To what extent should journalists (and perhaps scholars) allow their sense of patriotism to shape what they publish? And more broadly, how should those concerns shape their  interactions with government officials? Debate on this issue has been rekindled recently in the case of Raymond Davis, the CIA employee who is now under arrest in Pakistan after an incident where he shot and killed two Pakistani assailants.  

For competing perspectives on this incident, see Jack Goldsmith here and Glenn Greenwald here.  Both writers make useful points and I recommend the whole exchange, but one passage in Goldsmith's post leapt out at me:

For a book I am writing, I interviewed a dozen or so senior American national security journalists to get a sense of when and why they do or don't publish national security secrets.  They gave me different answers, but they all agreed that they tried to avoid publishing information that harms U.S. national security with no corresponding public benefit.  Some of them expressly ascribed this attitude to "patriotism" or "jingoism" or to being American citizens or working for American publications.  This sense of attachment to country is what leads the American press to worry about the implications for U.S. national security of publication, to seek the government's input, to weigh these implications in the balance, and sometimes to self-censor."

Nationalism and patriotism being what they are, I don't expect reporters and commentators (or academics, for that matter) to be able to completely disassociate their personal attachments from what they think or write. But when they do let those biases in -- and especially when they do so explicitly -- then the rest of us are entitled to question their judgment on those matters. More generally, here's what disturbs me about the idea that national security journalists consciously adjust what they say in response to their patriotic feelings.

First, it is a common error to equate "patriotism" or "love of country" with deference to or support for the policies of the government. In fact, the main justification for a free press in a democracy rests on the assumption that it will take a skeptical, even adversarial, attitude towards the government and its policies. Such skepticism is needed given the information advantages that government officials normally possess: they can classify embarrassing materials, leak secrets selectively, and curry favor with sympathetic journalists by offering them unusual levels of "access." The more you dilute the basic confrontational attitude between journalists and officials, the more the vaunted "Fourth Estate" starts to resemble a Xerox machine that just repackages facts, arguments and justifications offered by those in power.

Read on

I'm on the other side of the world, and so I didn't get to see President Obama's speech in Arizona. I gather that he did well. I'm glad to hear it because one of the things presidents can do at times of crisis is to provide us with sentiments that most of us can readily embrace, at a moment when our unity as a nation is in some doubt.

I've tried to keep up with at least some of the blizzard of commentary that has followed the Arizona shooting, and although a lot of it has been thoughtful, I'm also disappointed (though not surprised) by the reflexive "who us?" reaction from a lot of conservative pundits. The most prominent example was probably David Brooks of the New York Times, who devoted an entire column to explaining why violent political discourse had absolutely nothing to do with a violent assault on a U.S. congresswoman. Brooks took this position, I suppose, because he knows that most of the hateful and violent rhetoric in America today comes from the right-hand side of the aisle. I'm not saying he agrees or endorses the worst rhetorical excesses of the American right (i.e., Brooks is often wrong but rarely openly hateful), but it was a pretty lame attempt to exonerate his ideological fellow-travelers.

One problem, of course, is that causality in a case like this is always murky. When someone arrives at a public event and starts shooting people, how do we determine the relative weight of mental illness, personal experience, opportunity, lax gun-control laws, and the toxic soup of violent rhetoric to which he had been exposed, when we try to figure out how something like this could have happened? Granting that Rep. Giffords's assailant was by all the evidence a deeply disturbed individual, it is still true that his madness manifested itself as an attack on a politician. He didn't shoot up his workplace, or a school, or even a random shopping mall: He chose a political target. And whatever his personal motives or internal dialogues may have been, he did this at a moment in our history when self-interested hatemongers have combined violent rhetoric and political polarization to an unprecedented degree. Yet for the American right, the violent, and frequently Manichaean, rhetoric that has been the stock in trade of some of their most prominent spokespeople (including Sarah Palin) is totally irrelevant, and anyone who says differently is just playing partisan politics.

Read on

There was a brief flap last week when the Nixon Library released a tape of a conversation between Henry Kissinger and the former president. At one point, Kissinger says "the emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."

A number of pundits have already explored what these disturbing remarks tell us about Kissinger himself and his relationship with Nixon, but Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush who is now a columnist for the Washington Post, has decided that the real culprit is the entire "realist" approach to foreign policy. Not only does he consider realism to be a "sadly limited view of power, discounting American ideological advantages in global ideological struggles," he claims that "repeated doses of foreign policy realism can deaden the conscience."

Such statements tell us two things: 1) Gerson hasn't read many (any?) realists, and 2) Gerson hasn't spent much time reflecting on the morality of his own government service. If he had, perhaps his own conscience would be a bit more troubled.

For starters, to use Henry Kissinger as a stand-in for all realists is bogus and intellectually lazy. Most academic realists thought the Vietnam War a foolish waste of U.S. resources, for example, yet Kissinger prosecuted that war with enthusiasm during his tenure as national security advisor and secretary of state. Similarly, most contemporary realists opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but Kissinger supported it (as did Gerson). Before indicting an entire school of thought on foreign policy, therefore, you'd think Gerson would have spent some time familiarizing himself with what realists actually wrote.

Furthermore, Gerson is wrong to claim that realists are indifferent to moral concerns. (See here for a thoughtful discussion of this issue). Realists emphasize the role of hard power and are generally skeptical of idealistic crusades, but not because they think morality has no place in human affairs. Indeed, most realists that I know are deeply moral individuals who wish that humans (and states) behaved in a more ethical fashion; unfortunately, history makes it abundantly clear that bad behavior is commonplace and that prudent leaders have to take that possibility into account.

Read on

For years a number of political scientists have been complaining about the propensity for scholars to study topics that are of little real-world value or of interest only to a handful of fellow scholars. We've come to call this the "cult of irrelevance." At the same time, many academics cloud their analyses in obscure jargon or a fog of methodological "sophistication," and rarely bother to offer up translations for the busy policy-maker. To make matters worse, although academics defend the institution of tenure fiercely, most of them do not use the protection it affords to pursue topics that might be politically controversial.

These unfortunate tendencies are not universal, however, and a number of us have tried to address the broader issue in various ways. You can read about the general subject here, here, here, or here. In that spirit, I'm also happy to pass on the news that a group of political scientists have organized a week-long summer institute designed to tackle the problem head-on. Under the guidance of Bruce Jentleson of Duke, Steve Weber of UC-Berkeley, and James Goldgeier of George Washington, a new International Summer Policy Institute will "deliver an intensive curriculum designed to teach participants how to develop and articulate their research for a policy audience, what policymakers are looking for when they look to IR scholarship, whom to target when sharing research, and which tools and avenues of dissemination are appropriate." The Institute is part of a larger effort to "bridge the gap" between academia and policy, and you can find out more about its activities here.

Needless to say, I think this is a worthy enterprise. Together with efforts like the Tobin Project, it may encourage more academics to focus their research efforts on policy-relevant topics and teach them how to communicate their results in ways that policymakers will find more accessible. The point here, by the way, is not to "dumb down" scholarship or to imitate the plethora of partisan think tanks now located inside the Beltway. Academic scholars should be independent researchers first and foremost, and seekers of truth above all. But the topics that they choose to address can be chosen to illuminate important policy issues more directly, and devoting some time to figuring out how to communicate their results more broadly would surely be a good thing.

What is also needed is a change in academic practice, including the criteria that are used to make key hiring and promotion decisions. The standards by which we assess scholarly value are not divinely ordained or established by natural law; they are in fact "socially constructed" by the discipline itself. In other words, we collectively decide what sorts of work to valorize and what sorts of achievement to reward. If university departments placed greater weight on teaching, on contributions to applied public policy, on public outreach, and on a more diverse range of publishing venues -- including journals of opinion, trade publishers and maybe even blogs--then individual scholars would quickly adapt to these new incentives and we would attract a somewhat different group of scholars over time. If university departments routinely stopped the "tenure clock" for younger academics who wanted to do a year of public service, that would enable them to gain valuable real-world experience without short-changing their long-term academic futures. It would also send the message that academia shouldn't cut itself off from the real world. And it probably wouldn't hurt if deans, department chairs, and university presidents welcomed controversy, encouraged intellectual diversity, and defended the slaying of sacred cows. As I've said before, academics really shouldn't count it a great achievement when students have no interest in their classes, and when people outside the ivory tower have no interest in what we have to say.

My colleague and friend (and brother-in-law) Christopher Stone sent me an email over the weekend, and I thought I should share it with you. His message read as follows:

I was reading EM Forster's Two Cheers for Democracy on the plane out to LA yesterday, and I came across an extraordinary little essay that seems to me to point to important elements of our politics today.

The essay is called "Post-Munich," and it is a reflection, written in 1939, on the curious political psychology that gripped England after Chamberlain made his deal with Hitler. He describes the country as in a strange double-state: still deeply fearful, and yet simultaneously distractible by the routines of life promised through the deal. Here is what Forster writes:

'This state of being half-frightened and half-thinking about something else at the same time is the state of many English people today. It is worth examining, partly because it is interesting, partly because, like all mixed states, it can be improved by thought.'

Forster goes on to describe why it is so hard to break free and face what needs to be done:

'We are urged. . . to face facts, and we ought to. But we can only face them by being double-faced. The facts lie in opposite directions, and no exhortation will group them into a single field. No slogan works. All is lost if the totalitarians destroy us. But all is equally lost if we have nothing left to lose.'

And finally:

'Sensitive people are having a particularly humiliating time just now. Looking at the international scene, they see, with a clearness denied to politicians, that if Fascism wins we are done for, and that we must become Fascist to win. There seems no escape from this hideous dilemma and those who face it most honestly often go jumpy.'

Back to Chris:

If you just substitute terrorists for totalitarians and terrorism for fascism, you have a pretty good picture of our politics today. But here's the important question this raises in my mind:

Why, I ask myself, does the United States today seem like England after Munich? The Taliban are not Hitler. I think it is because we have indulged this same appeasement, but with ourselves. We are on both sides of the bargain: we are the world's threatening tyrant, and we are the world's best hope for freedom. And rather than fight out that battle, we have decided we can have it both ways. We have walked up to the fundamental choice that we face about our role in the world, and we have made a Munich pact with ourselves instead of choosing liberty and democracy for all. The point here is that it is as unstable and unholy a pact as Munich. It will come undone, and it should come undone. But then the real choice and the real peril will confront us."

My reaction: I reproduced his email because I think Chris is on to something (just as Forster was back in 1939). Americans think we ought to be managing the whole world, but we shouldn't have to pay taxes or sacrifice our way of life in order to do it. We use our military machine to kill literally tens of thousands of Muslims in different countries, and then we are surprised when a handful of them get mad and try (usually not every effectively) to hit us back. But then we docilely submit to all sorts of degrading and costly procedures at airports, because we demand to be protected from threats whose origins we've been refusing to talk about honestly for years. We are constantly warned about grave dangers, secret plots, impending confrontations, slow-motion crises, etc., and we are told that these often hypothetical scenarios justify compromising liberties here at home and engaging in practices (torture, targeted assassinations, preventive missile strikes at suspected terrorists, etc.) that we would roundly condemn if anyone else did them. We think it is an outrage when North Korea shells a South Korean island and kills four people, (correct), yet it is just "business as usual" when one of our drones hits some innocent civilians in Pakistan or Yemen. We have disdain for our politics and our politicians, but instead of questioning the institutions and practices that fuel this dysfunction, we indulge in fairy tales about so-called leaders who will somehow lead us out of the darkness.

If I am reading Chris right, the lesson here is that the United States cannot be a republic and an empire, because the latter inevitably ends up corrupting the former. This is the central point raised by the late Chalmers Johnson (who passed away last week), by Andrew Bacevich, and by a number of other thoughtful people. It is an issue that gets raised in various corners of the blogosphere, but hardly ever in the mainstream press and certainly not at most of the think tanks and talk shops inside the Beltway, most of whom are devoted custodians of energetic international activism. And until that debate starts happening in a serious way, we will continue to stumble about, simultaneously bearing the weight of the world and being afraid of our own shadow.

Earlier this summer I mentioned that I was reading Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and I promised to sum up the insights that I had gleaned from it. The book is well-worth reading -- if not quite on a par with his earlier Guns, Germs, and Steel -- and you'll learn an enormous amount about a diverse set of past societies and the range of scientific knowledge (geology, botany, forensic archaeology, etc.) that is enabling us to understand why they prospered and/or declined.  

The core of the book is a series of detailed case studies of societies that collapsed and disappeared because they were unable to adapt to demanding and/or deteriorating environmental, economic, or political conditions. He examines the fate of the Easter Islanders, the Mayans, the Anasazi of the Pacific Southwest, the Norse colonies in Western Greenland (among others), and contrasts them with other societies (e.g., the New Guinea highlanders) who managed to develop enduring modes of life in demanding circumstances. He also considers modern phenomenon such as the Rwandan genocide and China and Australia's environmental problems in light of these earlier examples.

I read the book because I am working on a project exploring why states (and groups and individuals) often find it difficult to "cut their losses" and abandon policies that are clearly not working. This topic is a subset of the larger (and to me, endlessly fascinating) question of why smart and well-educated people can nonetheless make disastrous (and with hindsight, obviously boneheaded) decisions. Diamond's work is also potentially relevant to the perennial debate on American decline: Is it occurring, is it inevitable, and how should we respond?

So what lessons does Diamond draw from his case studies, and what insights might we glean for the conduct of foreign policy? Here are a few thoughts that occurred to me as I finished the book.

First, he argues that sometimes societies fail to anticipate an emerging problem because they lack adequate knowledge or prior experience with the phenomenon at hand. Primitive societies may not have recognized the danger of soil depletion, for example, because they lacked an adequate understanding of basic soil chemistry. A society may also fail to spot trouble if the main problem it is facing recurs only infrequently, because the knowledge of how to detect or deal with the problem may have been forgotten. As he emphasizes, this is especially problematic for primitive societies that lack written records, but historical amnesia can also occur even in highly literate societies like our own. 

By analogy, one could argue that some recent failures in U.S. foreign policy were of this sort. Hardly anybody anticipated that U.S. support for the anti-Soviet mujaheddin in Afghanistan would eventually lead to the formation of virulent anti-American terrorist groups, in part because the U.S. leaders didn't know very much about that part of the world and because public discourse about U.S. policy in the Middle East is filled with gaping holes. Similarly, the people who led us into Iraq in 2003 were remarkably ignorant about the history and basic character of Iraqi society (as well as the actual nature of Saddam's regime). To make matters worse, the U.S. military had forgotten many of the lessons of Vietnam and had to try to relearn them all over again, with only partial success.

Second, societies may fail to detect a growing problem if their leaders are too far removed from the source of the trouble. Diamond refers to this as the problem of "distant managers," and it may explain why U.S. policymakers often make decisions that seem foolish in hindsight. As I've noted here before, one problem facing U.S. foreign policymakers is the sheer number and scope of the problems they are trying to address, which inevitably forces them to rely on reports from distant subordinates and to address issues that they cannot be expected to understand very well. Barack Obama doesn't get to spend the next few years learning Pashto and immersing himself in the details of Afghan history and culture; instead, he has to make decisions based on what he is being told by people on the ground (who may or may not know more than he does). Unfortunately, the latter have obvious reasons to tell an upbeat story, if only to make their own efforts look good. If things are going badly, therefore, the people at the top back in Washington may be the last to know. 

Read on

I'm back from my mini-break and digging out emails and correspondence, so I don't have an extended commentary today.

One piece in my mailbox did catch my eye, however, from the June 2010 issue of Perspectives on Politics. For those of you who aren't political scientists, PoP is a relatively new journal, founded eight years ago by the American Political Science Association. It was created in part in response to a bottom-up protest movement within the discipline known as the "Perestroika" movement ("Perestroika" was the pseudonym of the anonymous list-server who got it started).  Although primarily motivated by a desire to defend methodological pluralism, one of the movement's related concerns was the "cult of irrelevance" within academic political science. In my judgment PoP has, been a partial corrective to that tendency, and it often features articles that engage big political issues from an academic perspective.

In any case, the current issue has a provocative article by Lawrence Mead on "Scholasticism in Political Science." Mead argues that academic writings about politics are increasingly "scholastic," which he defines as being increasingly specialized, preoccupied with methods, non-empirical, and primarily oriented to other academic literature instead of engaging real-world issues. In his words:

Today's political scientists often address very narrow questions and they are often preoccupied with method and past literature ... Scholars are focusing more on themselves, less on the real world. ... Research questions are getting smaller and data-gathering is contracting.  Inquiry is becoming obscurantist and ingrown."

This sort of complaint is hardly new, of course. Hans Morgenthau offered a similar critique way back in the 1950s, when he warned of a political science "that is neither hated nor respected, but treated with indifference as an innocuous pastime, is likely to have retreated into a sphere that lies beyond the positive or negative interests of society. The retreat into the trivial, the formal, the methodological, the purely theoretical, the remotely historical -- in short, the politically irrelevant -- is the unmistakable sign of a 'non-controversial' political science which has neither friends nor enemies because it has no relevance for the great political issues in which society has a stake. History and methodology, in particular, become the protective armor which shields political science from contact with the political reality of the contemporary world. Political science, then, resembles what Tolsoi said modern history has become: 'a deaf many answering questions which no one has asked him.'" (Dilemmas of Politics, 1958, p. 31).

Morgenthau's Olympian denunciation was offered without a lot of supporting evidence, but Mead's warning is accompanied by an analysis of every article published in 1968, 1978, 1988, 1998 and 2007 in the American Political Science Review.  You might get different results if you looked at different journals (i.e., the "scholasticism" of the APSR was one of the complaints of the original "Perestroikans"), but Mead's complaints are consistent with a lot of my own impressions of how the field is evolving. As Mead shows, the issue isn't method per se; it's the tendency of many scholars to ask smaller, less significant, and less controversial questions and to produce what he describes as "analyses of jewel-like precision that ... generate only minor findings and arouse little interest beyond specialists." This is accompanied by an aversion to topics that might make a scholar visible outside the academy -- or god forbid, controversial -- because that might screw up your shot at tenure or get your criticized in print.

This tendency is not universally true, of course, and I'd argue that the willingness of younger scholars to take up blogging as a form of public engagement is a prominent counter-tendency. Could it be that younger scholars are just as bored producing "scholasticist" works as many of us are reading them, and that they find blogging far more fulfilling than adding another (largely) unread article to the catalog of academic journals. And if that's the case, what does it tell us about the priorities and values of contemporary academe?

I first heard the name "Tony Judt" when I was a graduate student at UC-Berkeley in the late 1970s, and I took an immediate dislike to it. It was uttered to me by a female student whom I was (briefly) dating. She was enrolled in one of Judt's classes, and the rapt enthusiasm with which she described his course made it clear that she was a lot more impressed with him than she was with me. Deservedly so, I suspect. So without laying eyes on the man or reading any of his scholarship, I decided I didn't like this Judt fellow very much.

I remained vaguely aware of Judt's work after that, but his scholarly interests didn't overlap with most of mine and he was mostly a name I remembered with a certain vague disregard. The Committee on Social Thought considered him for a position during the years I taught at the University of Chicago, but I was in a different department and didn't devote much attention to the issue at the time.

Fast forward to the fall of 2003. John Mearsheimer and I were beginning work on our study of the "Israel lobby," and we read with interest Judt's essay in the New York Review of Books entitled "Israel: the Alternative." In it he portrayed modern Zionism as manifestation of 19th-century ethnic nationalism, a world-view he judged increasingly inappropriate to the post-modern, globalized world of the 21st century. Israel was increasingly an "anachronism," he wrote, and he suggested that a brighter future lay in replacing Zionism's ethno-religious exclusiveness with a more inclusive liberal democracy. In other words, Israel should evolve into a multi-ethnic liberal democracy instead of remaining an explicitly "Jewish state." The illiberal leadership of the New Republic greeted the piece by tossing Judt off their masthead (where he had previously been listed as a "contributing editor"), and he and his family reportedly received several death threats as well. I didn't agree with his conclusions, by the way, but the essay cast the phenomenon of Zionism in a new light.

And then in 2006, our lives intersected on three separate occasions. The first conjunction came after John Mearsheimer and I published "The Israel Lobby" in the London Review of Books in March 2006. The furor was immediate, and my co-author and I were denounced by a wide (and predictable) array of critics. To our surprise, however, the New York Times said nothing about the controversy, and neither did any of its columnists. And then, on April 19, I opened the Times's op-ed page and found an eloquent defense of our article by the same Professor Judt to whom I had taken an unwarranted dislike back in grad school. 

Judt's op-ed didn't endorse all of our conclusions, but he agreed that the lobby's influence had become a taboo subject in discussions of U.S. foreign policy and this situation was not healthy for the United States or for Israel. Judt's balanced and supportive intervention opened the door to a more reasoned discussion of the issue, and from that point forward the tide of discourse began to turn.

Read on

Back in the fall of 2003, I was in London for an conference and I took a stroll around the neighborhood near my hotel.  At one point I turned a corner and saw a massive, looming building, surrounded with various barriers and fences and looking for all the world like an updated version of a medieval castle.   "What's that?" I wondered, and wandered over to investigate.  It was the U.S. Embassy, of course, and I was struck by how forbidding and unwelcoming it was.  It seemed to me to be a vivid physical symbol of a powerful Empire striving to keep the outside world at bay.

I thought of that moment today when I read the Times story on the winning design for a new U.S. embassy in London.  Lord knows I'm no architecture critic, and I think my wife was too harsh when she said the winning design looked "like a big ice-cube," but the sketches in the Times don't show a building that invites the world in, or that conveys a sense of openness and confidence. Despite elaborate efforts to conceal security measures with adroit landscaping, the overall image is one where security concerns predominate: a fancy building isolated from its surroundings and keeping the world at arm's length.

What troubles me is what this tells us about America's place in the contemporary world, and the tensions between its global ambitions and its willingness to accept the consequences of them.  On the one hand, the United States defines its own interests in global terms: there are no regions and few policy issues where we don't want to have a significant voice, and there are many places and issues where we insist on having the loudest one.  But on the other hand, we don't think we should get our hair mussed while we tell the world what to do.  It's tolerable for the United States to fire drones virtually anywhere (provided the states in question can't retaliate, of course), and Americans don't seem to have much of a problem with our running covert programs to destabilize other regimes that we've decided to dislike.  We also aid, comfort and diplomatic support to assorted other states whose governments often act in deeply objectionable ways.  But then we face the obvious problem that some people are going to object to these policies, hold us responsible, and try to do what they can to hit back.

So we have to build embassies that resemble fortresses, and that convey an image of America that is at odds with our interests and our own self-image, and especially with the image that we would like to convey to foreign peoples.  We like to think of our country as friendly and welcoming, as open to new ideas, and as a strong, diverse and confident society built on a heritage of pluck and grit.  You know, we're supposed to be a society built by generations of immigrants, pioneers, and other determined folk who faced adversity and risk with a smile and a bit of a swagger.  Yet the "Fortress America" approach to embassy design presents a public face that is an odd combination of power and paranoia.

Don't get me wrong: states in the modern world do have to worry about security for their representatives, and we ought to take all reasonable measures to ensure that our diplomats are adequately protected.  But as with dangers (such as extremists with explosives in their underwear), it's possible to go too far in the quest for perfect security. Trying to blast-proof everything may even be counterproductive, if the damage done to our global image is greater than the damage that violent radicals would do to a slightly less-fortified global presence

I see from today's news that the Obama administration is apparently going to reverse the "don't ask don't tell" policy that has prevented openly gay Americans from serving their country in the armed forces. I can only applaud this decision; not only does it eliminate an obvious source of discrimination, but it makes it easier for the military to get the best people to fill the ranks.  Realists should support this move, because the name of the game in international politics is to maintain national power at the least cost and risk. Anytime you restrict the pool from which you are recruiting on arbitrary grounds that are unrelated to the task at hand (i.e., on grounds of race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.) you end up excluding some outstanding people whose presence would improve an organization's performance.  Baseball got better after it integrated, the Ivy League improved once it dropped barriers to Jews and other minorities, and the same basic principle applies to gays in the military. As I wrote earlier this year:

The point is that in any competitive endeavor, you want to be able to recruit and employ the most talented and highly motivated people you can find, and you don't want to limit the talent pool from which you can draw unless there is something about them (such as a physical disability) that makes them obviously unfit for military service. By not allowing gay Americans to serve openly, we are imposing an artificial limit on the number of loyal Americans that our military can draw upon to fill its ranks. Some gay Americans would undoubtedly not be very good soldiers or sailors, but the same is true of plenty of straight people too. Many others undoubtedly would serve with distinction, however, and we know that because many already have, like Dan Choi.

For realists who appreciate the international politics is a rough business, therefore, the only possible argument against allowing gays to serve openly in the armed services is to claim that this policy would have a detrimental effect on actual military performance. The problem with this line of argument is that there is no good evidence to support that claim, and considerable evidence against it. For an excellent examination of the issue, see Elizabeth Kier's "Homosexuals in the American Military: Open Integration and Combat Effectiveness," from the Fall 1998 issue of International Security. Or check out a series of recent reports from the Palm Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which offer survey evidence from the U.S. military and comparative studies of foreign armies (including Britain and Israel), where gay people serve openly, bravely, and effectively."

This is not to say that abandoning this policy won't create a few temporary disruptions, but the U.S. military has generally been quite successful at managing this sort of change in the past. As a senior officer commented during my visit to the Truman last week, it is a good thing for the U.S. military to be a fairly accurate reflection of American society rather than an artificial caste, and repealing "don't ask, don't tell" is a positive step in that direction.  And contrary to what narrow-minded bigots might think, we'll get a better fighting force out of it too.

My colleague Joe Nye has made many contributions to scholarship and policy, but his most lasting contribution to the political lexicon is the idea of “soft power.” It’s 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 it’s 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, I’d 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 of Foreign Policy Analysis, Carol Atkinson of Vanderbilt University presents results on 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 the annual survey by China’s 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.

I've posted on Valentine's, Father's Day, Independence Day, Veterans Day and Halloween, so at this point I assume a few readers are expecting me to offer up some thoughts on Thanksgiving. I'm happy to oblige, because Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Not only do I enjoy helping produce a feast and welcoming friends and family, but I like the idea of a day to reflect on whatever blessings we may have received. In my own case, I've been blessed with a wonderful family and a lot of undeserved good luck, and I probably ought to be even more grateful than I am.

So in that spirit, here are the Top Ten things I'm thankful for this year. (For the "official" FP version, check out Josh Keating's list here). I've limited myself to items that relate in some way to foreign policy or international affairs.

1. The Foreign Policy team.  First off, I'm grateful for the invitation to write this blog, and especially for the terrific backup we get from the editorial and production team at FP. Special thanks to Rebecca Frankel (who finds all those great photos), to Susan Glasser, who keeps the whole operation running, and of course, the boundlessly inventive and fearless Moises Naim.

2. Free Speech. Every writer lucky enough to live in a country that protects free speech ought to give thanks for that good fortune every single day.   Compared to the millions of people who risk persecution (or worse) if they dare to express their own ideas, intellectuals in the United States have it pretty soft. We should never take that luxury for granted.

3. Great Power Peace:  Throughout history, wars between great powers have been one of the most potent causes of human misery.  Just think about World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, which together killed over 85 million people and impoverished millions more. Yet today, great power rivalries are quite muted and the danger of a true great power war seems remote.  There are plenty of other problems still remaining, of course, but I'm grateful that one of the big ones isn't troubling us right now. Let's try to keep it that way, ok?

4. Nuclear Deterrence.  Unlike some writers whose work I nonetheless admire, I think nuclear weapons did contribute to peace during the Cold War and remain a stabilizing force today.  As Churchill put it, safety has become the "sturdy child of terror." So despite some lingering reservations, I'm glad that nuclear weapons exist. But I'm not giving thanks for the number that we have, which is far in excess of what is needed for deterrence. 

5. Critics.  Some of my recent work attracted a lot of criticism, and I'm genuinely grateful for it. First of all, my co-author and I have been fortunate that our most vehement critics chose to misrepresent our work and to smear us with various baseless charges, thereby confirming some of our central arguments and helping us win over a lot of readers. At the same time, scholars who have challenged my various writings over the years in more serious ways helped me refine my ideas and gain a fuller understanding of numerous topics. And I'm always thankful for students who don't accept ideas at face value and push back, because we need more independent thinkers and vigorous discussion helps us all learn.

6. Supporters.  The controversy over The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy also brought me a legion of new friends, some of whom I would never have met otherwise. My thanks to inspired writers and activists like Phil Weiss, Tony Judt, M.J. Rosenberg, Jerome Slater, Avi Shlaim, Uri Avnery, Sydney Levy, and many, many more. I'm also grateful to the various people who faced pressure to cancel speaking engagements and didn't succumb to it, as well as the many friends who offered their support privately, in countless small ways.  You know who you are, and I won't forget.

7. The Fruits of Globalization. I don't know about you, but I'm grateful to live in a world that is increasingly interconnected. Indeed, this aspect of the modern world still strikes me as nearly miraculous, and I feel enormously lucky to be able to enjoy it. I've eaten hummus in Tel Aviv, camel in Abu Dhabi, fish head curry in Singapore, and tapas in Barcelona. My iPod contains music from all over the world, and the last two novels I read were by Orhan Parmuk (Turkey) and Haruki Murakami (Japan). My children attend a public high school where students speak over fifty different languages at home, and there are students from over 80 different countries where I teach. Cultural differences often create awkward tensions (or worse), but I'd feel terribly impoverished if I lived in an isolated mono-culture.

8. Bullets Dodged.  I am also thankful that we have thus far avoided some even more dire events in recent years. The world economy may have tanked in 2007-08, but we seem -- knock wood -- to have avoided a complete replay of the Great Depression. Swine flu has been a serious problem but is not a true global pandemic. Terrorists still conspire and sometimes succeed, but another 9/11 (or worse) has not occurred  And we have not been so foolish as to attack Iran (at least so far). We should not forget that many are suffering in today's economy, roughly 5000 people have died from H1N1, both soldiers and civilians are still dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there are still influential voices clamoring for more war. But things could be much worse and for that we should all be grateful.

9. The Internet.  Boy, am I glad that Al Gore invented this! After all, this blog wouldn't exist without it. Not only has it revolutionized how many of us do research (and in a good way), but it is becoming the main engine of accountability in a world where it is often lacking. Bloggers are exposing the flabby fatuousness of mainstream media and politicians everywhere live in fear of their own "YouTube moment."  And whether it is a brutal crackdown in Tehran, torture at Abu Ghraib, or possible war crimes in Gaza, the Internet is helping bring misconduct to light in ways that governments cannot easily suppress.  I say: let the sunshine in!

10.  Readers.  Finally, a heartfelt thanks to all of you who've been reading this blog since its inception, and especially those who've taken the time to offer words of support. I've learned a lot in the process-including some of the more constructive comments that readers provide -- and I intend to keep going until the tank is empty. Tomorrow is a holiday, however, and I'm going to take the day off. You should too, and don't forget to give thanks.

TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images

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."

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