What is the state of the intellectual in politics? BYDANIEL W. DREZNER MARCH 14, 2006Over atThe American Interests web site,Francis Fukuyama and Bernard-Henri L?vy have a fascinating exchangeon the relative merits of L?vysAmerican Vertigo. The part I found particularly fascinating comes near the end:FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: The idea that an intellectual must always speak truth to power and never compromise means for ends seems to me a rather naive view of how intellectuals actually behave, and reflects in many ways the powerlessness of European intellectuals and their distance from the real world of policy and politics. Of course, the academy must try to remain an institutional bastion of intellectual freedom that is not subject to vagaries of political opinion. But in the United States, to a much greater degree than in Europe, scholars, academics and intellectuals have moved much more easily between government and private life than in Europe, and are much more involved in formulating, promoting and implementing policies than their European counterparts. This necessarily limits certain kinds of intellectual freedom, but Im not sure that, in the end, this is such a bad thing. I myself worked for more than ten years at the RAND Corporation, the original think tank satirized in Stanley Kubricks Dr. Strangelove that did contract research for the U.S. Air Force and Defense Department. Obviously, one cannot be a free thinker in a place like that (Daniel Ellsberg tried to be and he was fired), and that is one of the reasons that I eventually left to go to a university. But overall, I believe that a democracy is better off having intellectuals pay systematic attention to policy issues, even if it is occasionally corrupting. Having to deal not with ideal solutions but with the real world of power and politics is a good discipline for an intellectual. There is a fine line between being realistic and selling ones soul, and in the case of the Iraq war many neoconservatives got so preoccupied with policy advocacy that they blinded themselves to reality. But its not clear that virtue necessarily lies on the side of intellectuals who think they are simply being honest. BERNARD-HENRI L?VY: Thats it. I think we have come to heart of what divides us. The problem lies with the definition of what you and I call an intellectual, and beyond its definition, its function. Unlike you, I dont think an intellectuals purpose is to run the RAND Corporation or any institution like it. Not because I despise RAND, or because I believe in Kubricks burlesque portrayal of it. No, I just think that while some people are running RAND, others no more or no less worthy or deserving should be dealing with, shall we say, the unfiltered truth. A democracy needs both, imperatively and absolutely both?realistic intellectuals and idealistic intellectuals. Both types and the functions they embody have recognizable places inside society, even if some societies value one type more than the other. America needs intellectuals with a selfless concern for sense, complexity and truth. This is just as essential to its equilibrium (possibly even to its moral fiber and therefore to its good health) as the existence of universal suffrage or the separation of powers ? la Montesquieu.I suspect that Fukuyama would not disagree with L?vys express desire for both kinds of intellectuals. I do wonder, however, about the health of the institutions that support both sets of intellectuals in the United States. [What about Europe?ed. Oh, Lord know, the situation is probably worse there but thats not my concern here.] The trouble with think tanks and the like is a seasonal topic of conversation in the blogosphere. As for the academy, well, lets just say that many of my colleagues make Hollywood seem politically grounded by comparison. Is the system broken? If so, can it be fixed? If so, how?

The limits of political science BYDANIEL W. DREZNER DECEMBER 15, 2006The November 2006 issue of theAmerican Political Science Reviewis a special one: The Evolution of Political Science. Commemorating the 100th anniversary of theAPSR, it consists of about 25 short essays discussing how the APSR has treated various political phenomena. Theres something for everyone in this issue. History of political science is not as widely taught as history of economic thought, but those who are interested should check out the whole issue particularlyMichael Heaney and Mark Hansens take on The Chicago school of political science. Conservative critics of the academy will delight in laughing atMichael Parentis rant about how political science is a conservative discipline. World politics types will likely findBruce Bueno de Mesquitas essay worth of perusal. The one that stands out for me is Andrew Bennett and John Ikenberrys The Reviews Evolving Relevance for U.S. Foreign Policy 1906-2006 Bennett and Ikeberry go back over all of the IR contributions to the APSR. Their chief finding? Even in the good old days when the APSR actively publshed policy relevant work, political scientists did not appear to be clued in to the brewing problems of world politics:To read early issues of theReviewis to be reminded that aspiring toward policy relevance is quite different from achieving it, and that any policy influence the profession does achieve will not necessarily be in directions that future historians will find praiseworthy. Just as theReviewand the political science profession in general failed to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, theReviewbefore 1914 conveyed little sense that a cataclysmicworld warwas imminent.The journal did publish an article on the Balkans (Harris 1913), but it did not focus on the larger power transitions taking place in Europe until publication of a rather realist analysis of ?The Causes of the Great War? after World War I had begun (Turner 1915). In this same time period, the Review was filled with articles putting a favorable emphasis on international law as a means toward peace. After World War I, the Review played a role in the ?idealism-realism? debate of the 1920s (Carr 1940), largely favoring the idealist side with more than a dozen articles through the decade on the League of Nations or international law. Former President William Howard Taft, for example, launched a staunch defense of the League of Nations in the Review (Taft 1919). Only one article in the journal in the 1920s included the term ?balance of power? in its title, and this article strongly criticized balance of power politics and argued that the building of international institutions was the best answer to the problem of war (Hoard 1925). In the 1930s, a handful of articles began to focus on the issues that would precipitate World War II, including the Manchurian crisis, nationalism, and the geographic bases of states? foreign policies, but no articles were fully dedicated to assessing the international implications of the rise of Hitler or Germany. Articles sympathetic to the League of Nations process, on the other hand, continued right up until the spring of 1939 (Myers 1939), although an article critical of international law appeared in 1938 (Wild 1938).It is an interesting piece of trivia to know that not one, but two presidents have published in theAPSR. UPDATE: Commenters point out a possible selection bias question it might be that political scientists did generate useful predictions, but these predictions were simply not published in theAPSR. This is a valid point, but I think it applies better to the post-1945 environment than the pre-1945 one. Most of the major IR journals International Organization, World Politics, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution did not exist before 1945. All of the policy journals, except forForeign Affairs, were not in existence. Therefore, prior to 45, theAPSRwould have been the predicted outlet for scholarly work on world politics. On the other hand,Foreign Affairsmight have siphoned off a few articles. I know of at least one person who received tenure at a major research institution, when their only publication was aForeign Affairsarticle.

The kind of conversations that happen at IR conferences BYDANIEL W. DREZNER OCTOBER 23, 2007UPDATE: As God is my witness,I did not know about thiswhen I posted the exchange below. The following transcript approximates a real exchange that took place at the conference I attended this past weekend among serious members of the international relations community. This is a true story. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent:POLICYMAKER A: You know, theyve done experiments with monkeys where they have to do tricks to earn a cucumber. The two monkeys can see each other do the tricks, as well as the rewards they receive. After a few days of trick, cucumber, etc., the experimenter gave the first monkey a cucumber, but then gave the second monkey a red grape after his trick. The first monkey nibbled at his cucumber, but did not finish it. The next day, this was repeated. And the first monkey took the cucumber and threw it on the ground. The third day, the first monkey took the cucumber and threw it at the experimenter. So the point is, all primates have an innate sense of fairness, and will react when they see it violated. IR THEORIST A: Heres the thing if the experimenter shoots the monkey when it throws the cucumber, the other monkeys will process that information as well. So its not only about a sense of fairness, its about survival. POLICYMAKER B: Yes, the experimentercouldshoot the monkey, and maybe that would cow the other monkeys into submision. If you keep shooting monkeys, however, it might encourage the remaining ones to rise up and overthrow the experimenters and establish their own cucumber plantation.For the rest of the conference, this last exchange was referred to as the cucumber paradigm. I wonder ifGeorge Orwellhung around international relations types all that much.I am considering for my introductory World Politics class in the Fall. I call it IR Vocabulary, and the basic idea is to split students into pairs and have each pair go off and find consensus definitions of key IR terms, My intuition here is that in order to have a good discussion about world politics, there are some basic terms that we need to know; some of these terms are more or lessempiricaland refer to objects in the world, while others are more or lessconceptualand refer to ways of making sense of those objects. [Yes, yes, this is an unstable distinction; yes, empirical terms are conceptual and vice versa . . . but there is still a difference, if only a difference of degree, between a term like 'the balance of power' and a term like 'the Security Council.']So heres my question for all of you: if you were going to draw up a list of twenty key terms that people ought to have working definitions of in order to sensibly and meaningfully talk about world politics, what would they be? What is the basic vocabulary that people have to know before they can start in with the arguing and the debating and the pondering?

The ten worst books in international relations BYDANIEL W. DREZNER APRIL 10, 2009Its "top ten" week here atForeign Policy,and the powers that be have asked me to chip in with a list of my own.The thing is,Steve Walt poacheda lot ofthe booksI would have named on my own list of top ten international relations books (if theres real demand for a "top 10" books in international political economy specifically, let me know in the comments andIll put one up next week). So, rather than replicate Steve, lets have some fun what are the tenworstbooks in international relations?In one sense, this question is difficult to answer, in that truly bad books are never read. Smply putting down books by bad people Mein Kampf,etc. is kind of superfluous. The books matter less than the person.So, lets be clear on the criteria: to earn a place on this list, were talking about: Books by prominent international policymakers that put you to sleep; Books that were influential in some way but also spectacularly wrong, leading to malign consequences.In chronological order:1.Norman Angell,The Great Illusion. This book has been widely misinterpreted, so lets be clear about what Angell got right and got wrong. He argued that the benefits from international trade vastly exceeded the economic benefits of empire, and therefore the economic motive for empire no longer existed. He was mostly right about that. He then argued that an enlightened citizenry would glom onto this fact and render war obsolete. Writing this in 1908, he was historically, spectacularly wrong.2. E.H. Carr,Nationalism and After. CarrsTwenty Years Crisisis one of the best books about international relations ever written. This is not that book. Here, Carr argues that nationalism is a passing fad and that eventually the number of nation-states in the world will be reduced to less than twenty. Since this book was published, U.N. membership has at least tripled.3. Paul Ehrlich,The Population Bomb. The first of many, many, many books in which Ehrlich argued that the worlds population was growing at an unsustainable rate, outstripping global resources and leading to inevitable mass starvation. Ehrlichs book committed a triple sin. First, he was wrong on the specifics. Second, by garnering so much attention by being wrong, he contributed to the belief that alarmism was the best way to get people to pay attention to the environment. Third, by crying wolf so many times, Ehrlich numbed many into not buying actual, real environmental threats.4. Shintaro Ishihara,The Japan That Can Say No: Why Japan Will Be First Among Equals Written at the peak of Japans property bubble, Shintaro argued that Japan was destined to become the next great superpower. Whoops.5.Kenichi Ohmae,The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies. Plenty of management consultants have tried to write the Very Big Book. And plenty of authors have predicted the demise of the nation-state in their books. Ohmae encapsulates both of these trends. Still, theres something extra that puts him on this list over 90% of the footnotes in this book are to other works by Kenichi Ohmae. Its the most blatant useof the footnote as a marketing strategy that I have ever seen. 6. Robert D. Kaplan,Balkan Ghosts.Kaplan argued that "ancient hatreds" guaranteed perpetual conflict in the Balkans. According to his aides,this book heavily influencedBill Clintons reluctance to intervene in the Balkans for the first two years of his presidency.7. Caspar Weinberger,Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon. Back when I was a grad student, I needed to check out the memoirs of Reagan cabinet officials to see if there was anything that could e gleaned about a particular case. George Shultzs memoirs were chock-full of useful bits of information. This book, on the other hand, was a vast wasteland of barren prose.8. Warren Christopher,In the Stream of History: Shaping Foreign Policy for a New Era. Makes Weinbergers memoirs seem exciting by comparison. ZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.9. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,Empire. Ordinarily, this massive exercise in generating non-falsifiable arguments about an actorless empire would have slipped into obscurity a few months after publication. In this case, however, Emily Eakin claimed in theNew York Timesthat it was the "next big thing" in international relations. Which meant this book was inflicted on a whole generation of poor, unsuspecting IR grad students.10. Kenneth Pollack,The Threatening Storm: The Case For Invading Iraq. In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Pollacks bookbecame the intellectual justification forDemocrats to support the invasion. And we now know that result.

What I told the Navy BYSTEPHEN M. WALT JUNE 18, 2009I spent Tuesday at the Naval War Colleges annualCurrent Strategy Forumand participated on a panel on Strategic Challenges and Opportunities with John Ikenberry of Princeton and Mitchell Reiss of William and Mary. I thought the panel went very well, with interesting contributions from the other panelists, adroit management by moderator Jonathan Pollock, and some excellent questions from the large and responsive audience.I occurred to me thatFPreaders might be interested in what I had to say on our panel, so what follows is a slightly truncated version of my remarks. The global balance of power is and will remain very favorable for the United States, and that the main dangers to U.S. security in the near-term are various self-inflicted wounds. In other words, the United States can do more to harm itself through misguided policies than our adversaries can do to us through deliberate acts of malevolence. We shouldnt drop our guard, in short, but we should also take care not to shoot ourselves in the foot.This view is at odds with a lot of contemporary writing about Americas international position. Over the past several years, for example, several prominent books and studies have concluded that Americas position is deteriorating and that a new MP world is rapidly emerging. For example, both Fareed ZakariasThe Post-American Worldand the National Intelligence CouncilsGlobal Trends 2025study argue that the rise or resurgence of Russia, China, the EU, Brazil, and India are recreating a multipolar world, and that this will have profound implications for U.S. foreign policy.This prediction is mistaken, or at least premature. To begin with, the U.S. economy still dwarfs the other major powers. According to theWorld Bank, US GDP was $13.9 trillion in 2007, compared with $4.3 bn. for Japan, $3.3 bn. for Germany, $3.2 bn. for China, and $2.8 bn. for Great Britain. In 2007, therefore, the US economy was bigger than next four powers combined. Its true that the U.S. economy took a big hit in 2008, but so did everyone else, including China.Second, U.S. military power dwarfs all others, despite our difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not only does the United States spend more on national security than the rest of the worldcombined, but no other major power spends as large a percentage of its GDP on national security as the United States does. Not surprisingly, no country has the global reach of the United States or the capacity to operate with near-impunity over most of the worlds common spaces.

Third, this situation isnt going to change very much, because the United States is the only advanced industrial power whose population will grow significantly over the next few decades. Most European countries have low birth rates, which means their populations are both shrinking and getting older. This trend is especially evident in Russia and also in Japan. Chinas population will projected to increase slightly over the next twenty years and then begin to decrease, as the effects of the one-child policy kick in. China will also have a very large demographic bulge of retirees, which will be an increasingly costly burden over time.The United States, by contrast, is going to continue to grow, in part because U.S. birth rates are higher and also because legal (and illegal) immigration to the United States will almost certainly continue. The United States will have theyoungest populationof any major power in 2030, therefore, which is good news for our long-term strength.If you project out to where these various economies are going to be in 2030, U.S. prospects look good and the chances for true multipolarity seem remote. My Harvard colleague Richard N. Cooper projects that by 2030 the US share of world economy will decline only slightlyfrom 28 percent today to 26 percent while China will rise from 5 percent today to roughly 14 percent. The shares controlled by Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Brazil, or India will remain in the low single digits.So we arent going to see a true multipolar world anytime soon. We might see abipolarworld in 20 or 30 years, but it will still be a fairly lopsided bipolarity with the United States still leading China by a wide margin. Moreover, the United States will continue to enjoy a highly favorable geopolitical position. It is the only major power in the Western hemisphere, while the other major powers share the Eurasian landmass. This situation means these states tend to worry more about each other than they do about the United States even though the United States is a lot stronger and it gives many of these states a powerful incentive to try to stay on good terms with us in case they need help to deal with one of their neighbors. So in addition to being materially stronger than anyone in Eurasia, the United States also has long-standing alliances in Europe and Asia and new strategic partnerships emerging with countries like India.This is not to deny that states like China, Russia or Iran have been acquiring a somewhat greater capacity to defend their interests near their own borders, especially when compared with what they could do back when unipolarity first emerged in the early 1990s. This trends will constrain U.S. freedom of action slightly, give other states additional options, and complicate U.S. diplomacy somewhat. But in no case do these trends pose a mortal threat to vital US interests. Even in 2030, none of these states is going to want or be able to take the United States on in a direct test of strength.Thus, although it is easy to identify a number of vexing foreign policy problems such as North Korea, Iran, Sudan, the Somali pirates, or Afghanistan none of them actually threaten truly vital U.S. interests. In fact, the only threat that could directly threaten the American way of life would be anuclearterrorist attack on U.S. soil. We know that al Qaeda would attack us if it could, but so long as they do not acquire nuclear weapons or other WMD, they cannot do significant harm to the United States directly. Even 9/11, tragic and shocking as it was, did not threaten our global position significantly. It follows that reducing the danger of WMD terrorism remains a top priority, but that task is best accomplished bycontinued effortsto secure existing nuclear arsenals and potentially usable nuclear materials.Given the balance of power in our favor, therefore, the biggest threats we face are self-inflicted wounds. And our biggest opportunities involve exploiting our favorable position in order to preserve our current position as long as possible. What are some obvious mistakes to avoid, and what are the opportunities we should take advantage of?The first self-inflicted wound the United States could make would be to spend too much on national security. A country can also get into trouble by spending too little on defense, of course, but that doesnt seem very likely at present. As noted earlier, the United States spends more on national security than the rest of the world combined (and most of the other significant military powers are our allies) and we still devote a larger percent of our GDP to national security than any other major power does. Military superiority is a good thing and we ought to keep it, but we all know that too much of a good thing is usually bad for you. As Kenneth Waltz once wrote, more is not better if less is enough. The United States is expected to face a budget deficit of 1.8trillion(!) dollars next year, and theres more red ink in sight. We have critical needs in national infrastructure, education, and health care, and our long-term strength depends on these elements of national power too. A second self-inflicted wound is the recurring tendency to view allies as liabilities rather than assets. As its array of allies has increased, U.S. strategists tend to see this trend as simply increasing the number of areas we are committed to protect, instead of adding to our combined capabilities and therefore making it easier for us to achieve our national security goals. The United States has become accustomed to letting allies free-ride, and to supporting allies even when they do things that are not in the U.S. interest The lesson here is that America ought to take advantage of its favorable geopolitical position and play hard-to-get a bit more. We arent going to get greater cooperation from our allies if we keep insisting on doing it all ourselves, or if we arent willing to play hardball with them when they do things that we think are foolish or wrong.The third self-inflicted wound is forgetting what the U.S. military is and isnt designed to do, and ending up in costly efforts to remake the politics of areas that we do not understand. U.S. armed forces are extremely good at deterring or reversing large-scale conventional aggression, at preserving balance of power in key regions, and contributing to other aspects of global stability, like putting teeth in programs like the Proliferation Security Initiative. But the United States is not good at governing other societies who is? particularly when it lacks detailed knowledge of the societies in question, has insufficient language skills within the national security and foreign policy establishments, and when the prerequisites for democracy are absent from these areas. It follows that our current preoccupation with counterinsurgency which is largely an artifact of the decisions to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq on a long-term basis is a strategic misstep.

And that brings me to the opportunity side of the equation. Given the evolving balance of power and our geopolitical situation, U.S. should gradually return to a strategy of offshore balancing. What does that mean? First,the United States should maintain naval, air, and ground forces that can preserve a favorable balance of power in key strategic areas (which mostly means Asia and the Persian Gulf), while minimizing our on-shore presence, especially in areas where it generates opposition or fuels anti-Americanism. Second,the United States should maintain its formal alliance commitments in Europe, but devolve more responsibility for European security to NATOs European members. Apart from occasional exercises, the U.S. should maintain only token forces there. And after nearly sixty years, isnt it time that a European serve as SACEUR? Europe is democratic, prosperous, tranquil, and united within institutions like the European Union. This is good news for everyone, and it should allow the United States to shift most of its strategic attention elsewhere (a process that is in fact already underway). We would of course remain willing to intervene in Europe if the balance of power were to break down completely, but that isnt going to happen anytime soon. Third,the United States should scrupulously avoid costly and open-ended commitments to nation-building in areas of the world we do not understand which is most of them and encourage the United Nations and interested regional powers to take on more of this burden. This shift will entail playing hard to get with key allies a bit more, so that they do their fair share and so that they understand that American backing is not something anyone should entirely take for granted. Remember: American support is a very valuable asset, and other states should do a lot for us in order to get it.Whats the bottom line?Although the United States faces a number of foreign policy problems and should for its own reasons do what it can to address them, its overall global position is remarkably favorable and most of the challenges it faces are manageable. Put differently, virtually any other major powers would be delighted to trade places with us, and those Cassandras who constantly talk about Americas precarious security position are indulging in dangerous fantasies. At present, the main task is to avoid Pogos warning: we have met the enemy and he is us.

What is the best international relations book of the decade? BYDANIEL W. DREZNER JULY 1, 2009The International Studies Association announces a book contest:The International Studies Best Book of the Decade Award honors the best book published in international studies over the last decade. In order to be selected, the winning book must be a single book (edited volumes will not be considered) that has already had or shows the greatest promise of having a broad impact on the field of international studies over many years. Only books of this broad scope, originality, and interdisciplinary significance should be nominated.Hmmm. which books published between 2000 and 2009 should be on the short list? This merits some thought, but the again, this is a blog post, so the following choices are the first five books that came to mind:1. John J. Mearsheimer,The Tragedy of Great Power Politics(2001)2. G. John Ikenberry,After Victory(2001).3. Mia Bloom,Dying to Kill(2003)4. Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales,Savng Capitalism from the Capitalists(2003).5. Gregory Clark,A Farewell to Alms(2007).I dont agree with everything in these books but they linger the most in the cerebral cortex.So, dear readers, which books doyouthinkareworthy of consideration for this award?

Musings on a summers day BYSTEPHEN M. WALT JULY 30, 2009Ive been studying politics a long time now, and there are still lots of things about it that at some level I just dont get. Im not saying that I have no idea why these things occur or suggesting that they are totally inexplicable. Im just saying that I still find them a bit baffling.So I made a list, and thought Id share a few of them. Maybe some of you will share my confusion.1.Ive never really understood why plenty of smart people think the United States still needs thousands of nuclear weapons (or ever did). Im familiar with the abstract theology of nuclear weapons policy and I dont favor total nuclear disarmament, but the case for an arsenal of more than a few hundred weapons eludes me. Seehereorherefor convincing arguments to this effect.2.Im still puzzled by why Americans are so willing to spend money on ambitious overseas adventures, and yet so reluctant to pay taxes for roads, bridges, better schools, and health care here in the United States. My fellow Americans, wheres your sense of entitlement? And frankly, Im also surprised that the U.S. armed forces havent put up more resistance to the seemingly open-ended missions they keep getting handed by ambitious politicians. I can think of various reasons why they remain willing to make these sacrifices (its a volunteer force, theres a long tradition of civilian authority, our soldiers, sailors and airman are dedicated patriots, the top brass are often chosen for their political malleability, etc.), but it still surprises me.3.I dont understand why many people think invoking God is a compelling justification for their particular policy preferences, and why they assume that this move is a trump card that ends all discussion. The idea that Jehovah, Jesus, Allah, Odin, or Whomever gave some people permanent title to some patch of land, dictated how men and women should relate to each other for all eternity, or provided the incontestable answer to ANY public policy question is simply beyond me. Yet it remains a common feature of political discourse at home and abroad. Weird.4.Im equally baffled by when someone invokes history to justify a territorial claim and assumes that this basis is unchallengeable. This view assumes that sovereignty over some area is infinitely inheritable (no matter what has happened in the interim), ignores the fact the borders have changed a lot over time, and further assumes that theres only one version of history that matters. I understandwhySerbs invoke the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 to justify their current claims to control that region, why Israelis and Palestinians invoke different readings of history to justify their positions on Jerusalem, or why certain Asian states invoke different historical claims to assorted rocks in the South China Sea they are all looking for some way to persuade others to let them have what they want. Whats odd is that people who make such claims tend to think their view is simply incontestable and other equally valid historical claims arent worth paying attention to. Youre entitled to your version of history, I suppose, but why do you assume that anyone is going to be persuaded by it?5.I do not understand why Americans are so susceptible to the self-interested testimony of foreigners who want to embroil us in conflicts with some foreign government that they happen to dislike. A case in point would be Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, who sold a lot of fairy tales to the Bush administration prior to the 2003 invasion. As Machiavelli (himself an exile) warned inThe Discourses: How vain the faith and promises of men who are exiles from their own country. .. Such is their extreme desire to return to their homes that they naturally believe many things that are not true, and add many others on purpose; so that with what they really believe and what they say they believe, they will fill you with hopes to that degree that if you attempt to act on them, you will incur a fruitless expense, or engage in an undertaking that will involve you in ruin. This sort of thing goes back to the Peloponnesian Wars (at least), and youd think wed have learned to be more skeptical by now.6.I certainly dont get the business model that informs the content of theWall Street Journals op-ed page. The rest of the newspaper is an excellent news source, with reportage that is often of very high quality. The editorial page, by contrast, is often a parody of right-wing lunacy: the last refuge of discredited neoconservatives, supply-siders, and other extremists. Do theJournals editors really think democracy is best served by offering the public such a one-sided diet of opinion? Do they feel no responsibility to offer a wider range of views to their readers, as the rivalFinancial Timesdoes? More importantly, wouldnt their market share (and profits) be increased if they offered a more diverse range of views? Im equally puzzled by the op-ed page of theWashington Post: whats the business model that says cornering the market on tired neoconservative pundits is the best way to attract new readers? (FPis now owned by thePostcorporation too, I might add, but anyone who follows this Web site knows that there isnt any discernible party line here.)7.A related point: I cant figure out why newspapers arent hiring more bloggers to write columns for them on a regular basis. I started reading blogs because the stuff I read on the web tends to be smarter, funnier, better researched, and more entertainingly written than the pablum that appears on the op-ed pages of most newspapers. A lot of bloggers seem to produce more material too; frankly, doing a column twice a week sounds almost leisurely compared to what some bloggers pound out. There are dull bloggers and some excellent mainstream print pundits, of course, but Im amazed that more bloggers arent breaking into the so-called big-time mainstream media. Probably another good reason why newspapers are dying.8.In an era where the United States is facing BIG problems at home or abroad, it is both puzzling and disheartening to observe the amount of ink and airspace devoted to the Skip Gates arrest, Michael Jacksons demise, or the birther controversy. But then I didnt get the Princess Di phenomenon or the whole reality-TV thing either.9.I dont understand why academics defend the institution of tenure so energetically, and then so rarely use it for its intended purpose (i.e., to permit them to tackle big and/or controversial subjects without worrying about losing their jobs) When it comes to politics at least, the Ivory Tower seems increasingly populated by methodologically sophisticated sheep.10.Im both amused and annoyed by the highly intrusive security procedures that now exist at airports, which are almost certainly not cost-effective. The key to preventing another 9/11 wasnt to have us all removing our shoes or carrying shampoo in a plastic bag; the key to preventing another 9/11-style attack was to put locks on the cockpit doors, so terrorists couldnt gain control of the airplane and turn it into a weapon. (A smarter Middle East policy wouldnt hurt either). Ill concede that additional screening is probably preventing a few additional incidents, but I question whether the extra expense and inconvenience is ultimately worth it. Alas, nobody is going to relax those procedures now, because theyd worry about being blamed the next time someone managed to blow up an airliner. I understand the CYA impetus that will keep these procedures in place from now until doomsday, but the irrationality of it all annoys me every time I fly.

America unbound BYSTEPHEN M. WALT AUGUST 6, 2009By Justin LoganUnipolarity is one of the hotter IR theory topics, and its virtually impossible to discuss the subject without reference toWorld Out Of Balance. A terrific book by Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, it provokes the reader to rethink his or her views, and engages seriously with realism, liberalism, and constructivism.Their argument, in a nutshell, is that scholars from the above schools have underrated the United States ability to transcend structural constraints:realists overrate the impact of the balance of power; liberals overrate the impact of economic interdependence and international institutions, and constructivists overrate legitimacy constraints on the United States.The authors conclude:Our book provides the necessary analysis for concluding that the United States does, in fact, have an opportunity to revise the system and, moreover, that this opportunity will long endure Because their theories ignore or misunderstand the implications of the unipolar distribution of power, scholars have generally underestimated the U.S. potential to remake the post-1991 international system. More realistic theories with a clear-eyed appraisal of the workings of a unipolar system would lead them to see the systemic constraints they believe stand in the way of such a policy for what they are: artifacts of the scholarship of previous eras.Nowthatsan argument.The topic of unipolarity has spawned two main debates: The first over how long unipolarity is likely to endure, and the second overwhether unipolarity is peaceful. But to my mind, there is a third interesting question worth examining the same one Gen. David Petraeus asked journalist Rick Atkinson on his way into Iraq: Tell me how this ends?For many scholars, this is a moot question: Unipolarity isalreadyending. But even for those who think the end is further down the road,imperial overstretch taking on a range of commitments beyond our means is one way America might fall from being in a league of its own to being just first among equals.In a recentForeign Affairsarticle, Brooks and Wohlforth waved off dangers such as the long-term fiscal imbalances in the United States by observing that these problems can be fixed. Similarly,in a roundtable review of their book, the authors admitted that they did not compose a theory of how unipolarity ends, but they seem reasonably certain that overstretch is not a concern. Responding to criticism that power yields ambition and ambition can lead to overstretch, Brooks and Wohlforth fired back:

This is a bit like arguing that a person will dramatically increase his spending priorities if he garners a windfall e.g. he goes from having $1 million in assets to having $10 million in assets and will be more likely to become bankrupt as a result. Yet how much a consumer spends is not structurally determined by income, just as how much a state takes on its foreign policy is not structurally determined by how much power it has. A wealthy individual can go bankrupt, to be sure, but it requires poorer choices to do so than if they had fewer resources.Im not convinced. Long traditions in human history and in international politics suggest otherwise. Hubris has not been a common affliction of people of modest means. The pride that goeth before a fall is frequently spawned by possessions and power. Or, as Lord Acton wrote, power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.But perhaps the most puzzling aspect of Brooks and Wohlforths dismissal of the overstretch argument is that it was Wohlforth who argued (with two co-authors in anedited volume on the balance of power in ancient history and non-European contexts),that overstretch is a frequent cause of the demise of hegemonic systems. Summing up the findings, Wohlforth et al surmised that:Not only is military expansion a well-nigh universal behavior, but such expansion is frequently characterized by myopic advantage-seeking (boondoggling), rather than aimed at long-term system maintenance (balancing), even among rivals to potential hegemonsThe pattern of boondoggling is a major reason why balanced systems routinely break down, and why systemic hegemons frequently squander their advantages. (Emphasis mine.)If unprofitable military expansion is a well-nigh universal behavior that explains the demise of systemic hegemons, its strange that Brooks and Wohlforth have been as dismissive of the concept as they have.Maybe Im just being a Nervous Nellie (or maybe Ive fallen victim to the Pundits Fallacy, where a pundit assumes that the key to political success, international or otherwise, involves the adoption of the commentators own policy views). But I think the perils of the systemic activism Brooks and Wohlforth are urging, represent more cause for concern than they let on.Justin Loganis associate director of foreign policy studies at the Cato

Field Study: Just How Relevant Is Political Science?Principio del formularioFinal del formularioByPATRICIA COHENPublished: October 19, 2009After SenatorTom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, this month proposed prohibiting theNational Science Foundationfrom wasting any federal research funding on political science projects, political scientists rallied in opposition, pointing out that one of this years Nobel winners had been a frequent recipient of the very program now under attack.Yet even some of the most vehement critics of the Coburn proposal acknowledge that political scientists themselves vigorously debate the fields direction, what sort of questions it pursues, even how useful the research is.Much of the political science work financed by the National Science Foundation is both rigorous and valuable, said Jeffrey C. Isaac, a professor atIndiana Universityin Bloomington, where one new winner of the Nobel in economic science, the political scientist Elinor Ostrom, teaches. But were kidding ourselves if we think this research typically has the obvious public benefit we claim for it, he said. We political scientists can and should do a better job of making the public relevance of our work clearer and of doing more relevant work.Mr. Isaac is the editor of Perspectives on Politics, a journal that was created by the fields professional organization to bridge the divide after a group of political scientists led a revolt against the growing influence of statistical methods and mathematics-based models in the discipline. In 2000 an anonymous political scientist who called himself Mr. Perestroika roused scores of colleagues to protest the organization, the American Political Science Association, and its flagship journal, The American Political Science Review, arguing that the two were marginalizing scholars who focused on traditional research based on history, culture and archives.Though there is still jockeying over jobs, power and prestige particularly in an era of shrinking budgets much of that animus has quieted, and most political scientists agree that a wide range of approaches makes sense.What remains, though, is a nagging concern that the field is not producing work that matters. The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less, said Joseph Nye, a professor at theJohn F. Kennedy School of Governmentat Harvard, whose work has been particularly influential among American policy makers. There are parts of the academy which, in the effort to be scientific, feel we should stay away from policy, Mr. Nye said, that it interferes with the science.In his view statistical techniques too often determine what kind of research political scientists do, pushing them further into narrow specializations cut off from real-world concerns. The motivation to be precise, Mr. Nye warned, has overtaken the impulse to be relevant.In recent years he and other scholars, including Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol, both former presidents of the American Political Science Association, have urged colleagues not to shy away from the big questions.Graduate students discussing their field, said Peter Katzenstein, a political science professor atCornell University, often speak in terms of an interesting puzzle, a small intellectual conundrum that tests the ingenuity of the solver, rather than the large, sloppy and unmanageable problems that occur in real life.This is the great divide on what we are doing, he said, adding that political scientists did not agree on the unit of analysis (whether the focus should be on the individual or social relationships), the source of knowledge or how to measure things.Rogers Smith, a political scientist at theUniversity of Pennsylvaniawho has been active in the Perestroika movement, said that the question should determine the method. If you want to test cause and effect, quantitative methods are the preferred way to go, he said, but they cant tell how political phenomena should be understood and interpreted whether a protest, for instance, is the result of a genuine social movement or an interest group, whether it is religious or secular.Arthur Lupia, a professor in theUniversity of Michigans political science department, said he was using the scientific method to understand what processes and institutions were necessary for a democratic society to function.Mr. Lupia is the lead investigator on one of the projects financed by the National Science Foundation that Senator Coburn has attacked: the American National Election Studies. Senator Coburn has maintained that commentators on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and other news media outlets provide a myriad of viewpoints to answer the same questions. He has argued that the $91.3 million that the foundation spent on social science projects over the last 10 years should have gone to biology, chemistry or pharmaceutical science.Mr. Lupia, whose background is in applied mathematics and economics, concedes that political science is not quite like the natural sciences. First, the subjects under study can argue back. But he maintains that it uses the same rigorous mechanisms to evaluate observations as any other science.The elections project, which has been financed by the foundation in various forms for more than three decades and has involved 700 scientists, tracks why citizens vote and how they respond to elections. The database is used by thousands of scholars, and has been widely praised as illuminating the question of why democracy works.No date has been set for a vote on Senator Coburns proposal, which was introduced on Oct. 7. Yet even as he is trying to restrict National Science Foundation financing of social science, the Defense Department has been recruiting scholars in the same fields to work on security issues like terrorism, Iraq and Chinas military. The nation must embrace eggheads and ideas, Defense SecretaryRobert M. Gateshas said, to meet potential national threats.Some Defense Department grants were awarded by the Pentagon through a new program titled Minerva; others were distributed through the National Science Foundation because it has experience in grant making and is apolitical.As for those who criticize quantitative analysis as too narrow, Mr. Lupia said that the big questions were precisely what interested him. His work has been used by theWorld Bank and government officials in India, for example, to figure out which villages had sufficient institutions and practices to ensure that money earmarked to build a water system would not end up in someones pocket. Political science can also help determine what institutions and arrangements are needed to help a dictatorship make the transition to a democracy, he added.After the fall of Communism, when Eastern European governments were writing their constitutions, I can guarantee you they werent callingGeorge Stephanopoulos, Mr. Lupia said.I try to identify problems and then identify solutions to them, he said, to find the type of scientific method that can answer the questio

Its only a game really! BYSTEPHEN M. WALT DECEMBER 11, 2009A week ago I had the opportunity to participate in a one-day simulation of the broad international effort to address Irans nuclear program, sponsored by Harvards Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The participants were divided into various teams (the United States, EU, Russia, China, Iran, Israel, and a GCC team representing other Persian Gulf states), along with a control team that supervised events (and played the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency). Several prominent journalists observed the proceedings and were also available to leak information to. The simulation was designed to begin on Dec. 1, 2009 and cover the next twelve months, and various teams were able to negotiate face-to-face (bilaterally or multilaterally), move military forces around, issue press releases, make back-channel offers, etc.; in short, they could undertake virtually any action that might have been possible in the real world.The result, as hasalready been reported, was discouraging: by the end of the game, Iran hadnt agreed to halt enrichment, the P5+1 coalition was collapsing, and the United States and Israel were having what could politiely be called a candid and frank exchange of views. The sole piece of good news was that there had been no recourse to military force by the time the game ended.Several participants have recently published their own take-aways from the experience, which they appear to have found sobering. Writing in theWashington Post, David Ignatius (who was one of the journalists in attendance)suggestedthat although it was only a simulation, the game nonetheless revealed some important real-life dynamics-and the inability of any diplomatic strategy, so far, to stop the Iranian nuclear push. The head of the Iranian team, former NSC aide Gary Sick, has offered reflections of his own in arecent pieceinThe National, noting that By the end of the game, the Americans had driven away all their ostensible allies, and wasted immense time and effort, while Iran was better off than it had been at the beginning. Sick also suggests that the moves of the US team were quite similar to the strategy actually employed by the United States over the course of the last three administrations.I thoroughly enjoyed the experience but drew a different set of conclusions from it. (I was on the U.S. team, and was assigned the role of SecDef Robert Gates). My conclusion at the end of the game was that one could draw no firm conclusions from the experience, and my principal concern was that participants would be tempted to do just that.In my view, what one might call the external validity of the game was limited by three unrealistic features.

First,the timetable of the game was extremely compressed. In effect, we were trying to simulate a full year of negotiations in a mere six hours. Thus, each hour of the game covered two months, which meant that a team could send a message to another team and receive a reply in due course, only to discover that a month or more had passed and the original message was now effectively obsolete. More to the point, the breakneck pace of the game did not allow for any time for reflection, for the weighing of alternatives, or even the formulation of clear or novel strategies. (Each team was given about twenty-five minutes to plan its approach before the game began, and I like to think U.S. leaders do a bit better than that in real life. Heck, Obama just spent severalmonthsdeciding what to do in Afghanistan). Yes, time is a precious commodity and policymakers are often forced to juggle multiple commitments, but I believe a more realistic timetable would have produced very different results.Second,trying to simulate a complex multiparty negotiation with four or five-person teams was problematic, particularly when some team members (myself included), had to leave the game temporarily to teach their regular classes. This constraint required me to be absent for 90 minutes, which in terms of the games timetable meant that the U.S. Secretary of Defense was effectively incommunicado for three months. The same problem sidelined the person who played the Secretary of State for a similar period. Moreover, given that team members had no staff and thus no subordinates to give orders to, there was no one to delegate to and it was impossible to conduct continuous consultations with all of the relevant parties, even when both sides may have wanted to. What must have looked to some like Bush-era unilateralism was instead simply an unavoidable artifact of the games structure.Third,the composition of the different teams was unavoidably slanted. The U.S., Russian, Chinese, Iranian teams were all populated with and led by Americans, while the Israeli team was made up entirely of Israelis and the EU team was composed of Europeans. To have confidence in the validity of the results, therefore, you have to assume that each of the teams actually played the way that their real-life counterparts would have. That might be true in the case of the U.S., Israeli, and European teams (though I wouldnt assume it), but its obviously more of a stretch with the others.These difficulties are not the fault of the games organizers, who faced obvious constraints in putting the exercise together. Ideally, such a simulation would have been played over a long week-end and covered a shorter time period, but it would have been far more difficult to assemble an equally impressive array of participants for an entire weekend. Putting together a genuinely multi-national participant list (including appropriate Iranians?), would have been even harder if not impossible. The bottom lineis that one ought to be exceedingly wary about drawinganyconclusions about what this artificial exercise actually teaches. To me, its real value is not as a crude crystal ball that allows us to divine the future, or even as an analytical device that helps us identify particular barriers to resolving some thorny diplomatic problem. After all, its not exactly headline news to discover that resolving the Iranian nuclear issue isnt easy, that there are certain tensions within the P5+1, or that Irans objectives are at odds with those of the other participants.Rather, the potential value of such an exercise lies in forcing participants to take on different roles and see how a problem looks from a wholly different perspective. With hindsight, I wish we had mixed things up a lot more: with some Israelis on the Iran team, with real Russians, Chinese or EU citizens playing on the U.S. or Israeli side, and so forth. That might have taught us about some of the sources of misunderstanding that have made this issue so hard to resolve, whatever the actual outcome of the game might have been.

Are you smarter than a Fletcher School graduate student? BYDANIEL W. DREZNER DECEMBER 15, 2009The following question was on the final exam for my Global Political Economy class this fall. If youre interested, provide a one paragraph answer in the comments. Ill report back later in the week if these answers are better than the ones Im about to grade:"When China becomes the worlds largest economy, the current era of globalization will come to an end. The simple fact is that while Great Britain and the United States had open liberal polities, China does not. This will foster mutual suspicion between China and the west, as well as discourage China from fully opening up its domestic market. That, plus the geopolitical tensions that come from a hegemonic power transition, means we can expect a new era of mercantilism."Do you agree or disagree with the above statement? Why or why not?Hint: you get absolutely no extra credit for agreeing or disagreeing with anything previously said on the subject on this blog.

A renaissance in nuclear security studies? BYSTEPHEN M. WALT JANUARY 21, 2010Ever since Hiroshima, the role of nuclear weapons in international politics has been a central part of the security studies field. Think of the seminal works of Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, and Thomas Schelling, as well as the somewhat less enduring but still important work of people like Pierre Gallois, William Kaufmann, Herman Kahn, Hedley Bull, and others. (If you want a real hoot, try to re-read Henry KissingersNuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy(1957),the book that made his early reputation but has to put it politely not aged well). Discussions of nuclear strategy were a cottage industry in the 1970s and 1980s (think Robert Jervis, Colin Gray, Desmond Ball, Bruce Blair, Paul Bracken, John Steinbruner, Ken Waltz, etc.), and former statesman and policy wonks routinely weighed in on the issues of nuclear proliferation and arms control.Indeed, when I got my first job at Princeton in 1984, I was hired in part to teach a course on nuclear weapons and arms control, and it routinely attracted 50-100 students. The Cold War was still going strong and the Reagan administration was raising the nuclear temperature in various ways, so concerns about nuclear weapons were front and center. Interest in the topic hasnt vanished entirely since then, but theres no course of that kind at Harvard these days (or at Princeton, for that matter), and I havent detected much student demand for one. (That may also reflect that fact that there is only one regular faculty member in Harvards Government Department whose main research interest is the study of war and peace, but thats another story).In recent years, however, scholarly interest in the topic has declined dramatically. One reason is that there hasnt been that muchnewto say about the subject; the essential features of deterrence theory are well-established by now, and the infeasibility of any sort of "nuclear war" seems to be pretty well-understood (at least lets hope so). There have been a few important works on nuclear-related topics in recent years (such as Nina Tannenwalds work on thenuclear taboo, the policy literature on"loose nukes"andnuclear terrorism, and the many discussions of the Indian, Pakistani, North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs), but the end of the Cold War and the gradual reduction in the Russian and American nuclear arsenals has diminished interest in this question. With somenotable exceptions, younger scholars and graduate students have tended to pursue other questions (e.g, ethnic conflict, terrorism, religion, insurgency, globalization, etc.), and interest in nuclear issues has declined.That situation may now be changing, and a new initiative by the Stanton Foundation could accelerate the trend. Back in the 1970s, the Ford Foundation created university-based research centers in the field of international security and arms control at Harvard, Stanford, Cornell and UCLA, with the explicit goal of "restocking" the intellectual capital of the field, primarily by supporting younger scholars. The initiative was a resounding success, and a list of alumni from the various Ford centers (which includes the Belfer Center where I work now) reads like a "Whos Who" of the field (in both academia and the policy world) in the United States and overseas.Earlier this month, the Stanton Foundation announced a new nuclear security fellowship program, which will offer ten-month stipends of 20,000 USD to predoctoral research fellows, and stipends for postdoctoral scholars and junior faculty on a case-by-case basis and commensurate with experience. The Belfer Centers International Security Program is one of the hosting centers, so if youre interested (or if you know someone who should be), you can find out how to applyhere. (If Harvard is not to your liking for some reason, other participants in Stanton program include Stanfords Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), the Council on Foreign Relations, the RAND Corporation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.)And while Im on the topic, let me call your attention to some recent publications that suggest a renewed interest in nuclear topics. Ive already touted John Muellers important bookAtomic Obsession,but you should also read University of Texas historian Francis Gavins new article"Same as It Ever Was: Nuclear Alarmism, Proliferation, and the Cold War,"in the latest issue ofInternational Security. Gavin shows (convincingly, in my view), that the current spate of nuclear alarmism rests in part on a misreading of nuclear affairs during the Cold War (including the repackaging of "old threats in new clothing"), and that a proper understanding of the past might lead to better policy choices today. (Gavin also gets bonus points for using aTalking Headslyric in his title.) Thenext article,("Posturing for Peace") by Vipin Narang of Harvard (and starting next year, a faculty member at MIT), suggests that some degree of alarm is still warranted. Narang analyzes Pakistans nuclear posture (i.e., its combination of weaponry, command and control, and employment doctrine) and suggests that Islamabads efforts to gain political leverage from its arsenal have created a nuclear posture that is much less stable than it should be. If reading Gavin makes you feel a bit more secure, reading Narang will bring your blood pressure back up.Lastly, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has just released volume 2 of a special issue ofDaedalus(edited by my colleague Steven Miller and Scott Sagan of Stanford), onThe Global Nuclear Future.The Academy has a long history of producingseminal worksin this area, and these two volumes are excellent guides to the evolving nuclear environment. Who knows? Maybe someone will decide that undergraduates ought to be able to take a course on the subject at a place like Harvard.

Joe Nye was right BYSTEPHEN M. WALT JANUARY 19, 2010My colleague Joe Nye has made many contributions to scholarship and policy, but his most lasting contribution to the political lexicon is the idea ofsoft power.Its a concept that is simultaneously seductive and slippery: It captures something that most of us intuitively recognize the capacity to influence others without twisting arms, threatening, or compelling but its also hard to measure or define with a lot of precision. And for a realist like me, soft power has also seemed like a bit of an epiphenomenon, because you need a lot of hard power to produce much of the soft variety.Nonetheless, Id be remiss in not telling you about a recent article that provides systematic empirical support for the soft power concept. Writing in the latest issue ofForeign Policy Analysis, Carol Atkinson of Vanderbilt Universitypresents resultson the impact that student exchange programs (a classic instrument of soft power) have on the diffusion of liberal values. She finds that there is a strong positive effect, and offers the following provocative conclusion: . . . the U.S. government often uses educational exchanges as a negative sanction; prohibiting or limiting attendance by countries with poor human rights records. However, my findings show that when the United States allows only well behaved countries to participate, it restricts its ability to build its own soft power across the international system. Over the long term, engaging potential political elites from authoritarian states, rather than excluding them from programs, provides an opportunity to channel liberal ideas into some of the most democratically austere regions of the world.At the risk of appearing to be pleading on behalf of my own line of work, I would just add that the United States is currently home to 17 of the top 20 universities in the world (Cambridge, Oxford, and the University of Tokyo are the other three), according to theannual surveyby Chinas Jiao Tong University. In addition to being engines of innovation, those universities are also powerful magnets for talented and ambitious people from all over the world. Not only does the United States benefit from their presence, but exposure to American ideals appears to have positive long-term effects on political attitudes among most of them, and perhaps especially for those who come from authoritarian societies. The lesson: If we let our universities decline as California is now doing to the once-vaunted UC system we are guaranteeing a much less influential future for subsequent generations.

Politicians, the press, and foreign policy: What to read BYSTEPHEN M. WALT FEBRUARY 10, 2010Over the past few years, media critics like Glenn Greenwald, Mark Danner, and Michael Massing have exposed some of the sloppiness, incestuousness, and group-think that routinely afflicts mainstream media coverage of world events, especially in the realm of foreign policy and national security. Even "faux news" outlets like Jon StewartsDaily Showhave contributed to greater awareness of media failings, mostly by pointing out biases and inconsistencies in a ruthlessly funny fashion. Yet no matter how useful such critiques are, they need to be complemented by more systematic scholarly studies of the complex relationship between media coverage, public opinion, and actual foreign policy decisions. On that topic, my colleague Matthew Baum and his co-author, Tim Groeling of UCLA, have recently published an excellent book entitledWar Stories: The Causes and Consequences of Public Views on War(Princeton University Press). Drawing on a wide array of empirical evidence (including opinion surveys, media content, and foreign policy decisions), they argue that the interaction between elites, media, and public opinion is a three-way process in which each groups behavior is essentially strategic. Politicians try to use media to advance their aims; the media picks stories in order to maximize audience (or in some cases, to advance an ideological agenda), and therefore tend to favor stories that are novel or surprising (like when a prominent senator criticizes a president from his own party). Similarly, the public does not just consume the news passively; readers and viewers use various cues to gauge the credibility of different sources.The book examines a dizzying array of hypotheses, and I cant do justice to all of their findings in a short blog post. Among their more interesting findings are: 1)the tendency for media coverage to over-represent negative evaluations of presidential performance, more so when they come from figures in the presidents party, and especially when the presidents party also controls the Congress 2)the so-called "rally round the flag" effect is not very powerful, and there is little evidence that president can consistently anticipate substantial rallies when they use force abroad, especially during unified government," 3)coverage of conflicts and wars tends to track elite rhetoric more closely in the relatively early stages of a conflict, while tracking reality more closely if a conflict persists," but "consumers become relatively less susceptible to the influence of elite rhetoric regarding a conflict as they gather more information [and] grow less responsive to new information, particularly when it conflicts with their prior beliefs.

They also present evidence suggesting that the rise of new media (including the blogosphere) is increasing audience fragmentation and self-selection (i.e., citizens tend to consume news and opinions that are consistent with their prior beliefs), and they speculate that this tendency may give elites a greater capacity to manipulate public opinion regarding foreign policy over time, especially among their fellow partisans, and to sustain such manipulations for longer periods of time. Among other things, this tendency poses a real challenge to anyone who hopes to advance a genuinely bipartisan approach to foreign policy. If were all consuming different sources of information, we will all be living in a different subjective reality and well naturally tend to favor different policies. The reasoned deliberation extolled by John Stuart Mill and other democratic theorists, implicit in the idea of a democratic marketplace of ideas becomes impossible, and what you get instead is a Tower of Babel conducted at increasingly high volume. As Baum and Groeling note, it also implies that if a president wants to win over support for a particular policy such as escalation in Afghanistan trying to win over the opposition media (e.g., in Obamas case,Fox News) is the smarter strategy. Getting a favorable endorsement fromThe Nationwont help him much, but even grudging support from Hannity or OReilly will be seen a as credible by GOP sympathizers and independents and might sway more than a few of them.Hmmm, I guess its time for me to go readThe Corner. As for those of you who want to know more about how leaders, the media, and the people interact, go read Baum and Groeling.

Five big questions BYSTEPHEN M. WALT JULY 12, 2010Ive been thinking about U.S. grand strategy again, and pondering some big questions that ought to be central to the debate on Americas global role. Some of these big questions are researchable, others are by their very nature more speculative. How you answer some of them also depends on the theories you think are most powerful or applicable (i.e., realist theory suggests one set of answers, liberal approaches offer a different set, etc.), and the answers your get should have profound implications for what you think U.S. grand strategy ought to be.So here areFive Big Questionsabout contemporary world politics.

1. Where is the EU project headed?The construction of the European Union was a major innovation in global politics, but new doubts have arisen about its long-term future. Pessimists such as Notre DamesSebastian Rosato believe the highwater mark of European unity has already been passed, while optimists like PrincetonsAndrew Moravcsikthink that Europes current difficulties are likely to encourage further steps towards integration. The answer matters, because the re-emergence of genuine power politics within Europe could force the United States to devote more attention to a continent that some argue is"primed for peace"and no longer of much strategic concern.2. If Chinas power continues to rise, how easy will it be to get Asian states to balance against it?Balance of power (or if you prefer,balance of threat) theorypredicts that weaker states will try to limit the influence of rising powers by forming defensive alliances against them. Chinas rise is already provoking alarm in many of its neighbors, who look first to the United States and possibly to each other for assistance. But how strong will this tendency to balance be? If China getsreallypowerful, and the United States disengages entirely, some of Chinas neighbors might be tempted to bandwagon with Beijing, thereby facilitating the emergence of a Chinese "sphere of influence" in Asia. But if Chinas neighbors get support from each other and from the United States, then theyll probably prefer to balance.But heres the question: Just how much support does the United States have to provide, given that this issue ought to matter more to the Asian states than it does to us? If you think balancing is the dominant tendency (as I do), then the United States can pass a lot of the burden to Japan, India, Vietnam, etc. It can "free-ride" to some degree on them, instead of the other way around. But if you think these states will be reluctant to balance, then the United States might have to do a lot of the heavy lifting itself.

To make matters more complicated still, both the United States and its Asian allies may be tempted to do some bluffing with each other, to try to get their allies to pay a larger share of the burden. Asian states will quietly threaten to realign or go neutral if they dont get more backing from the United States, and U.S. leaders may drop hints about disengagement if they dont get what they want from the allies they are helping protect. And this means figuring out just how large and iron-clad the U.S. commitment needs to be in order to sustain a future balancing coalition is a tricky business, and there will be lots of room for disagreement.Finally, Chinas own conduct will also affect the propensity for Asian states to balance. If China starts playing "divide-and-conquer" and refrains from overtly threatening behavior, then its neighbors will be less worried and less inclined to seek closer ties with either the United States or with each other. If China starts throwing its weight around, by contrast, the United States will find it easier to enlist allies and will be in a stronger position when bargaining with them.3. Whats the relationship between U.S. defense spending, the deficit, and Americas economic health and well-being?Many people believe that the United States is spending way too much on national security, especially given the 2008 recession, the soaring budget deficit, the impending retirement of the baby boomers, the looming fiscal problems facing states and local governments, and the need to rebuild infrastructure and improve U.S. education. I tend to agree with that view, but the actual relationship between defense spending and economic well-being isnt that clear-cut. In the short term, cutting defense spending dramatically would put people out of work and could make the recession worse. Moreover, cutting defense doesnt help with the budget deficit if the money just gets shifted into entitlement programs.As you might expect, economists who have studied this issue have reached a wide arrayof conclusions (in part because the effects of defense spending or defense cuts depend a lot on the condition an economy is in at the time). Bottom line: If youre trying to figure out how big Americas global military role ought to be, this is a Big Question that you cant ignore.4. If the U.S. disengaged from key areas in the Muslim world most notably Iraq and Afghanistan would the threat of anti-American terrorism rise or fall?We are supposedly fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places to "disrupt, defeat, and destroy al Qaeda." But our military presence in these areas is one of the big reasons (along with our unconditional support for Israel and our close ties with several Arab governments) why we have a terrorism problem in the first place. Some scholars, such as Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, argue that anti-American terrorism (and especiallysuicide terrorism) would decline if the Untied States ended these military campaigns and reduced its military "footprint" in these regions. Otherspoint outthat our military efforts are also inspiring home-grown terrorists like the inept Times Sq. bomber Feisal Shahzad. More hawkish commentators believe that disengagement would be a morale booster for Al Qaeda, facilitate their recruitment and make them more ambitious, and encourage them to "follow us home." As readers here probably know, I favor the former view. But my main point here is that this issue is central to the design and conduct of U.S. grand strategy, and deserves more careful and systematic scrutiny. It would be a tragic irony if even well-intentioned efforts to make ourselves safer led to policies that had precisely the opposite effect.5. Is the era of U.S. primacy over? How will the end of post-Cold War primacy affect its grand strategy and foreign policy?The United States will remain the worlds most powerful state for some time to come. Its economy will be the worlds largest until 2030 at least, and its per capita income will be much higher than that of other potential rivals (meaning there is great potential wealth that can be mobilized for national purposes). Unlike Europe, Japan, and Russia, the U.S. population will continue to grow and will not as old. And it will take a great deal of time before any other country amasses global military capabilities akin to ours.Nonetheless, the position of primacy that the United States enjoyed in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse has already eroded significantly and is unlikely to return. China is growing rapidly, and it will gradually translate some of its growing wealth into greater military capacity. It will not challenge the United States around the globe, but it is likely to challenge Americas current pre-eminence in East Asia. No great power likes seeing another one with a large and visible military presence in its own backyard, and China will be no exception to that rule. Other states may acquire a greater capacity to deter us (in some case including WMD) thereby forcing the United States to treat them gingerly than we might prefer. Countries such as Brazil and Turkey have been growing steadily in recent years, casting off their past deference to Washington, and gaining considerable influence in their immediate surroundings. To succeed, therefore, U.S. diplomacy and grand strategy will have to be more nuanced, attentive, and flexible than it was in the earlier era of clear U.S. dominance (and a rigidly bipolar global order). Well have to cut deals where we used to dictate, and be more attentive to other states interests. The bad news is that nuance and flexibility are not exactly Americas long suit. We like black-and-white, good vs. evil crusades, and our leaders love to tell the rest of the world what to do and how and when to do it. Even worse, our political system encourages xenophobic posturing, know-nothing demonizing, and relentless threat-inflation, all combined with a can-do attitude that assumes Americans can solve almost any problem and have to play the leading role in addressing almost anything that comes up. It is also a system that seems incapable of acknowledging mistakes and admitting that sometimes we really dont know best. Leaders like Bush and Obama sometimes talk about the need for humility and restraint, but they dont actually deliver it. So for me, a big question is whether the United States can learn how to deal with a slightly more even distribution of power, a somewhat larger set of consequential actors, and a rather messier global order. Its hard to be confident, but Im open to being pleasantly surprised.I can think of other questions too (e.g., how serious is the threat of nuclear terrorism? How will climate change affect global politics? Will Iraq settle down or fall apart after the U.S. withdraws? Etc.) but the five questions listed above are the biggies for me right now. How about you?

Hawks, doves, and realists BYSTEPHEN M. WALT JULY 28, 2010As my vacation comes to an end, I want to thank Columbias Jack Snyder and Georgetowns David Edelstein for their thoughtful guest posts. Last week David had anexcellent entryon the war-aversion of most contemporary realists and I wanted to offer a brief reaction. Ive always found it odd that many academics see realism as a hawkish view of world politics and think that realists are big fans of using military power, even though most contemporary realists with a few exceptions like Henry Kissinger have generally been prudent about the use of force and skeptical about most overseas military adventures. As Edelstein points out, realists like Waltz, Morgenthau, and Kennan were opposed to U.S. involvement in Vietnam on strategic rather than moral grounds and younger realists (including me) opposed the Iraq War in 2003, were ambivalent about our intervention in Balkans or Africa in the 1990s, and think attacking Iran would be major strategic blunder today.Edelsteins discussion of this issue is excellent and I dont have any major disagreements with his post, but I would add a few additional points.To start with a minor correction: the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 is not the only post-Cold War military operation that realists supported. As I recall, most realists also supportedDesert Storm,the 1991 liberation of Kuwait. Moreover, it was two realists John Mearsheimerof the University of Chicago and Barry Posen of MIT who offered the most optimistic (and as it turned out, accurate) pre-war forecasts of how easy that war was likely to be. (By contrast, both doves and a surprising number of hawks seemed to think ousting Saddam from Kuwait was going to be very difficult).As one might expect, realists supportedDesert Stormfor good balance-of-power reasons. If Saddams Iraq had absorbed Kuwait permanently, its GDP would have increased by about 40 percent and it could have translated that additional wealth into additional military power. Although Saddams military machine was never very impressive by U.S. standards, a somewhat stronger Iraq might have posed a more serious long-term threat to the regional balance in the Gulf and presented a more serious threat to Saudi Arabia in particular. Given that the United States has always sought to prevent any single power from dominating this oil-rich region, it made good strategic sense to expel Iraq from Kuwait and to degrade its military power in the process. Most of the rest of the world agreed, by the way, which is why they helped us do it and why that operation did not tarnish our national image.It was also the right decision not to go to Baghdad back then, because toppling Saddam in 1991 would have dragged us into precisely the same quagmire we have been dealing with since we foolishly invaded in 2003.

The other reason why contemporary realists have been skeptical about many recent military adventures is essentially structural. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been in a remarkably favorable geopolitical position. Realists care primarily (thought not exclusively) about the balance of material power, and there just isnt a lot of additional power out there to be won via military action. Instead, the main arenas of American military activity have been conflict-ridden backwaters of little or no strategic importance. They are hard to get to, difficult-to-impossible to pacify, and dont have a lot of economic potential or military power of their own. Getting bogged down in places like Iraq or Afghanistan just strengthensjihadi narratives about Americas alleged antipathy to Islam, and as with Vietnam, it ultimately wont matter very much whether we win or lose. On simple cost-benefit grounds, therefore, realists dont think these wars are worth the effort.In short, because realists understand that military power is a crude instrument and that governing alien societies is a costly business, they have argued against such foolishness. Instead, the main advocates of military involvement have been a coalition of neoconservatives and liberal internationationalists, driven by a a variety of agendas and infused with a remarkable degree of hubris. The results first in Iraq and now in Afghanistan have not been pretty.Realists have lost these debates, however, for somewhat similar structural reasons. When a state is as big and powerful as the United States is, it is hard for its leaders to believe that they cant do the impossible in places like Iraq or Afghanistan. And when you are geographically distant from the places you are meddling, its hard to believe that it will have any serious consequences back here at home (9/11 notwithstanding). Also, as Ivenoted before, the Cold War got the United States in the habit of going everywhere and doing everything, and led to the emergence of a large set of domestic institutions whose cumulative impact is to to keep the United States engaged in as many places as possible.So long as there are no great power rivals out there, it is hard to argue that attacking some country we have taken a disliking too (whether for valid or bogus reasons) is going to be costly or difficult. Even worse, there will always be various propagandists and clever briefers out there to explain whythistime the intended target isreallydangerous andthistime the war really will pay for itself, andthistime failure to act will have catastrophic consequences, and oh yes,thistime other states really want us to do it, etc., etc., etc. And no matter how many times the hawks have been wrong in the past, plenty of people will take them seriously. For an 800-lb gorilla like the USA, amnesia seems to be a congenital condition.One last point. Contrary to what some critics think, realists dont want a weaker America. But they do understand that a robust economy is the foundation of all national power and that wasting money or lives on foolish foreign adventures, excessive military spending, or a large, secretive, redundant, and dysfunctional"intelligence" apparatusdoes not make the country stronger or more secure.As the realist Kenneth Waltz put it back in the early 1980s, "more is not better if less is enough." Those wise words apply to the entire national security establishment, and to the costly misadventures that civilians have been asking it to do in recent years. So in addition to the reasons that Professor Edelstein emphasized, thats why realists have been wary of using force in recent yearsSo you want to become an expert BYDANIEL W. DREZNER AUGUST 19, 2010I received the following e-mail query today:What I am wondering is; how did you become an expert in your field? I understand that you obviously went to college and probably got all sorts of degrees but how did you know when you were an expert in your field of knowledge? So did you get all of your knowledge from your research while in school, or do you just read a large amount of books on whatever interests you?This is one of those questions that sounds incredibly simplistic and yet is impossible to answer in a pithy manner.I mean, sure, I gota few degrees. And I suppose getting a Ph.D. allows you to call yourself an expert overa very limited domain of knowledge. In truth, however, Ive met many, many people withdoctorates who are truly quite dim about great many things (important safety tip: never buy a book from someone who puts Ph.D. after their name in a book). Im dim about aspectacularnumber of things. So even expertise is quite limited in its domain.That said, how does one become an expert withoutgoing to the Dagobah system? Theres no one way and theres no one answer. Here are ten ways to acquire expertise about world politics (WARNING: does not necessarily apply to other fields of knowledge):1)Go to school. There are people out there who are self-taughtwunderkinds, capable of long, brilliant disquisitions about the intricacies of international relations after reading Thucydides just once. Theres a 99% chance that you are not one of these people. For you and almost everyone else, the path to expertise is paved through college and graduate school. So go forth and take courses on these subjects.2)Read a lot. I mean, read a whole damn lot. Dont just read the books and articles that are assigned to you in class. Read the stuff that you notice popping up repeatedly in the footnotes and bibliographies of your assigned reading. Read the classics. Read cutting edge work. Read anything that seems of value. When you get to the point where you think youre seeing recurring arguments, then youre approaching the cusp of expertise.3)Read a newspaper every day and a magazine every week. World politics and current events are intertwined. The more you read about daily events, the larger your mental database of interesting events that can be used as raw data when considering various puzzles in world politics.4)Hang around smart people. Anyone whos been to graduate school knows that the best education comes from your peers. While the image of the lonely, eccentric, brlliant grad student is a compelling narrative, its also much more common in film than in real life. You can pick up an awful lot from osmosis by hanging around smart people.5)Never be afraid to ask a question that betrays your ignorance.One of the smartest political scientists I ever met told me that if I didnt understand a concept or presentation, odds were good that the majority of other people in the room didnt understand either. People who dont ask questions dont learn anything.6)Walk the earth.You know,like Cain inKung Fu. Asrecent events suggest, there is an appalling lack of knowledge about how politics function in other countries. If you can develop a good working knowledge of another countrys language/culture/polity, then you can claim a relative amount of expertise.7)Get a job. There are oceans of knowledge that cannot be acquired via books, coursework, or peers. Michael Polanyi labeled these kinds of knowledge as tacit they have to be experienced to be learned. In world politics, sometimes the best way to learn is to do.8)Grow older.Aging doesnt have a lot of upside, but one of the benefits is that youve probably done a lot more of items 1-7 thanthose young whippersnapperspeople younger than you. Expertise has a relative quality to it, and as you grow older, youre likely to have more of it than younger generation