Who knows how things in Iran are going to turn out? Andrew Sullivan has been invaluable; Juan Cole's comment has been exceedingly informed.
At Progressive Realist, Dan Nexon asserts that autocratic regimes are learning to get one step ahead of modular mass movements.
That being said, Twitter, a tool that really only makes sense when you have something both important and urgent to say, has finally come into its own.
It should be acknowledged that, whatever the particulars of the results, there are thousands - maybe millions - of Iranians attempting to change their country through peaceful means. And that truth needs to be supported by progressives and realists of all stripes.
God, we hope, truly is great.
Showing posts with label International Relations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label International Relations. Show all posts
15 June 2009
The Revolution will be Tweeted
07 April 2009
Rationalists beware! Obama is a secret constructivist!
"[M]oral leadership is more powerful than any weapon... That is why I am speaking to you in the center of a Europe that is peaceful, united and free — because ordinary people believed that divisions could be bridged; that walls could come down; and that peace could prevail." (Obama Prague, Sunday)
"Human destiny will be what we make of it" (Obama, Prague, Sunday)
"Moving the ship of state is a slow process... States are like big tankers. They’re not like speedboats." (Obama, Istanbul, Monday)
05 April 2009
A Rebuttal (II)
Aldous' earlier post on the Russian leadership's apparent irrationality put me in mind of the following learned opinion:
At bottom of Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity...for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.You'd think that the author of this quote would back up the Real Clear World piece. Unfortunately, George Kennan has been dead for four years, and the quote above is taken from his famous "Long Telegram" on US-Soviet relations written in 1946 - which is where I would consign any analysis that makes unsubstantiated claims regarding the supposed intractability of Russian strategic aims.
03 April 2009
A Rebuttal
The overzealous simplification of complex analytical issues for popular consumption is everywhere and gets me hopping mad most of the time, but here's one case in which I can't let it slide without an appearance on the glorious pages of HG:Just like the Obama administration, the Bush administration went about seeking to play a “win-win” game with Moscow, pointing out common interests and priorities. It found out the hard way the perils of playing a win-win game when faced with a zero-sum opponent. The Obama administration will surely learn the same lessons; let us hope that it will do so sooner than its predecessor did.
According to the author, the U.S. can't hope to "reset" its relationship with Moscow because the latter is motivated by virulent "anti-Americanism at the heart of the 'Putinist' ideology." This anti-Americanism supposedly obscures or overwhelms the long-term national interests of Russia.
Of course this falls apart if the alternatives aren't "win-win" versus "zero-sum." Obviously the United States and Russia do not have a complete harmony of interests, else cooperation would be irrelevant or trivial, and they do not have a complete conflict of interests, else cooperation would be completely impossible and it would be irrational to attempt to pursue it. Rather, the reality is, as Obama's foreign policy seems to clearly recognize, that the Americans and Russians converge and diverge over a broad spectrum of issues. So, for example, the Russians might not want NATO to win an easy victory in Afghanistan, but to stabilize the country and do so at a high enough cost that they do not remain in the region afterward. And that's precisely why there is room for cooperation.
12 March 2009
Reflections on The Israel Lobby in a Post-Freeman America
1. Maybe they had a point?
2. End of list.
[Update: Oh, and the msm clues in.]
20 August 2008
Right on, Mr. Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev himself in the NY Times on the crisis over Georgia. The thrust of his warning:In recent days, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Bush have been promising to isolate Russia. Some American politicians have threatened to expel it from the Group of 8 industrialized nations, to abolish the NATO-Russia Council and to keep Russia out of the World Trade Organization.
These are empty threats. For some time now, Russians have been wondering: If our opinion counts for nothing in those institutions, do we really need them? Just to sit at the nicely set dinner table and listen to lectures?
Indeed, Russia has long been told to simply accept the facts. Here’s the independence of Kosovo for you. Here’s the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, and the American decision to place missile defenses in neighboring countries. Here’s the unending expansion of NATO. All of these moves have been set against the backdrop of sweet talk about partnership. Why would anyone put up with such a charade?
There is much talk now in the United States about rethinking relations with Russia. One thing that should definitely be rethought: the habit of talking to Russia in a condescending way, without regard for its positions and interests.
Our two countries could develop a serious agenda for genuine, rather than token, cooperation. Many Americans, as well as Russians, understand the need for this. But is the same true of the political leaders?
14 January 2008
Best Assigned Academic Book Title of the Quarter
Elbe, Stefan. 2003. Europe: A Nietzschean Perspective. London and New York: Routledge.
Haha it works on so many levels! I'm sure that John or Luke* can top that, but given the normal practice of publishing in Political Science, this is a pretty good contender.
*I don't list Nick here, since (a) he rarely even posts on this blog and (b) Cherubs: Angels of Love doesn't count as an academic book.
01 December 2007
Breaking the "Democratic" Peace?
So, it's happened. Turkey has attacked the PKK in Iraq (possibly without actually crossing any borders), and the Turkish government has authorized the army to take cross-border action - not quite carte blanche but a significant move from the October parliamentary vote. Bruce Russett, Michael Doyle, et al. probably won't lose too much sleep over this one, though (Iraq being barely a state, much less a democracy).
20 November 2007
01 November 2007
Podhoretz v. Zakaria on Iran
Time to join the bandwagon of bloggers who've posted this video. One does get the sense that Prodhoretz is fighting the last, last, last war (I mean, come on, how long is appeasement going to keep getting the bad rap it does?) Zakaria gives a pretty boilerplate Realist deterrence spiel. Throughout, Prodhoretz seems to miss the point; deterrence and appeasement are simply not the same thing. Of course, Zakaria sort of misses a point as well: what the Americans are doing in North Korea is not (just) deterrence, but also (a bit of) appeasement in the form of (a lot of) fuel oil.
Dan Drezner, while going nowhere near endorsing the idea of attacking Iran, worries that we're not dealing with a situation as simple as deterring Iran, but avoiding spillover into an all-out Mideast arms race and the uncontrolled proliferation that might result.
True enough, the situation with Iran is not Cold War bipolarity - or even a regional bipolarity like India-Pakistan (where, I would be happy to argue while my Realist hat is still on, I think we indeed see higher stability because of nuclearization). Israel's - and the United States' - deterrent threats would prevent Iran from using its potential nuclear capability, but that would not necessarily dissuade Iran's other neighbors from going nuclear as well. And deterrence may not actually prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear capabilities, because pre-emption might not be a credible existential threat. Especially if (admittedly reasonable) positions like Zakaria's are overtly taken by decision-makers.
But does any of this matter? Keeping the Realist hat on for a few moments, even if the whole Middle East goes nuclear, I don't think the world would be necessarily more unstable or that any of these weapons would actually be used, unless the United States or Israel first lose their cool and break the nuclear taboo (Realist hat off, momentarily for rhetoric's sake).
This is true even if Ahmadinejad is actually evil or, in better IR Theoretical terms, a revisionist. If Iran is a revisionist or revolutionary state, whether it or any other non-nuclear Middle Eastern country acquired nukes or not, it will still be deterred from using them, by the assurance of destruction by the United States. Iran can probably revise Middle East politics in important ways, but can't pose an existential threat to anybody. Now, if Ahmadinejad is actually crazy (doesn't value his own existence, political position, his fatherland, or his coreligionists) we have far greater problems on our hands.
So even though, as Drezner says, there's a possibility that some Middle Eastern countries will transform their nuclear energy desires into nuclear weapons desires, nothing seems to say that this is a problem for the world. (Oh, and in case anybody was worried about nuclear terrorism, read this working paper by John Mueller of OSU.) The real policy prescription in all of this - especially if we choose to maintain our (healthy?) level of fear about a nuclear Iran - would be controlled nuclear proliferation. But that's stretching out my Realist hat a bit too much.
Anyhow, in light of all of this, I find this BBC article pretty interesting, all the more so if the initiative had any hope of getting off the ground.
[Edit: It looks like Obama's making more sense on foreign policy, according to this NY Times article. Not talking to leaders has never been a smart foreign policy move. Ever.]
06 October 2007
The Inevitable Mearsheimer and Walt Post
So, since the book came out earlier this year, since I am the Hobokenite who nominally studies such things, and moreover since I've been reading the extended version of the LRB article of the same title for class, I think it falls on me to give some sort of comment. And I must (perhaps shamefacedly) admit that I'm spurred to do this by Mearsheimer's appearance on the Colbert Report.
Caveat: I haven't read The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy in book form, but since this isn't a review in any real sense I think that's all right - call it commentary on commentary instead. Warning: this post will inevitably become excessively long.
The argument should be pretty familiar and can be stated in a sentence: United States foreign policy since 1967 has been influenced by a collection of pro-Israel lobby groups and individuals in directions that actually run contrary to national interests. It's not so much this essential argument that has generated controversy, but Mearsheimer and Walt's approach to making it - though to the extent that it has drawn unnecessary vitriol, those reactions have in a funny way simply fulfilled the authors' prophecy that their work would raise charges of antisemitism and all other sorts of hoopla.
Of course, controversy generates sales and run-of-the-mill academic titles don't tend to yield profits, so we can understand that Mearsheimer and Walt are doing something slightly different from the norm to justify their $750,000 advance. All of this to say: we oughtn't read The Israel Lobby as a regular academic tract (and thus should give it the benefit of the doubt in terms of academic rigour, cogency of argument, etc.).
From The New Republic, Jeffrey Goldberg launches an assault on Mearsheimer and Walt's work. Many of the substantive points Goldberg raises are fair ones: the most common criticisms of The Israel Lobby have been about poor research and misreadings of history. But lax scholarship (if the allegation is correct) does not translate into the accusation of antisemitism that Goldberg not-so-implicitly brings on the authors' argument:Mearsheimer and Walt have set themselves a similar goal [to Joseph Kennedy's cowing of Jewish Hollywood executives]: to convince non-Jews that their Jewish fellow citizens do not have their best interests at heart, and, further, to harass or to rattle or to embarrass American Jews into silence. Their book is not an act of scholarship, but an act of intimidation.
Commending Goldberg's attack, TNR's Jeffrey Herf implicitly compares The Israel Lobby to those "Judeocentric" conspiracy theories that helped shape Nazi antisemitism.
These particular charges hinge largely on reading Mearsheimer and Walt's focus on the Israel lobby as an attack on Jews - which prima facie seems unlikely, since that is the very thing that the authors would be trying assiduously to avoid. Of course there will be a degree of straw-manning in situations like this, but still I'm partially surprised by these kinds of attacks, especially since there seem to be a lot of legitimate substantive grounds on which to refute the argument. I think that those familiar with the longstanding and still-dominant Realist paradigm in International Relations can't have read The Israel Lobby (italicized or in quotes) in the same light that these reviewers have.
Mearsheimer and Walt, in their academic work (and as far as I can judge) view the world in the power-politics terms employed by their scholarly camp. There are important differences between the two, but undoubtedly their common theoretical framework questions the usefulness and advisability of an array of foreign policy choices that do not increase the United States' security or power (the Vietnam War was a favorite target of Realists). The United States' Middle East policy fits that bill, according to the authors, since the degree to which America supports Israel, the "dual containment" of Iraq and Iran from 1991 to 2003, and the 2003 war in Iraq have worked against America's security needs and strategic interests. (I should add in the way of explanation that many Realists don't share the popular view that the Iraq war was about strategic resources like oil.) What, then, could be driving the United States to engage in such unwise activities? Mearsheimer and Walt look to American domestic politics - admittedly not their primary subfield of expertise - and think they've found an answer: the Israel lobby.
There are of course problems in the argument (beyond the huge problems that have led many to conclude that the work is just bad social science) and here is where the authors' fiercest detractors must find their ammunition. First, they set out to show that supporting Israel does not benefit American national security. Especially since the end of the Cold War (or, as Realists should really argue, far before the end of the Cold War) this assertion seems like a no-brainer. Unfortunately, the authors suggest that support for Israel contributed to the motives for the terrorist attacks in 2001, and that the Israel lobby is partially responsible for America's misadventure in Iraq. Of course these suggestions, if true, would be powerful evidence for Mearsheimer and Walt's argument, but since they cannot be shown to be true (or false, for that matter) they are sure to draw attacks. It would be much better to make the more limited argument that American acquiescence to or support of Israel's actions in the West Bank and Gaza helps the recruitment efforts of terrorist groups and to show directly that AIPAC lobbied for the Iraq war - and leave it at that.
Second - and more seriously, I think - Mearsheimer and Walt attempt to show not only that America doesn't have a security interest in unconditionally backing Israel, but that it also doesn't have a moral motivation to do so. Consequently, they have to make the case for the moral equivalence of Israel and its Palestinian and Arab neighbors/subjects. They do this by drawing on Israeli history, making the familiar but obviously controversial claim that Israel's actions as a state have been no better than the actions of its (once or present) enemies. Because their history is contested - and often shaky - and the subject matter very sensitive, this line of reasoning was sure to draw fire. What is more, they didn't have to follow it.
Mearsheimer and Walt's work unfortunately mixes normative and explanatory claims in a way that would be sure to generate the criticism I've cited. To show that the influence of the Israel lobby explains misguided U.S. foreign policy, they think (rightly) that they have to show that national security is not served by this policy, and (wrongly) that they must show that the United States doesn't actually have a moral reason for backing Israel's actions. Walt and Mearsheimer might have shown that the United States is not morally justified in backing Israel, but that doesn't mean that moral justifications don't explain U.S. policy. One can believe, falsely, that one is doing the right thing - and that false belief can be the cause of action. What they have accomplished is to argue that the U.S. ought not back Israel on moral grounds - but Realists going back to Machiavelli would have been able to make that claim without even looking at Israel's (im)moral policies. As Realists, their claim should be simply that moral reasons are improper reasons, and that the country should tend to its security and strategic interests (and so should not unquestioningly back Israel).
In this case, justificatory or moral reasoning can't be separated from the supposed other cause of American policy - the Israel lobby. What sets a state's "moral compass"? Some possible answers include: philosophical tradition, custom, and in a democracy the beliefs of citizens and elites. Or put another way, all sorts of forces - including domestic forces like lobby groups - help construct a state's identity in its external relations. In this light, the Israel lobby and its influence can't be separated from the question of whether America has been acting on moral grounds in its support of Israel: of course it has, and part of what has defined its moral reasoning has been the interaction of domestic interests, including the Israel lobby.
The normative current in Realism has never claimed that states should allow moral considerations to lead to action contrary to security interests - and that's what Mearsheimer and Walt should have stuck to as good Realists. But of course, that argument's not going to sell books. And moreover, it's a pretty bad argument that runs so contrary to what we know about how states act that it would be the Realists that look like they have their heads in the sky, hoping for a world of pure, security-seeking rational actors that they will never see. (Rodger Payne makes this point more convincingly and less facetiously than I do.)
But maybe the confusion generated when scholars engage in more popularly accessible projects such as Mearsheimer and Walt have done is best shown in these lines from Goldberg's review:When did it become legitimate in American political science to explain complicated phenomena by single causes? Not even the blizzard of footnotes at the end of their book can disguise the fact that it is an exercise in simplification.
That quote is a criticism, by the way.
20 September 2007
Offline / So this is the new year
The first day of classes in the 2007 Fall Quarter at The Ohio State University has come and passed. My upcoming, stress-inducing, caffeine-addled, boilerplate-for-the-most-part quarter shall consist of:
Research Design
Theories of International Relations
Political Obligation
Political Theory from (before) Socrates to (before) Machiavelli (Audit)
So there you have it: from KKV to Christine Korsgaard. Should be a wild time.
In other news, my computer seems to be on its last legs. I shall be shutting down operations in order to try to format it to get some more life out of it.
18 September 2007
Will freedom fries be served?
In my inbox this morning:
LEIBNIZ AND SPINOZA II
September 28-30, 2007
Princeton University
Sponsored by
Princeton University
Leibniz Society of North America
Ecole Normale Supérieure - Lettres et Sciences Humaines
Centre d'Hautes Etudes en Rhétorique, Philosophie et Histoire des Idées (UMR 5037)
This will be the second of two events in a Franco-American collaboration, organized by Daniel Garber (Princeton University), Pierre-François Moreau (ENS-LSH), Mark Kulstad (Rice University), and Mogens Laerke (University of Chicago). The first conference took place on March 15-17 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure—Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Lyon.
The two conferences aim to put in place a truly international group working toward a common project. Organized around a well-defined philosophical and historiographical problem, these conferences aim to establish a forum for the comparison, confrontation, and coordination of divergent historiographical and philosophical national traditions, and thus to reinforce the relations between the scholarly communities in the U.S. and Europe.
The precise scholarly objective of these two conferences is to reevaluate the nature and the importance of the biographical, historical and philosophical relations between these two major figures in the history of philosophy.
17 September 2007
Bombes en haut de Tehran?
Apparently (the unlikely?) Bernard Kouchner is saber-rattling over the Iranian nuclear program. I wouldn't make too much of such statements. The most that can be said is that the French are signaling to the Iranians that they understand and are prepared for an American attack on a nuclear Iran sometime in the future (if all diplomatic avenues are blocked). That is, there won't be noisy protestations coming from the French - or, I suspect, the rest of the European Union - if Iran completes and tests an atomic bomb and America (or Israel, which I speculate is also likely) responds militarily.
The French don't want Iran to build the bomb and they recognize Iran as an actual threat (unlike Iraq circa 2003). This much is rather obvious; the position should surprise nobody. Nor do I think this is evidence for a "New France." Chirac, before the end of his presidency, had gone much further in suggesting that the force de frappe could be used against a nuclear Iran.
07 September 2007
The Economist v. Belgium
The Economist is a well known weekly collection of editorials masquerading as "news" articles. But a new piece suggesting that Belgium's time has come may take the cake.
Quoth The Economist:When it was created in 1831, it served more than one purpose. It relieved its people of various discriminatory practices imposed on them by their Dutch rulers. And it suited Britain and France to have a new, neutral state rather than a source of instability that might, so soon after the Napoleonic wars, set off more turbulence in Europe.
Citing the bitter animosities between Flemings and Walloons, The Economist declares that "in short, Belgium has served its purpose" and proposes a "praline divorce," consoling patriotic Belgians (who must be in short supply, according to the article's logic) that "countries come and go."
[...] No doubt more good things can come out of the swathe of territory once occupied by a tribe known to the Romans as the Belgae. For that, though, they do not need Belgium: they can emerge just as readily from two or three new mini-states, or perhaps from an enlarged France and Netherlands.
In fact, countries don't simply come and go. They live far longer than any "purpose" would appear to dictate (a curious notion if there ever was one, since many would argue that a state's most basic purpose is survival) . That state death occurs rather infrequently has long been noted.
Indeed, The Economist is on to something, but it's a point that is wholly left out of that article. If states are going to fade away peacefully anywhere, it's likely to be in Belgium's neighborhood. How typical for the still-quite-Eurosceptic (dare I insert the pejorative "Anglo-Saxon"?) publication to ignore the most salient factor outmoding a unified Belgian state: Europe.
NATO has long placed Belgium's external security in the hands of the North Atlantic security community; in the past two decades the EU has seen the unprecedented pooling of its members' "exclusive" authority to govern. But on that score, if shared sovereignty and collective security mean that it's time to say goodbye to Belgium, why not the United Kingdom as well? That state has seen its share of devolution, it's entrenched in NATO, and it's enmeshed in Europe - whether Britons like it or not.
***
On a completely different note, I fell upon an intriguing discovery on Amazon, from Routledge, publisher of the 2006 volume containing "Social Theory as Cartesian Science."
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