind (however distorted by focus groups) – what he thinks is important or not, ideal preferences for the country, American ‘exceptionalism,’ etc. In this vein, George W Bush’s 2005 SotU was easily the most important of my lifetime, as W laid out a soaring and terrifying image of the US a global democratic revisionist prepared to war for freedom indefinitely. It scared the pants off the country and the planet, but that in itself made it a major, frightening moment in the W presidency. So I still think we should watch them. But, I will grant that you should probably play one of those drinking games while you’re at it.

1. Domestic’s not my area, but I have to agree with Sullivan that this was just a grab bag of bleh. Instead of the big issues like deficit control, entitlement restraint, broad tax hikes (to actually pay for the government we want), defense spending control, etc., it was a bunch of populist/protectionist tax alterations that, as Sullivan notes, will make the tax code even more impenetrable than it is. Isn’t there pretty much a national consensus now that the tax code needs to be simplified? And the protectionism masquerading as ‘bringing jobs home’ was ridiculous – an unworkable tangle of new law, more government, more lawsuits at the WTO. That’s the last thing the world economy needs in the great recession, and you know MNCs will fight this stuff tooth and nail, move resources even faster, relocate, lawyer up like hell to find the loopholes, etc. If you are one of those conspiracy theorists looking for socialism from Obama, you finally got some evidence. This verged toward old school Democrats-from-the-70s industrial policy.

2. What a lame sop to manufacturing. I understand why, and part of me appreciates it. I’m from Cleveland; I have seen lots of small towns in Ohio get hammered by globalization and contraction of manufacturing (it can be fairly depressing to drive around the state). For decades, I have seen Cleveland slip and slip and slip; the city’s east side is so violent now. But honestly, this is the sort of stuff politicians always say to Ohio and the Midwest when elections come up. Not only is it bad economics (hold that thought), but, as Michael Lind and Thomas Frank have pointed out for years, the Midwest has never seen a big industrial turn-around despite the bi-annual pandering we get as swing-states. The first half felt more like campaign speech on my old street to get the neighborhood out to vote for Democrats, because this is the type of stuff the Ohio Democratic Party has been saying as long as I can remember. I imagine other midwestern listeners would think the same, but this was pretty much the ODP’s playbook, and Obama even mentioned Cleveland.

Part two will go up in two days

Cross-posted at the Duck of Minerva.

This year I will be cross-posting my work on the international relations theory website, The Duck of Minerva. For readers of my site interested in social science theory in world politics, the Duck is a great place to start. Readers will also find the comments section much more vigorous than here on my own site. I encourage you to visit the Duck. The writing is fairly complex, and its contributors are excellent. I am flattered to be asked to guest-post this year. I’d especially like to thank Vikash Yadav for his solicitation.

I have been teaching IR (international relations theory) in Korea for almost 4 years. Generally, it’s a lot like teaching it in the West. The same theories get circulated, and we read the same journals. My university, a big state school, is organized a lot like any Big U in the US – dozens of departments, huge faculty, growing administration, a large middle class student body (but no student athletics). As at home, my department has theorists, internationalists, comparativists, and Koreanists. In fact, given how far away the Western system is geographically, it is almost a little too easy, too seamless. I guess this means political science really is a globalizing discipline.

So here are a few macro-lessons I have picked up teaching and conferencing IR in Asia:

1. Your feeble skills are no match for the power of the American Empire, young PhD. Ron Paul voters and retrenchers beware. If you think America is an empire, bullying hegemon, overbearing interventionist, or otherwise enjoy Steve Walt’s blog, you’ll be a lot more struck by the obviousness of the US presence than in Europe. I lived in Germany in the 90s, but the US footprint here is a lot more outstanding. Korea is pretty much ground zero for the ‘empire of bases’ argument of Chalmers Johnson, and the State Department couldn’t care less about your hotshot PhD from the People’s Republic of Berkeley. At conference after conference, you see the American influence everywhere. I meet people from Heritage, CSIS, Brookings, the US State Department, and the US military on the rubber chicken circuit regularly, and the party-line on the US presence in Asia is enforced pretty vigorously. Even though there’s a deep IR consensus now that the US uses too much force and faces retrenchment due to overstretch, the US community here studiously avoids mentioning things like the implications of the staggering US debt on its alliances. There is a real collision between what I read as an IR guy, and what I hear on the policy conference circuit.

My own feelings are mixed: I worry a lot about overstretch and the growing excesses of the national security state, but I can think of few uses of US force more noble than defending a democracy like SK against the worst country on earth. Still, the commitment to forward basing and extended deterrence is all but universal, and don’t dare call it empire (as, ironically, do neocons when they’re candid, as well as a lot of my students). You can ask why the US should spend 5% of GDP on defense (actually its closer to 8%) when Japan spends less than 1%. You can ask if perhaps we should be ‘nation-building at home’ (Obama) with 9% unemployment, instead of semi-encircling China.You can ask if the massive US global footprint, including 28k warfighters plus another 100k contractors and family members in Korea, might chain-gang the US into an unwanted Asian war even though SK’s GDP is 26x NK’s.  But you’ll get no good answer other than suspicion that you like Neville Chamberlain. The think tank-industrial complex ‘fusion’ around endless engagement is deeply entrenched.

2. English, English ueber alles. Cultural imperialism abets my laziness, or, as a professor in grad school once told me, ‘you don’t need to learn languages, because it all gets translated anyway.’ Ah, yes,  luxuriate in your Anglo-American social science supremacy, because thankfully Asians actually tolerate your linguistic lameness on your behalf! My colleagues’ patience with my atrocious Korean is legend, but English is everywhere – conferences are offered with simultaneous translation (try to imagine that at APSA), journals will double-print with translations, Korean colleagues all speak English and don’t even bother to expect you to try anymore (so embarrassing that), support staff too speak fluently, and, perhaps my favorite, you can watch Korean, Chinese, and Japanese scholars duke it out among each other in English at the conferences (that was a real shock the first time I saw it – I guess I had a vague sense they would all speak Chinese). So if you think that culture is a tiresome linguistic quirk blocking your equations and Verstehen is ‘soft,’ Asian IR is here to vindicate your monolinguistic laziness masquerading as universalist rationalism!

3. One American IR ring to rule them all. Somewhere in grad school, I remember that whole discussion about IR as an American social science. Once again, you can really see that here. Korean PS  journals are filled with regular laments about how little indigenous Korean political theory there is, and how concepts simply get pulled over from the US and maybe they don’t fit. IR here is most definitely that way. I’m 12 time zones away, but everyone around me still reads IO, IS, ISQ, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, OUP, etc., etc. In the same way I am uncomfortable with the cultural imperialist undertones of the ubiquity of English, I find the overwhelming dominance of US IR somewhat disheartening (as do many of my colleagues). In what had to be the most surreal and disturbing moment in this vein, I was in Beijing for a conference on China’s rise. A Chinese IR grad student was walking me around (showing me the Forbidden City and such). When the conversation turned to her training, there I was recommending to her what to read (Friedberg, Kang, Ross, and Hui), in English, on her own country! All I could think of was how much more this woman would ever know about China than me, and here I was telling her what to read – and it was a bunch of Americans. So embarrassing.

Cross-posted at Duck of Minerva.

Part two will go up in a few days.

It’s time for a break. Blogging is pretty time-consuming, so I need some down-time. I will be back in mid to late January, and I will be cross-posting at the academic international relations blog The Duck of Minerva. After 2.5 year of blogging, I am excited to step up to something with greater visibility next year. Academic readers especially will find that site a good one, and I want to thank the Duck’s outreach guy, Vikash Yadav, for inviting me.

So while your guzzling too much eggnog for New Year’s, I have tried to put together a list of stuff from 2011 that is worth your time. I try to avoid academic articles and stick to informed journalism that is easier to digest. Here we go:

SEPTEMBER

Friedberg’s essay in the NYT on China is a big one. Friedberg is a major thinker in the ‘China threat’ school, and you should read him even if you disagree with him. Here is the book for the full argument. The jury is still out on China, and Friedberg is major pessimistic voice you need to know. (For my own thoughts, try here.)

Here is an important response to Friedberg.

Korea is finally starting to recognize that the US may be too broke to protect it the way it expects. I have been saying this for two years, but it is a breakthrough when I major Korean political scientist says this on the op-ed page of Korea’s second newspaper.

Finally, this is a breath of fresh air on a point I belabor constantly.

UCAVs are everywhere now I guess. Does anyone else find this worrisome? What are the rules for these sorts of drone strikes? Is this constitutional? Who knows…

This should sicken anyone who thinks we are fighting for liberalism in the GWoT. Yet another reason the GWoT will be regarded as a catastrophic error in 20 years.

OCTOBER

This doesn’t say anything you don’t already know, but when the chairman of the best political science department on the planet talks on Asia, you should listen. Here is the follow-up.

Rachman nails the dilemma of Asian states dependent on exports to China for growth and the US for security. At some point, the choice will come (hint: they’ll choose China in the long run: it’s big, local, and not broke).

IS on NK.

No US Retrenchment from the Pacific: I guess any SecDef would say this, but do we have the money for it?

More and more I think trying to contain China is a mistake, but more and more I think it is likely.

NOVEMBER

Etzioni nails it on China’s (and Asia’s generally) near -obsession with sovereignty. Asia is Hegelian (today, even if it wasn’t until recently).

More on why the drone war should give everyone pause. I worried about this earlier.

Honestly, it is about time someone said this.

 Bases in Australia now too…

I want America’s globocop role to decline to find money for domestic needs too, but if this is probably too far…

Sketching Chinese hegemony to an American audience. Walt’s response.

The US deployment in Australia as incipient China containment? (Last year I argued that containment of China is pretty likely.)

A good antidote on the China hype. More and more I read about the build-up of internal problems in China (demographic, ecological, representational) that are papered over by super-growth. But one day there will be a reckoning, and an early China peak, more than any US turn-around, may save US hegemony in Asia.

The longer I live in Asia, the more I think US-led containment of China is both a mistake and inevitable.

These tragedies are far too common for a ‘benevolent hegemon,’ and should give every hawkish neocon ‘national greatness’ commentator pause.

Going dovish on China, and more and more, I agree.

A fundamental statement of American values in the Asia-Pacific from the Obama White House. Good stuff.

I probably whine too much that the US is slipping toward empire, so here is a nice reminder of why we AREN’T an empire in the traditional way. When we are told to go, we go. Americans should be proud of that respect for other states’ choices, but I am sure there are GOP presidential candidates who would say we should ram it down the Pakistanis throat anyway.

DECEMBER

I increasingly argue on this website that the US should probably retrench, at least for awhile, because we’re so overstretched and broke. Here’s nice piece on that without all the hysteria that that means isolationism, the abandonment of allies, the breaking of US national security, etc.

This guy clearly has no idea what he’s talking about…

More on how we are over-hyping China. I am starting to buy into this stuff. For awhile on this site, I have been arguing that America is slipping and that we need to retrench a bit. But increasingly I read expert commentary that argues that China’s own rise is slow. This reminds me of Ned Lebow’s argument that the end of the Cold War was a race of who declined the least fast (ie, the USSR declined faster than the US, so the US ‘won’). If China’s rise is slowing, this bails-out US hegemony (in relative terms) by reducing the pressure of rising challenger. Maybe US hegemony will have a longer life in Asia after all…

US torture isn’t even an open secret anymore; it’s just a fact.

I lamented US citizen Awlaki’s extrajudicial killing by the US and had some sympathy for his father. Yet it turns that dad is nut-job islamist too. ugh. I find this crushing, as it will clearly justify the killing to many and makes it yet hardly to maintain rule of law in the GWoT.

Tough questions for those who want USFK to stay in Korea. Money quote: “the Roh Moo-hyun government insisted that American forces based in the ROK could not be used elsewhere in the region without its consent.” A similar rant.

How can America’s presence in Asia be less militarized?

This is most important finding to come from international relations academic discipline since the democratic peace idea of the 1990s. Read this.

My own take on Kim Jong Il’s death; vastly more important though is the Juche-Funk

Read this and this, and then tell me the GWoT hasn’t gone way too far.

And finally, a bit of humor for your break:

h/t to Jon Western at Duck of Minerva

In part 1, I tried to offer some comparative national cases (France, Israel, US) by which non-Koreans can get a handle on Korea. Today, I thought it would be useful to use some conceptual, rather than national, benchmarks. I can think of at least four sociological conflicts through which Korea is moving simultaneously, and hence make it such a boisterous place to live:

1. Korea is still trapped in the Cold War. Ok, this is not exactly a transformation, but it must be ranked near the top of sociological stresses here. This must be hard to grasp for westerners for whom the USSR is thankfully history and for whom salafism is current enemy. Yet living in Korea is like a 1980s timewarp. At the conferences I go to on Korea security we talk about communist infiltration (!), nuclear deterrence, throw-weight and missile ranges, the nuclear calculator, defense-in-depth, etc. Its like NATO circa 1983! (For someone raised on Red Dawn, Mad Max, and Rambo and trained in game theory, there is something disturbingly comfortable about this 80s retro. My students always giggle when I accidentally refer to Russia today as the Soviet Union. Wait! is that Duran Duran on the soundtrack?)  As you might imagine, this creates enormous continuing psychological pressure on Koreans, not to mention the continuing the cold war-style national division. The overwhelming national desire is to simply put this behind them and got on with the future, but NK keeps pulling them back…

2. Korea is democratizing. Like most countries, Korea doesn’t have much of a democratic tradition. Liberalism and democracy are foreign imports. Korea’s own traditional politics are a weak monarchy complimented by a super-literate but fairly reactionary Confucian literati. To be fair, these guys actually governed Korea pretty well. Until NK totalitarianism (which is a Soviet import anyway), Koreans had no real experience with extremist government. Koreans didn’t fight too many wars before the West showed up in Asia in 1839; there was almost no religious persecution here; Korea never kicked up a megalomaniac like Napoleon or Qianlong. So give the Choseon Dynasty its due – compared to the violent, expansionist, hysteria-prone states of Europe last millenium, Koreans were quite gentle. I admire that. But the old ways were definitely hierarchical, feudal, and personalist, and you still see that here. I hear all time from expat businessmen that they must take care of legal or regulatory issues in Korea through personal contacts in the relevant bureaucracy rather than formal submissions. The impersonal rule of law of egalitarian democracy is a work in progress, and Korean politics remains a very closed, technocratic elite game, in which democratic voting doesn’t actually change much. This is why Koreans street-protest so much: the normal channels of democratic voice and participation (voting, parties, etc) are shallow. So you can see the hangover of the old Confucian elite ways as Korea struggles to build a more participative democracy.

3. Korea, a very traditional place, is modernizing very fast. Koreans are very proud that their history stretches back about two millennia. Korea’s borders (Yalu and Tumen rivers) have basically been settled for a millennium. So they have a pretty definite notion of identity, and it is a distinctly pre-modern agrarian, feudal, and conservative image. Korean TV and film are filled with stories about this or that king fighting to protect the nation, and all the characters are wearing highly stylized traditional clothing – the flowing robes characteristic of premodern Asia, called the hanbok  in Korea (and yes, men wear them too). Yet Koreans are also plowing headlong into the future of gizmos and technology and modernism generally. Current architecture is relentlessly modernist; Koreans love high, super modern skyscrapers. The fashion industry is huge and very hip.  They love gadgets. I see people watching TV on cellphones in underground subways for example. Just about everybody has lightning fast internet in their house. Online gaming is wildly popular. When I lived in Europe, I had lots of those tiresomely lofty, bloviating ‘Heidiggerian’ conversations about how technology is stripping away the human persona all that. Koreans are exactly the opposite. If the ‘Matrix’ were real, some of them would sign up, and if robots take over the world, I am sure they will have been made here. In short, you have almost reactionary sense of national cultural identity colliding with a youth-driven, super-modernism for technology.

4. Korea is pluralizing. Also colliding with this stable, somewhat backward looking sense of national identity is the rapid pluralization of both religion and ethnicity in the last century. While I do think the discourse of Korean multiculturalism is overhyped, there is no doubt that Korean’s demographics have changed more in the last 100 years than the last 1000, and more in the last 10 than in the last 100. Christianity has spread very rapidly, and Korean religious life is more diverse than any other OECD state I can think of. And in the last 15 years or so, Korea’s foreign population has jumped from basically zero (but for US soldiers) to over 2%. For Americans accustomed to immigrants, this is no big deal, but for a population raised on the idea of an integrated ethno-cultural identity (the minjeok), this is a huge and rapid shift that creates a fair amount of tension(which, to be fair, I think they manage pretty well).

Or was it Dr. Strangelove?

Some friends from Reuters asked me to comment on KJI’s death with these questions:

How stable is North Korea today, with the news of Kim’s death?

Pretty stable actually. When Stalin and Mao died the whole show didn’t tip over. Insiders took a bit more power from the now-missing center but more or less followed their previous roles initially. The Kim family network all have an obvious and deep interest – at least now, before the sorting out of the new pecking order – in preventing implosion. They’re all deeply vested in a brutal, human-rights abusing regime, and they would face SK post-unification courts with access to the death penalty if it all came apart. So the chance of civil war or implosion in the coming days is pretty close to zero. The real test will be in the next 6 to 12 months as the factional conflict heats up over the distribution of gains, particularly access to the badly-strapped national budget, in the nouveau regime. I think China after Mao is a good analogue here.

How prepared was the North for this scenario?

Better than we’d think, but still not too well. Highly personalized regimes, by definition, are institutionally poorly prepared for transition at the top, because the ‘sun-king’ has structured the system that way. Like Bismarck, Hitler, or Mao, they keep the underlings jockeying and guessing, but when they go, the hole in the middle is big. It took KJI years to solidify his rule after his father Kim Il Sung,  and even KJI could only do that by leading the army personally, likely to forestall a coup. That said, NK has gone this through before, and familialism of its elite and dynasticity of its succession alleviate some of the factional tension authoritarian successions generate. Ie, because they are all related to each other (like any good mafia), they are less likely to turn one another. That is the whole point of appointing relatives to high positions. But nepotistic grooming didn’t have the full time to play through, because Kim Jong Un hasn’t been the dauphin long enough. NK is much less well-prepared than in 1994 (KIS’ death).

How prepared are Seoul, Washington and Beijing?

Not very. As General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev’s health declined slowly, the West had time to adjust to rising factionalism and stagnation in the USSR. Brezhnev showed up less and less in public; the faces on the stage at Red Square changed to show who was up or down. This barely happened in NK; KJI was travelling and walking around in Russia just 4 months ago. My sense is that most of us thought KJI had recovered reasonably well from the stroke and might hang on for a few more years. This was a sudden heart attack that caught everyone by surprise.

How ready is the young Kim Jong-un to take over?

Not very. 1) He is young, which cuts against Korean cultural-Confucian standards of age matched to authority. 2) He has no experience in the military, which is now the central institution of the regime. 3) He does not have the years of ‘training’ and experience in Pyongyang backrooms to groom the connections necessary to govern a mafiaosi-like kleptocracy. Indeed, he seems to have no real political, military, educational, scientific, or other training for this role at all. The name is all he’s got, but that is central for the regime’s legitimacy given its hyper-patrimonialism and ideology. So my guess is that he will be kept for continuity and legitimacy but will basically become a figurehead for an emergent soft military junta (like Myanmar).

Who are the real leaders, now Kim Jong-il is dead?

The Korean People’s Army top brass and the National Defense Commission, because KJU is weak and they have the guns.

What role does the military have right now?

Regime Stabilizer. The extended Kim family is like the Corleones in charge of a whole country – shaking down SK, the US, the UN, China, and anyone else for aid and cash, counterfeiting currency, committing insurance fraud, dealing drugs, etc. Try to imagine that Brando’s Godfather character took over a whole state and ran it like a corrupt casino to rip off just about everyone – most obviously the NKs themselves. The nukes are just the biggest gun pointed at the world to force an offer no one can refuse.

But it is the military that keeps the internal peace and wards off the outside world to keep this whole racket running. So long as the KPA gets to keep their constitutionally exalted position (‘military first’), and their generous access to privilege and the budget that it entails, I see no reason to think the KPA will overthrow KJU. Why not keep him as a figurehead, and the Kim family in general as the fall guys in case the whole thing does collapse? Let them face the angry Southern courts and swing from the gallows. That said, I do think the army’s role will increase substantially. We know  that there was some resistance to yet another dynastic succession, and that the Kims seem given to megalomania and a god-complex which the army must know is hugely dangerous. So my thinking leans towards an emergent junta with the Kims as a figleaf.

I have written a lot on NK. Here is the whole list. Here are some of the better ones: post-KJI as a military dictatorship; policy options (all bad) for dealing with NK; Arab Spring and NK; and the parallels between Korea and Germany on unification. For some humor on those famous NK traffic cops, try this.

Part two is here.

I get lots of questions from Western readers about this or that aspect of Korea in comparison. We don’t really know about Korea too much, but Americans often use it as an example for some larger political point they want to make. Here are a just few examples: 1) Obama: SK is kicking our butt on education and tech; 2) Obama: SK is an example of a country that modernized but didn’t westernize; 3) Michael Crichton and Amy Chua: SKs and other East Asians are work robots who will take over America and cost your kids a job; 4) John Bolton: Long-suffering SK gives us an excuse to stomp on NK.

Of these, I really think only the second is valid. A few years here can rebut the others without too much trouble:

1) Korea has huge educational problems that Americans don’t really know about. After taking insanely difficult tests in high school in order to place into a good universities, Korean college students often slack and party as a ‘reward.’ Too much of university here is about building the informal social network that will carry you through your professional life and not actually clamping down to do the work. Korean students are also not the readers that college education demands, which is why they often struggle in US graduate programs. And far too much of K-12 is focused on rote memorization, so plagiarism is a huge problem. Also, in case you ever wonder why Korea is so wired (which Koreans love to brag about), recall that Koreans live in very dense urban clusters, frequently in high rises. These are very cheap to wire, compared to the far more diffused American population and the high expense of the US ‘last mile.’ (That said, my broadband here is awesome and is about to get even better.)

3) As for Crichton and Chua, gimme a break. America’s inability to balance its budget, control its imperial temptations in the developing world, fix its K-12 schooling mess, reduce hyper-inequality and high crime, etc. are the reasons for US ‘decline.’ Asians like the Japanese, Koreans, or Singaporeans don’t have some magical growth formula. I will agree that East Asians are better ‘socially disciplined’ (crime here is mercifully low), but not the way Amy Chua’s ridiculously racist domestic fascism would have you think. I’ve been here close to 4 years, and I have never seen anything like what Chua describes in the Korean side of my family. As for the ‘Asians-as-work-robots’ idea so popular in the US in the 80s and 90s, once you’ve experienced the East Asian post-work business culture of hard drinking and debauchery, you know that’s bunk too. I have seen enough Korean ‘salary men’ lean out taxi windows on Friday night to vomit while the driver waits complacently to know that the whole ‘Asian values’ schtick is a fraud.

4) Bolton: I resent the way neo-cons manipulate SK unhappiness about national division to suit pre-existing ideological preferences for regime change and US military activism. This is cloying, pretended sympathy in service to American, not Korean, goals; that’s extreme bad faith. I have noted before that SK want nothing to do with ‘Axis-of-Evil’ talk.

Given this mediocre record of popular comparison, here are a few comparative classifications of SK with countries western audiences might recognize better. Compare and contrast is a basic social science method. And comparative politics in political science is always looking for similarities among states on which to build generalization. So here are the ones that have leapt out to me:

1. Like Israel, Korea is a barracks democracy striving for international normalcy. Both are democracies but under long-term siege. Both would like to join the global economy, get rich and be normal, but can’t. Both struggle to maintain civil liberties in an threatening environment with inevitable slippage. Korea, for example, blocks internet access to NK websites; in Israel, Israeli Arabs can’t join the military. Both are trapped in partial or incomplete states. Korea is half a country, and Israel’s borders are up for debate. Both are too militarized for a democracy, but still, they are doing a really good job balancing a huge military role in society with democratic freedoms. By comparison, look at simlarly over-militarized democracies like Indonesia, Pakistan, or Turkey.

2. a. Like France, Korea has aloof, farily corrupted political class in a too-cozy, corporatist relationship with business. Both also have weak political parties and weak legislatures. So voting doesn’t really make much difference; political participation looks for other avenues.  As a result, both have a vibrant street protest tradition. Working for serious change within the system feels pointless because of an entrenched, circulating elite, toothless opposition, close party-state relationship, and a bureaucracy rather insulated from popular pressure. So when Koreans and French are most angry, they turn to extra-parliamentary means. They march on the streets. Immobilist, scandal-ridden politics channels real political grievance onto the streets.

b. Also like France, Korea is extremely centralized on the national capital. Seoul dominates Korean life, vacuuming up talent, wealth, and prestige from around the country. The goal of just about everyone is to go ‘up’ to Seoul, whether for school, the best jobs, or the best cultural life. You even see it among the expats. Even we foreigners in Busan say we wish we had a Seoul gig! And, as Paris does to the provinces, the rest of Korea is impoverished by this.

c. Finally, both Korea and France are semi-presidential systems. Both have a tradition of a megalomanical ‘father of the nation’ who created a super-presidential post above ‘grubby’ politics. In France, de Gaulle directed the ship of state from a constitution he set up for his own personal benefit as the living embodiment of France. In SK, Park Chung-Hee did the same thing. In both countries though, political institutions are weaker than you’d think because of their ‘great man’ origins. Eventually a succession must occur – no one lives forever – and both France and SK have struggled to tame the office of the president and build more routinized, democratic institutions open to the public. To date, France has succeeded better. Korea remains a very presidentialized semi-presidential system. Ironically, that may help Korea, because the rise of the prime minister in French semi-presidentialism has effectively created a bifurcated executive, particularly when the PM and president have different party affiliations. In Korea, the reduction of the PM to essentially the first cabinet minister has helped unify its executive.

3. The cultural gap between the West and East Asia is wider than the between the West and Latin America, Russia, or even the Middle East. In terms of food, music, religion, and language, the differences are far greater. So it is therefore all the more surprising how Americanized Korea is. English is everywhere – in the schools, on street signs, music, TV. Its institutions, especially military ones, are heavily patterned on the US; until 1981, the Korean version of the CIA was even called – the KCIA! Today there is still the K-FDA. Koreans watch lots of American TV and film. They eat our fast food and junk food (and are getting heavier for it). And they are beginning to pick up the American culture wars. They fight increasingly over stuff like abortion and the death penalty as we do. Korean evangelicals (yes, they are here too) even say that God has a special mission for the US no less! (Now that really is brainwashing.) My own personal guess for why Korea is so Americanized, is that if Korea can close the cultural distance between it and the US, the US is more likely to honor its alliance commitment and fight for SK. In other words, cultural Americanization is a national security strategy to reduce the ‘otherness’ of Korea to average Joe American, in order that he will agree to fight here. Kinda smart if you think about it.

Don’t push any of these analogies too far, but Obama mentioned Korea five times in the 2011 State of the Union, so I thought this might help.

Continue to part two.

Quick IR test: name that dictator!

Regular readers will know that I have blogged about the parallels between Germany and Korea at length before: here and here. This week the Korean Journal of Defense Analysis published the long-form version of my argument. It is available here for free in PDF. KJDA is a great little publication in east Asian security is your area, and it is offered for free too. Very nice.

Comments on the argument are always welcome. I thought because everyone always implicitly compares NK to EG, and possible Korean unification to Germany’s experience, it would help to formalize the comparison at length. The bumper sticker version is that NK is about 10x poorer than EG, so unification will be way harder and more expensive than the German experience.

A foreign IR professor in Seoul argued to me that starting from the German analogy is an error, perhaps one that is flattering and preferred by Koreans because it turned out so well. A better parallel might be Yemen’s reunification, which worked out far less well. That seems pretty harsh to me. SK is a lot more like WG that either of the Yemens. For other comparison cases to Korean unification, try this.

Here is the summary section from the PDF:

To recap, domestically, there are more North Koreans than East Germans,
and they are much poorer as well. There are fewer South Koreans than West Germans,
and they are (albeit less so) less wealthy also. South Korea’s state capacity is lower
than West Germany’s, while North Korea today is dismal by even the former East
Germany’s standards. In sum, fewer people with less wealth in a weaker system will
support more people with less wealth from a worse system. That domestic calculation
is punishing, on top of which the international balance of forces is worse now than
in 1989 too.

Internationally, today’s external patron (the United States) of the free Korean
half is weakening, while the external patron of the communist half (China) is
strengthening. The opposite was true of the United States and West Germany, and
the USSR and East Germany, in 1989. Today’s northern patron (China) is trying to
push further into the continent (Asia), while yesterday’s eastern patron (USSR) was
looking for an exit (from central Europe). Nor is there is a regional encouragement,
revolutionary wave, or democracy zeitgeist that might accelerate the process. The
incentives for China to meddle (because of the greater importance of North Korea to
China, than of East Germany to the USSR) and the greater ease of such meddling
(because the United States and South Korea today are weaker than the United States
and West Germany were then, while China is much stronger today than the USSR
was then) mean Chinese intervention is likely. It will almost certainly seek to structure
any final settlement. The major policy question emanant from this paper’s analysis is
therefore: Will South Korea forego the U.S. alliance if that is required to remove
China from peninsular affairs? Will South Korea exchange neutralization for unity?

————————————–

So I got my wife a Kinect for Christmas (yes, it is very cool, but it’s a pain to set up your living room for it). While browsing for it, I found ‘Blackwater – the Game.’ Wow! Mercs for kids! Phenomenal! Who came up with that idea?! Recall that the Kinect is meant for the non-gamer types and kids (like the Wii). I understand that there are already lots of military-style shooters at home, and some of them are genuinely brutal and extreme. Yet Blackwater of course is/was a real firm, implicated in some of the most controversial moments of the Iraq War, and the game is on the wii-like Kinect. So do you really want your kids playing hired guns in Iraq? At least in most shooters you play a ‘public-spirited’ character (ie, a soldier); here you’re just killing people for money – a great lesson for little Johnny, I geuss.

Blackwater of course is gone now. Its called Xe today, but apparently former CEO Erik Prince owns the rights to the name and I geuss he needs the money. I’m just not sure what to think. On the one hand, I think realism and/or edginess improve gaming and make it less ridiculous; that’s why I don’t mind Grand Theft Auto or Halo, and I thought Bioshock was super. But mercs for kids is probably a new low. In any case, the game is terrible apparently.

And here is another nice item for the Korean-watchers. We bought a TV mount for the Kinect. It costs $20 on Amazon, and $36 in Korea. Yet another example of how Korean mercantilism and the weak won policy are killing Korean consumers by making everything pointlessly, outrageously expensive here. What possible explanation besides politics can there be for an 80% (!) price differential like that on such a mundane, irrelevant product? Ugh.

Mackinder’s famous map is on the left; Barnett’s is on the right. Here is Mackinder’s famous article; here is Barnett’s book.

It is a slow fall for Asian stuff. China is behaving better; Japan and SK are quiet; NK always seems like its building a new military installation somewhere, but it’s fairly quiet too. If you missed KJI’s birthday though, click here. The big recent new is the US decision to ‘shift’ toward Asia and the placement of US forces in Australia. Last year, I predicted that the US would lead a containment ring around China (yes, I realize that that is not a very gutsy ‘prediction’ at this point in the game). I see this as the first step. So here are some big geopolitics thoughts on the US shift, because I was re-reading Mackinder for work.

Halford Mackinder practically founded the field of geopolitics single-handedly with his famous article and the above map. It became the informal basis of US strategy in WWII and to certain extent, justified Cold War containment: keeping the Soviets penned into Northeast Eurasia. So it’s easy to roll this over to China. Mackinder’s map privileges land power. Mackinder thought the center of Eurasia constituted the ‘heartland’ that would be the pivot of global dominance. (China could arguably be a part of that, as it is far more populous than Siberia.) His famous quote was: Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.” Generations of German, Russian/Soviet, and (to a much lesser extent) American cold war strategists, took this as established wisdom. And indeed, I argue similarly in my Geopolitics article. The US is safe behind two big oceans, so long as no one controls all of Eurasia. If Napoleon, Hitler or Stalin had managed to control that whole stretch though, then a transoceanic invasion of the US might actually be possible. (Inter alia, it was Mackinder who coined that term ‘Eurasia.’) Probably the most famous exposition of the heartland theory’s importance for the US was from Frank Capra (yes, the guy who made It’s a Wonderful Life.)

Barnett comes more from the traditional American school privileging seapower, best known from the work of A T Mahan. Mahan thought (and Teddy Roosevelt agreed) that a powerful US navy was a the shield of the nation against the chaos of Eurasia. There is no need to get into long wars about the heartland; off-shore balancing is possible. The long US naval tradition is why the heartland school was never as dominant in the US as in Eurasia. Even though the US invented the nuke and has fought a land war in Asia for a decade now, the US is still firstly a naval power. I also think Barnett’s map reflects the American infatuation with technology and capitalism. Mackinder’s image is very traditional or realist: big states with big industries build big armies to conquer big spaces. This is a recipe every land strategist from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz could love. Barnett goes around all that to re-write geopolitics politically not militarily. In post-industrial economies, the control of land isn’t so important anymore (people’s brains are a lot more important than their manual labor in the fields of Ukraine). The critical divide is then between those states that function and those that do not. The functioning ones join globalization, get rich in the process, and then can use their wealth to set the rules. The nonfunctioning ones can’t grasp the benefits of globalization, generate all sorts of asymmetric problems, and are therefore the locus of military conflict. Policing failing states as spaces is more important the conquest of strategic territory. In Barnett’s world, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, etc. are the threats of the future; in Mackinder’s China should start bullying central Asia and maybe Russia soon.

Has Barnett’s vision of Eurasia divided into functioning and failed states replaced Mackinder’s land-power realism? It seems to me that this is a good test of whether or not globalization is really changing a lot. If China and Russia become status quo powers, then yes.  Then the only big issues will be integrating the periphery and rogues into the world economy. In this environment, salafism and other ‘remnants of war’ becomes the biggest challenger (headache really) to the US. But Russia, and especially China, pursue major changes in the land order in Asia, then score one for the realists. And America’s decision to base in Australia now too says Obama is leaning against Barnett-Mahan offshore balancing, toward forward deterrence of Asia domination.

I would add to other factors to this macro-musing:

1. A strong test of these competing maps is Chinese and Russian behavior if US power weakens. Radical Islamists, driven by the fear of God, will assault the West regardless of the chances of victory. So in that sense, Barnett will always be correct. But Russia and China are more rational. If US unipolarity holds, they are not likely to challenge the US, so then we’ll never know if the Russians and Chinese have changed because of globalization or were just deterred. But if the US declines, if military power genuinely disperses, and multipolarity emerges, then look for a challenge. As Beinart notes, “Offshore balancing, by contrast, reemerges when the money and bravado have run out.”

2. Global warming will raise the importance of the Heartland. In 1943, Mackinder noted the importance of the river basins in the Heartland. Fortunately for the West, those that flowed into the Arctic were blocked mostly be ice. Russian/Soviet naval power was forced to the fringes – Vladivostok, Leningrad, Odessa. If the Arctic truly meets permanently, perennial land power Russia will immediately become a sea power too. This would be an unprecedented shift, as geographic obstacles like the Arctic ice pack have generally been understood to be permanent, immovable features of geopolitics.

In the wake of the recent sexual assaults on Koreans by US soldiers in Korea, I was asked by the Korea Herald to participate in a debate about whether US forces in Korea should leave. (On the assaults try this and this. For NK manipulation of this as evidence of US “fascism,” try this.) It is terribly awkward in the wake of three assaults to argue that USFK should stay, but ultimately I think Korea benefits enormously from the US commitment.

My op-ed on the subject was published here on Tuesday, and is reprinted below:

USFK is in Korea’s Interest, but US Budget Pressures are Growing Fast

Whenever US soldiers in Korea misbehave egregiously, Koreans naturally soul-search on whether USFK should withdraw. This is proper; soldiers sexually assaulting teenagers is horrific. The debate also usefully signals to the US that Korea not be taken for granted. But in the end, Koreans have always hewn to the US, even after George W Bush famously alienated South Korea by placing NK on the ‘axis of evil.’ South Korea is the overwhelming beneficiary of a very one-sided relationship and terminating the alliance would dramatically weaken Korea in a very difficult neighborhood.

Korean foreign policy is structured by its dismal geopolitics. The traditional saying that ‘Korea is a shrimp among whales’ is accurate. Middle-power Korea is surrounded by three great powers with a history of intervention and bullying, and bordered by one of the worst tyrannies in history. As such, an alliance with a powerful external partner (the US) gives Korea critical leverage where it would otherwise be dominated. For the all US misbehavior in ROK history – from questions around the Kwangju suppression to the personal issues of ‘ugly American’ behavior – no serious ROK policy-maker has ever wavered from the belief that the US partner critically boosts SK autonomy against local encirclement. Because the US alliance gives Korea desperately sought local leverage, the US in turn has significant leverage over Korea. This is a cause of great consternation among proud, nationalist Koreans and explains enduring anti-Americanism, especially on the SK left. Conversely, it is the reason the Korean government so dramatically emphasizes English acquisition and exposure to the US. Americanization of what is otherwise a Sinic-Confucian culture reinforces Korean cultural compatibility with the critical US ally.

The contrast for the US is quite sharp. With the end of the Cold War, the utility of the Korean alliance to America has fallen significantly. A widely unappreciated fact in Korea, almost a willful blindness, is that a NK victory over SK would not dramatically impact US security. As a fellow democracy, the US would of course lament such an outcome, but with the end of expansionist Leninism as a threat to the US homeland, there is no longer an East-West balance in which Korea is a central weight. The Korean division is now a more local problem, to which the US is devoting fewer resources. It is well-known that USFK has shrunk over the years; the Combined Forces Command will be shortly abolished; and USFK is no longer stationed in a ‘hair-trigger’ posture on the DMZ. To Americans, with many global concerns including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, failed states, the drug war, climate change, and so on, Korea is one theater among many. Surveys of US public opinion by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs have found since the mid-2000s that only 40% of Americans want the US to fight in Korea, even if NK attacks first. A major conflict in Korea would be vastly more destructive than the recent war on terror, possibly involve nuclear weapons, and pull the US into a massive, unwanted post-war nation-building project, especially if SK is devastated by nuclear strikes. Given how badly the war on terror has flown off the rails in the last decade, American reticence about getting ‘chain-ganged’ by an alliance into another major war in Asia is predictable.

In short, the alliance is dramatically balance-positive for Korea, but increasingly neutral for the US. It is no longer clear what the main US benefit from the alliance is (this applies to many US alliances actually). Typically, the answer is that Korea is a central node in the American alliance network in Asia. But that just raises the next question of why the US needs a large, expensive Asian military footprint. Typically, the (unspoken) further step is that this will help contain China. But again, why the US should contain China is unclear. From an American national security perspective, China is primarily a local Asian dilemma. States like India, Japan, Australia, and Korea should really be dealing with that first, unless one believes the US should be a semi-imperial ‘globocop.’

‘Globocop’ hegemony may appeal to US allies in tough places (Korea, Israel, Afghanistan, Georgia), and it may be ideologically attractive to US neoconservatives, but is also very expensive, pulls the US into many conflicts of marginal value to US security (Iraq, Vietnam), and, most disturbingly, makes America morally culpable for violence, however justified, around the planet, including the deaths of non-combatants. In short, the US is flirting with empire, and the history of empires is often unhappy – too many wars, too much borrowing, over-extension leading to national exhaustion and institutional decay. Today, the US is on this path. By almost any definition, the US is overstretched. The military has been fighting continuously since 2001. The budget deficit is a staggering 10% of GDP; total debt is $10 trillion. National security spending is 25% of the budget. Post-Great Recession economic growth is anemic. For years the US disregarded its own values and tortured prisoners.

In such an environment, the US will eventually have to make hard choices about foreign commitments. Some measure of global retrenchment will likely happen, if only because the US is dallying with bankruptcy. Those Koreans who would like USFK to leave may be pleased to see the US pushed to the edge of insolvency, with a looming USFK retreat under budget pressure. But far more widespread will be anxiety about whether US relative decline will semi-abandon Korea in a tight neighborhood increasingly overshadowed by Chinese power. Do Koreans want to go it alone?