Fun Stuff

 

I'm in the UK at a conference, but I came across the following video, courtesy of Newsweek. If you've been doing a Rip Van Winkle or otherwise engaged for the past ten years, here's a quick way to catch up on the first decade of the 21st Century. My thought: "no wonder I'm tired ... it's been a busy ten years."

Halloween is a big event in my neighborhood, and tomorrow night our street will be filled with lots of scary monsters. They aren't really monsters, of course; it will just be a bunch of kids trying to look as frightening as possible. And that got me thinking: what are the "scary monsters" that have haunted foreign policy debates in the past, and which turned out to be not so scary after all?

So, in honor of tomorrow night's revels, here's my Halloween list of "scary monsters:" those overblown threats, dubious nightmares, and (mostly) fictitious demons that people dreamed up to frighten us unnecessarily.

1. The "Domino Theory."  This hardy perennial posits that a single defeat in one area will trigger a cascade of similar defeats elsewhere, either because allies "bandwagon" with the enemy, enemies become emboldened, or status quo forces become disheartened. It was famously used to justify prolonged U.S. involvement in Indochina, but variants were also invoked in Central America and the basic idea is making something of a comeback in debates about the war in Afghanistan. If we win, Islamic radicals will be on the run everywhere; if we lose, it will be hailed as a great victory and will spawn new troubles throughout the region and beyond. As Jerome Slater and others showed, both the internal logic and the empirical evidence for the theory was always paltry, but the idea that the fate of the entire free world might hinge on a single marginal event in some far-away land was an effective way to scare people into overstating the importance of otherwise peripheral conflicts.

2. Y2K. Remember the widespread fear that the world's computers would simply stop working at midnight on Dec. 31, 1999, when their internal clocks ran out of digits? Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre called it "the computer equivalent of El Nino" and said there would be "nasty surprises" around the world. In fact, it was a virtual non-event, even in countries that hadn't taken significant precautions. It's one of those episodees that makes me suspect that the growing hype over "cyberwarfare" and "cyberterror" is being exaggerated too. It's a legitimate concern, but watch it get over-sold in the months and years to come.

3. "Rogue States."  This phrase become popular in the 1990s, in a period when the U.S. faced essentially no significant great power threats. So national security worriers started to talk about the threat from "rogue states" like Cuba, Libya, Syria, Iran, or Iraq, even though their combined capabilities were paltry compared with the United States (let alone the U.S. plus its allies).  Specifically, the combined GDP of all the potential "rogues" was less than the size of the U.S. defense budget, and most of these states weren't even in cahoots with each other. The same was true (but even more so) for the Bush administration's famous "Axis of Evil," a conceptual monstrosity intended solely to scare the American people into launching an unnecessary and tragic war.

4. "Monolithic Communism."  The Cold War was a fertile source of exaggerated dangers, and this dubious idea was one of the best. Many people in the West believed that all Marxists (and maybe even a few socialists) were reliable tools of the Kremlin, despite the abundant evidence of deep rifts within the international Communist movement and the repeated tensions between Moscow and its various clients. The belief that the Kremlin controlled a potent world-wide revolutionary movement fueled the insane fear of communist subversion during the McCarthy period, and even led some highly placed U.S. officials to view the Sino-Soviet split as a clever communist plot to lull us into a false sense of security. Not only did we exaggerate the threat, but we missed opportunities to wean leftists away from Moscow and fought foolish wars in places that didn't matter, like Indochina.

5. "Strategic Minerals and Resource Dependence."  The United States and other industrial powers have repeatedly exaggerated their dependence on so-called strategic minerals (cobalt, chromium, manganese, platinum, etc.), and used the fear of cartels or cutoffs to justify a more interventionist foreign policy and greater power-projection capabilities. Alarmists point to the fact the United States imports most of its consumption of these materials from Africa and other conflict-ridden places, but this simplistic view ignores the reasons why this is the case and the various options we have for dealing with possibility of a cutoff. One option is stockpiles (which the U.S. possesses), and another is the fact that additional supplies often exist, albeit at higher prices. We import most of our consumption because these sources are the cheapest, not because they are the only ones available. Moreover, the danger of a complete and lasting cutoff is remote. With the (partial) exception of oil, strategic minerals are an issue that deserves a modest degree of attention, but are hardly cause for alarm.

6. Immigration.  Throughout U.S. history, people who had made it here from abroad have tended to panic over the next group to arrive after them.  The Anglo-Americans opposed the large-scale German migration in the mid-19th century, and every subsequent group -- Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, Chinese, Puerto Ricans, Muslims,. etc. -- seems to have provoked nativist alarm declaring that this latest group will never assimilate and will gradually destroy whatever it is that past immigrants have come to value. This sort of thing can even lead formerly sensible people like newsman Lou Dobbs to rail against illegal immigration now, and it inspires militia groups seeking to patrol our southern borders.

In fact, immigration has long been a great source of strength for the United States, and it will probably remain so for many years to come.  And the dirty little secret here is that American society -- and especially certain American businesses -- aren't upset at all about having a low-wage workforce to exploit.  Keeping a lot more people out of the United States wouldn't be that difficult if we really wanted to do it-but we don't.  That's a good thing, by the way, because it means the United States won't face the same demographic problems that Japan, Europe, and Russia will (i.e., a shrinking and progressively older population).

7. Soviet Military Power. Don't get me wrong: the Soviet Union was a serious adversary and it possessed considerable military power. But lots of people tended to portray it as a monster that was ten feet tall, and capable of seemingly magical feats of military deering-do. Richard Pipes famously told readers that the Soviet leadership genuinely believed it "could fight and win a nuclear war," other hawks seriously declared that the Red Army could easily defeat NATO and overrun Western Europe (in perhaps as little as two weeks), and Caspar Weinberger's Pentagon used to use U.S. tax dollars to produce a glossy document -- Soviet Military Power -- containing various ominous descriptions of Soviet weaponry and capabilities, much of it exaggerated.  Of course, what they portrayed as the ultimate scary monster turned out to be a colossus with feet of clay.

8. "Bogeymen from Latin America"  As befits a regional hegemon, the United States has long exaggerated the threat from various not-very-powerful forces in the Western hemisphere.  The list of bogeymen is a long one: Venustiano Carranza and Pancho Villa in Mexico, Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua,  Fidel Castro in Cuba, Juan Jose Arevalo and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Salvador Allende in Chile, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, etc., etc., right on up to Hugo Chavez in contemporary Venezuela. One might concede that some of these individuals or groups were an annoyance or even a regional problem, but U.S. officials often depicted them as mortal threats to U.S. security. Remember when Ronald Reagan declared that the Sandinistas were but "a two-day march from Harlingen, Texas?"  In other words, we were supposed to fear an invasion from an impoverished country whose total population was less than that of New York City. What's really scary is that some of Reagan's listeners probably believed him.

9.  "Declinism."  Fueled by books like Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, many Americans thought that "imperial overstretch" in the 1980s was going to lead to the rapid erosion in America's global position.  A corollary to this argument was the fear of Japanese dominance, as illustrated by Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One and other similar works.  This view even infected the international relations literature, as when Robert Keohane called his major work on institutions After Hegemony and realist Robert Gilpin offered a similarly gloomy forecast in War and Change in World Politics.

Of course, we now know that it was the Soviet Union whose decline was imminent (as others realists, notably Kenneth Waltz, had foreseen) and the Japanese Godzilla that many feared soon succumbed to a combination of speculative bubble at home and a sclerotic political system.  But might one sound a cautionary note: were these fears dead wrong, or just premature? I'd say wrong, unless we keep doing a lot of stupid things abroad and don't get our economic house in order back home.

10. "Islamofascism."   No list of scary monsters would be complete without neoconservativism's bedrock bogeyman: the claim that there is a powerful, cohesive, ideologically united movement of Islamic radicals, backed by assorted Islamic governments, seeking to re-establish the medieval caliphate, subjugate the West, and impose Islam on all of us. One thing is clear: the people who make this claim don't understand Islam very well and don't understand fascism at all; "Islamofascism" may in fact be the most misleading neologism in contemporary political discourse.  

Sure, some Islamic radicals harbor wild fantasies about transforming and uniting the entire Muslim world under their banner; the good news is that they are as likely to accomplish this goal as I am to flap my arms and fly to the moon.  Let's remember that Osama bin Laden isn't leading an vast army of followers to overthrow the existing Arab governments; he's hiding in some remote part of Pakistan and praying we don't find him. And surveys suggest that Al Qaeda's efforts aren't winning them any mass support; just recruits among a small number of disaffected.  But the more we fear this monster and overreact to it, the more sympathy they may win and the more trouble they can cause....even if its nowhere near the amount they would like.

 

I could go on and discuss the fear of fluoridation and flu vaccines, paranoia about foreign ownership of U.S. assets, the "window of vulnerability," China's "foreign aid offensive" in Africa, the fear of subversion that led to the shameful incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and so forth.   But I'll stop with these ten, and just make two final points. 

First, we are often told that international politics is a dangerous business, and that it makes sense to prepare for the worst case. This is nonsense, because there are real costs to exaggerating various potential threats. Not only may this policy lead us to ignore more likely and more legitimate problems and to waste resources addressing fantasies, but it can also lead a country to take active steps that either make minor problems worse or lead to enormous self-inflicted wounds (see under: Iraq). Fixating on scary monsters can leave you ill-prepared when real problems arise.

Second, even if these foolish fears led us to undertake various boneheaded policies on occasion, we should nonetheless be thankful that these various monsters turned out to be far less fearsome than we often believed. But given that Nov. 26 is the official day to give thanks this year, maybe I'll just hold that thought until that holiday arrives.

SONNY TUMBELAKA/AFP/Getty Images

One of the pleasant frustrations of modern life is that there are far more good books out there than any of us have time to read. Browsing the Brookline Booksmith -- the wonderful local bookstore in my hometown -- is simultaneously delightful and depressing: I get intrigued and excited by all sorts of titles, but then I have trouble deciding which to buy and which to read first.

I'm know I'm not the only person with that problem -- which is why book reviews exist -- so I thought I'd help out by suggesting a few books I've recently read that got my own synapses humming.

The first is John Mueller's Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda, which relentlessly punctures the various ways that analysts of all persuasions have overstated the dangers and the importance of nuclear weapons. (For a preview of Mueller's argument, see the FP excerpt here). It is an equal-opportunity critique, as Mueller goes after hawks, doves, realists, and other Cassandras with equal relish and a playful but pungent wit. He emphasizes that nuclear weapons are in fact highly destructive and need to be handled with great care, but convincingly shows that policymakers and pundits have 1) routinely exaggerated their destructive power (i.e., by suggesting they can "destroy the world"), 2) inflated their importance in deterring war, imparting influence, or enhancing status, and 3) overstated the risk of nuclear accidents, nuclear terrorism, or other very low-probability events. And instead of encouraging a useful prudence, Mueller argues that our "atomic obsession" has led us to adopt various policies that wasted a lot of money and may have actually made the situation more dangerous rather than less. Not everyone will be convinced by Mueller's arguments, but the book will certainly make you think. Added bonus: It's immensely fun to read.

My second recommendation is Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall's America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. This is a creative, carefully researched, and incisive analysis of U.S. strategy during the long struggle against the Soviet Union. There are plenty of good books on this topic already, but Craig and Logevall's is one of the best, and their interpretation has important implications for contemporary strategic debates. In brief, they argue that America's initial response to the Soviet threat in Europe was both necessary and successful, but overselling by early Cold Warriors also put in place a worldview and a set of domestic institutions that consistently exaggerated U.S. insecurity and led to costly and counterproductive excesses over the next 40 years. The Soviet Union is now gone, but that worldview and those institutions remain in place today. Which is why the United States spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined, why we find ourselves bogged down in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, and why we panic over countries like Iran (whose defense spending in 2007 was a whopping $7.5 billion, or about 1 percent of America's).

My third suggestion is Margaret MacMillan's Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, which I read on my recent trip to Norway. Based on a series of invited lectures, it is a set of pointed reflections on history, historians, and the ways in which the past is employed (and distorted) for both noble and ignoble purposes. If not quite the intellectual tour de force of a book like David Hackett Fischer's Historians' Fallacies, her reflections nonetheless provide a smart and eminently sensible set of warnings for citizens and leaders alike. History is essential to our identities, but it can also a dangerous weapon in the hands of anyone with a political agenda.

And speaking of history, my last recommendation is Eugene Rogan's The Arabs, which I acquired last week. I haven't finished it, but so far it's an entertaining, gracefully written, and eye-opening look at a diverse people whose history, culture and character are often badly misunderstood (if not actively distorted) here in the United States. Read it. You'll learn a lot.

RAMZI HAIDAR/AFP/Getty Images

I don't know how many people subscribe to both Foreign Policy and Sports Illustrated, but I do know lots of people who take athletics seriously. Human beings seem to be hard-wired into making "in-group/out-group" distinctions, so it's not surprising that the loyalty that sports fans show for their favorite teams looks a lot like the broader phenomenon of nationalism. And I'm not saying that just because I'm a proud member of Red Sox Nation.  

Success in sports can be the first step toward a successful political career (e.g., Bill Bradley, Sebastian Coe, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jack Kemp, etc.) and athletes like Pele, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods have become genuine global icons. Of course, using sports to demonstrate national prowess or as a source of national pride is a common practice. The revival of the Olympic games in the 1890s was at least partly intended to promote international cooperation and understanding, but as a good realist would expect, the Games eventually became yet another arena where states could try to demonstrate the superiority of their own system and enhance their global influence.

Anyway, as summer winds down and the fall term looms, I found myself wondering about various episodes where sporting events actually had an effect on world politics, or told us something about how the world was changing. Here's my list of ten key moments, in no particular order.

1. The Berlin Olympics, 1936.

Adolf Hitler uses the Olympic Games to highlight the superiority of the Nazi regime, but his efforts are at least partly undermined when a black American, Jesse Owens, wins four gold medals.

2. La Guerra de futbol (aka “Soccer War”): El Salvador vs. Honduras, 1969. 

Here’s a case where sports may have helped cause a war: a hard-fought match between El Salvador and Honduras in a preliminary round for the 1970 FIFA World Cup exacerbated the existing tensions between the two states and helped spark a brief four-day war in which over 1000 people died. The war ended inconclusively and El Salvador eventually won the actual match, but was ousted in a subsequent round and did not make the finals.

3. "Ping Pong Diplomacy:" U.S. Table Tennis Team Visits China, 1971. 

During the world championships in Japan, the U.S. table tennis team received an unexpected invitation to visit China, and shortly thereafter became the first group of Americans to visit China since the communist takeover in 1949. The "ping heard 'round the world" was the first tangible sign of normalization between the United States and China (even though the Chinese teams reportedly had to throw a few matches to the Americans). The visit was obviously not the cause of the subsequent rapprochement, but it shows how sporting events can be an effective diplomatic tool.

4. U.S. Women Win Soccer World Cup, 1999.

I see this as significant for two main reasons. First, it underscores the growing importance and legitimacy of women’s sports, which has been an important element in modern feminism. Second, it shows the United States finally demonstrating real prowess in the world's most popular sport. Plus, the final game was against China, which makes it a nice harbinger of 21st century geopolitics.

5. Black September at the Munich Olympics, 1972:

Palestinian terrorists seized and eventually killed eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games. The heinous act sets back Palestinian national aspirations and triggers a protracted Israeli reprisal campaign that assassinated a number of Palestinian leaders and at least one innocent victim.

6. South Africa Wins Rugby World Cup, 1995.

South African teams were barred from most international competitions during the apartheid era, a step that highlighted the regime’s pariah status and helped undermine popular support for the policy. The post-apartheid team’s victory in 1995 was a vivid symbol of South Africa’s new beginning, symbolized when President Nelson Mandela awarded the victor’s trophy to team captain Francois Pinear, a white Afrikaner.

7. Australia II Wins America’s Cup, 1983.

The Aussie victory broke what was probably the longest winning streak in the history of sports -- 132 years of dominance that began when the schooner America outpaced a British flotilla in a race around the Isle of Wight in 1851. (When she asked who had finished second, Queen Victoria was reportedly told "Your Majesty, there is no second.”). In retrospect, one could see the Australian victory as a symptom of globalization: cutting-edge yacht design wasn’t an American monopoly any longer. Since then, alas, the competition has been driven by another American export: gamesmanship and ceaseless litigation over the rules of the competition.  

8. The "Miracle on Ice": the U.S. Olympic Ice Hockey Team Defeats the Soviet National Team, 1980. 

Labeled the greatest sports moment of the 20th century by Sports Illustrated, the improbable defeat of a heavily-favored Soviet team by a group of U.S. college players arrived at a moment when many Americans mistakenly felt the Soviet Union was pulling ahead. In fact, the USSR was on its last legs, though its hockey establishment remained a powerhouse and eventually sent a lot of players to the NHL.

9. “Das Wunder von Berne:” Germany Wins World Cup, 1954.

An underdog German team defeated Hungary in the final in Berne, a win that set off a wave of euphoria in Germany and is seen by some historians as a key event that restored a sense of national pride after the shame of the Nazi era and helped signal Germany’s re-integration in the world community.

10. Pentathlete Boris Onischenko Disqualified at Montreal Olympics, 1976.

I was on the fencing team in college, so I can’t resist adding this to my list.  Onischenko was a member of the Soviet modern pentathlon team who was disqualified after referees discovered that his sword had been modified to enable him to register “hits” on the electronic scoring machine by pressing a switch concealed in his grip.  Together with the East German steroid scandal, such episodes helped undermine the image of the Soviet empire.  Plenty of other athletes have cheated, of course -- think of sprinters Ben Johnson and Marion Jones, bicyclist Floyd Landis, and subway-riding “marathoner” Rosie Ruiz -- but their transgressions had less impact absent the Cold War atmosphere.

There are other examples one might add: Budge versus von Cramm at Wimbledon, the controversial Soviet "defeat" of the U.S. men's basketball team at Munich, or the notorious Soviet-Hungary water polo match at the 1956 Olympics (played in the shadow of the Hungarian Revolution, the game was so violent the water reportedly turned pink). So please feel free to contribute your own suggestions.

IOC Olympic Museum /Allsport 

I've been studying politics a long time now, and there are still lots of things about it that at some level I just don't get. I'm not saying that I have no idea why these things occur or suggesting that they are totally inexplicable. I'm just saying that I still find them a bit baffling.

So I made a list, and thought I'd share a few of them. Maybe some of you will share my confusion.

1. I've never really understood why plenty of smart people think the United States still needs thousands of nuclear weapons (or ever did). I'm familiar with the abstract theology of nuclear weapons policy and I don't favor total nuclear disarmament, but the case for an arsenal of more than a few hundred weapons eludes me. See here or here for convincing arguments to this effect.

2. I'm 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, where's your sense of entitlement? And frankly, I’m also surprised that the U.S. armed forces haven't 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 (it's a volunteer force, there’s 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 don't 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. I'm 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 there's only one version of history that matters. I understand why Serbs 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. What's odd is that people who make such claims tend to think their view is simply incontestable and other equally valid historical claims aren’t worth paying attention to. You're 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 in The 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 you’d think we’d have learned to be more skeptical by now.

6. I certainly don't get the business model that informs the content of the Wall Street Journal's 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 the Journal's 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 rival Financial Times does? More importantly, wouldn't their market share (and profits) be increased if they offered a more diverse range of views? I'm equally puzzled by the op-ed page of the Washington Post: what's the business model that says cornering the market on tired neoconservative pundits is the best way to attract new readers? (FP is now owned by the Post corporation too, I might add, but anyone who follows this Web site knows that there isn't any discernible party line here.)

7. A related point: I can't figure out why newspapers aren't 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 I'm amazed that more bloggers aren't 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 Jackson's demise, or the "birther" controversy. But then I didn't get the Princess Di phenomenon or the whole reality-TV thing either.

9. I don't 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. I'm 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 wasn’t 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 couldn't gain control of the airplane and turn it into a weapon. (A smarter Middle East policy wouldn't hurt either). I'll 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 they’d 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.  

Ami Vitale/Getty Images

It's summertime, and some of you will be headed for the beach, or the country, or wherever you go to relax and recharge. You want to take along something fun to read, and you're not quite ready to tackle that new translation of War and Peace. But you're afraid you’ll feel guilty if you don't read something that is at least tangentially related to international politics. 

What’s the answer? Simple. Here’s a list of books for your summer vacation reading that are all entertaining and easy-to-devour, but will also keep at least a few of your foreign policy synapses alive while you're relaxing. These suggestions are from my own list of guilty pleasures, and I'm not claiming that these books are the "ten best" or anything like that. I'm sure I've missed a few obvious candidates, so feel free to offer up suggestions of your own.

1. Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy.

Yes, it's sci-fi, and the prose style isn't exactly Proust. But it's got lots of international (or more precisely, "interstellar") politics in it: balance of power, empire, deterrence theory, diplomacy, religion, economic interdependence, and you name it. The late Ernst Haas used to recommend it to grad students at Berkeley, and it's easy to see why. And the central premise of the book -- that mathematically inclined social scientists ("the psycho-historians") could forecast the future and guide it -- is certain to appeal to scholars who think that they could rule the world if they just got their models properly specified and had enough data. (Note: if Asimov's not-so-subtle leftwing politics bothers you, you can read Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers instead, which includes lots of chest-thumping patriotism as well as explicit denunciations of Marx.)

2. Graham Greene, The Quiet American. 

World-weary and cautionary tale about the idealism of American intervention, well worth re-reading in light of our current overseas adventures. And Greene is always easy to devour, even when dozing at the beach.

3. Joseph Heller, Catch-22

I must have read this book twenty times when I was in high-school, even though I didn't really understand it.  A dark and comic portrait of World War II, and Heller skewers many absurdities of military life. If you're worried that Heller will undermine your sense of patriotism, read Herman Wouk's The Winds of War as an antidote (another one of my faves -- see below).

4. John Le Carre, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People

Yes, I know the Cold War is over, which gives these books a rather dated quality. But the characters are beautifully crafted, the prose is elegant and seductive, and both books are real page-turners. The first time I read them, I stayed up to 3 AM to finish the damn thing and was next-to-useless the next day. (Cautionary note: the second volume of the trilogy, The Honourable Schoolboy, is a bit tedious. But you'll probably want to read it anyway.) Le Carre is still churning them out, of course, but these three books remain his high point.

5. Alan Furst, The Polish Officer

I'd recommend anything by Furst, who has written a whole series of dark and romantic noir-ish novels that offer detailed and remarkably vivid portraits of life in Europe before and during the Nazi period. There's not a lot of "high politics" in these books, but they depict spies, politicians, military officials, and ordinary people caught up in the dark dealings of a horrific period. There's betrayal around every corner, and you’ll find them impossible to put down.

6. Orhan Parmuk, Snow

This was my "beach book" last summer, and I concede it's not directly about "foreign policy" at all. But it is a brooding and moving portrait of life in contemporary Turkey, and especially the growing role of Islam. If you think that phenomenon is important, this book will open your eyes and touch your heart.

7. Joseph S. Nye, The Power Game

How many major IR scholars have written a novel and actually gotten it published? (Kindly hold the snarky comments about all the political science books that you think are also "fictional"). It's a fun read, and you get to see how a distinguished scholar, government official, and former Harvard dean writes a sex scene. (And for another example of a Harvard scholar venturing into fiction, see the late John K. Galbraith's The Triumph: A Novel of Modern Diplomacy, a wicked satire about an ill-starred U.S. intervention in Latin America. It must be fiction, because something like that could never happen in real life, could it?)

8. Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

A missionary family's experiences in the Congo, where misguided idealism and stubbornness eventually lead to tragic consequences. A powerful indictment of patriarchy, religion, and overzealous American righteousness.

9. Pat Barker, The Regeneration Trilogy

An intense and inspired set of novels set in and around World War I, imagining the relations between soldiers -- including real-life figures such as the poet Siegfried Sassoon -- and the doctors charged with treating them in hospital.  Not exactly a lighthearted read, but it will grip you.

10. Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

I think I read every one of Wouk’s books when I was a teen-ager, and The Caine Mutiny is still my favorite (and his best). But this book (and its sequel, War and Remembrance) is broader, and includes cameo appearances by Churchill, Stalin, and other real-life figures. Wouk marches his characters around the world, and manages to get most of the global conflict in somewhere. It's not great art, but it will more than pass the time.  

Pack away a few of these, and you'll have plenty to read while you're relaxing. And you won't have to feel too guilty about it either.

Infrogmation/flickr

I am heading to California tomorrow on a family vacation, and will be posting infrequently over the next ten days. I've asked a few people to contribute guest blogs while I'm gone, and I'm sure I'll chime in from time to time, but I plan to spend most of my time reading, hiking, and catching up with my family out west. I wonder if there's good Wifi in Yosemite Valley...

When I offered my "IR Theory for Lovers" guide back on Valentine's Day, I said I might follow up with some IR-inspired reflections on parenthood for Father's Day. I try to keep my promises, so here goes the "IR Theory Guide to Parenting." 

First off, modern realist theory focuses on the structure of the system and especially number of major powers in it. Right off the bat, this perspective can tell you a lot about the dynamics parents face as the size of their family increases. When parents have one child, the balance of power is in their favor. They can double-team the lucky kid, and give each other a break by taking turns. Life is good.  

But if you have a second child the dynamics shift. If one parent is alone at home and both kids are awake, the balance of power isn't in the parent's favor anymore. Instead of double-teaming them, they get to double-team you. And once the kids are mobile, you learn about another key IR concept: the window of opportunity. You're feeding or changing Kid #1, and Kid #2 makes a bolt out the front door, just like North Korea tested a nuclear weapon while we were busy with Iraq. Or you're in the middle of a crowded department store and they each decide to head down different aisles. The potential complications of a multipolar order were never clearer the first time this happened to me.  

Moreover, once your children learn to overcome sibling rivalry and form alliances (e.g., by backing each other's alibis), your problems get even more complicated.  Plus, children quickly master "divide-and-conquer" diplomacy -- "But Mom said I could stay up until midnight!" -- and soon learn that if they don't get the right answer from one parent, just ask the other. Of course, if you decide to have three, four, five (or more), you'll face even more complicated diplomatic dynamics and dilemmas of collective action, not to mention complete exhaustion. Yes, there are probably some economies of scale and maybe you'll learn from experience, but expanding NATO and the EU didn't make them easier to govern. If you decide to raise your own platoon, good luck to you.

Moreover, realists from Thucydides have stressed the destabilizing effects of shifts in the balance of power. This dynamic is built into family life: kids grow up, get older and smarter and bigger and more independent. Their parents get older, slower, more tired, and eventually dependent on the children. If you're lucky, your kids will help out when you're past your prime. Hmmm…is that what the United States has been doing for Great Britain?  

Second, as Tom Schelling described in Arms and Influence, the closely related subjects of deterrence and compellence are central to the parenting experience (just as the use of "salami tactics" is central to being a kid).  Most of us love our children deeply, which puts real limits on the amount of punishment we are willing to inflict. Total war just isn't an option, and the ability to use force is limited, so we're stuck with coercive diplomacy. And kids quickly figure out which threats are credible and which are not, and they are geniuses at probing the limits of our resolve.  

Moreover, no parent can monitor everything a child does (and you'd end up with a pretty neurotic kid if you tried), and you eventually reach a point where physical restraint (in IR terms, "pure defense") isn't practical. So we all rely on deterrence -- "if you hit your sister/brother, I'll take away your X-Box for a week." But we all know the various subterfuges that states (and siblings) employ to negate a deterrent threat. Remember classics like: "It's not my fault….he started it!" Or "I didn't hit him, I just poked him." (Sounds like the Middle East, doesn't it?) And when parents get desperate, they turn to foreign aid (aka bribes): "If you finish your homework, I'll take you out for ice cream." Schelling was probably right: you can learn just about everything you need to know about this subject by raising a child.  

Third, the whole field of asymmetric conflict can prepare you for another aspect of child-rearing: your superior education, physical strength, and total command of financial resources will not translate into anything remotely resembling "control." A two-year old who is barely talking can destroy a dinner party or a family outing just by being stubborn, and a smart, loving, strong and wealthy parent can be damn near helpless in the face of a sufficiently willful son or daughter. Read Andrew Mack, Ivan Toft, or James Scott on "asymmetric conflict" and the "weapons of the weak" before you have kids, and at least you'll be forewarned.

Network theory is still underdeveloped in the field of international relations, but it tells you a lot about your social life once you have children. You used to pick your friends based on common interests, professional associations, or simple serendipity; now you'll find that your children are in effect choosing some of your friends for you, depending on who they like in school or who's on their soccer team. This is actually one of the unexpected benefits of parenthood; just don't be surprised if your social circle looks a lot different by the time your child reaches ten.

Fifth, the IR literature on norms and socialization is obviously relevant, because there's a lot of socialization and norm development involved in trying to raise a reasonably well-adjusted child. Regime theory tells us that states create norms in part to reduce the transaction costs involved in cooperation, and that's exactly why parents set bedtimes and (try to) impose other general rules. My kids might like to negotiate every single aspect of their lives, but who has time? And as with most norms, failures in the short-term are less important than success in the long run. The fact that some states violate some norms doesn't mean that norms have no impact at all, and the fact that kids sometimes break the rules doesn't mean that they aren't internalizing a lot of the core principles over time. At least that's the hope that I cling to.

And then there's adolescence. Once again, we are back in the Jervisian world of misperception, reinforced by linguistic barriers, cultural gaps, hormonal eruptions, and the like. My teenaged kids are both pretty terrific, but there are those days when I think I am suddenly dealing with a creature who is as predictable as Kim Jong Il, as honest as Pinocchio, and as amenable to compromise as Torquemada. And the scary part is that on those days, they probably see me as the reincarnation of Joseph Stalin, with a bit of Mussolini thrown in. Bottom line: after you've raised a teenager, you'll never have quite the same confidence in the rational actor assumption.

There's a whole constructivist dimension to parenting too. For me, marriage merely institutionalized a relationship that was already well-established and formalizing it didn't feel like a momentous change. But parenthood felt like an instantaneous and overwhelming transformation of identity: there in the delivery room, I went from the comfortable role of "husband" to a new and frightening identity -- "Dad." And as the constructivists like to remind us, identities shape behavior in all sorts of unpredictable ways.

But to be honest, IR theory comes up short in one big dimension. I don't know of any body of IR theory that adequately explains why parents love their children, even when they are driving us bananas. But it's a good thing that we do, and for most of us, the joys outweigh the vexations. Happy Father's Day!

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