Here's a puzzle for you to ponder. For more than a decade, Americans have been repeatedly told that Iran is a Grave, Imminent, Deadly Serious Threat to us, our allies, and the security of the whole world. Why? Because it is enriching uranium, which it is entitled to do as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. U.S. intelligence services still maintain that Iran has no active nuclear weapons program. Even if Iran did acquire a nuclear weapon someday, it couldn't do anything with it without courting its own destruction at the hands of the United States, Israel, or possibly some other countries. Possession of a few bombs wouldn't give Tehran any more leverage than the United States gets from having a vast nuclear arsenal, and we get hardly any. Yet in response to this vastly inflated danger, the U.S. has organized an extensive program of multilateral sanctions, conducted aggressive covert action programs, and repeatedly hinted that it might launch a preventive war if Iran crossed some ill-specified "red line."

Meanwhile, the government of Laos has announced that it has broken ground for a giant dam on the Lower Mekong River, a step that many experts believe will permanently harm the ecology of the Mekong Delta and affect the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. What Laos is openly doing poses a more immediate and pressing danger to human well-being than the hypothetical possibility that Iran might someday acquire a small nuclear deterrent. So my question is: Why isn't the United States organizing "crippling" sanctions against Laos, conducting cyberattacks on the civil engineering firms who are planning the dam, and threatening to bomb the construction sites if Laos continues the work?

Of course, I don't think the United States should do any of these things. I'm not in favor of war with Iran either. But why do some hypothetical possibilities get enormous (and counterproductive) attention, while some real and tangible problems remain on the backpages?

It's summer, and a searing drought is shriveling corn fields in the Midwest. Meanwhile torrential rains (the worst in 60 years) have killed several dozen people in Beijing. Sea ice continues to shrink in the arctic -- the decline in June was the largest in the satellite record -- creating new sea areas for the Coast Guard to patrol. Welcome to climate change 2012.

But how serious is the problem? How worried should you be? I don't know, because I'm neither an atmospheric physicist, environmental economist, nor specialist in global institutions designed to address collective goods (or negative externalities). Nonetheless, I do try to stay informed on this issue, and I occasionally use the case of climate change to illustrate certain features of international politics to my students. And what makes it frustrating for a layperson like me is the range of opinion one can find even among well-informed journalists.

Case in point: two prominent articles on this topic appeared this past week, reaching sharply contrasting conclusions. The first article, by science writer/environmental journalist Bill McKibben, presents a deeply worrisome picture of the planet's future. According to McKibben, it's all in the math. There is now a strong scientific consensus that human beings can only put another 565 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere without causing average atmospheric temperature to rise more than two degrees Celsius. (Two degrees was the agreed-upon target figure at the 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen, though many climate scientists think even that level of increase would be very harmful.)

Unfortunately, a recent inventory of current oil and gas reserves showed that they contain enough carbon to release roughly 2,795 gigatons of CO2, if it is all brought to the surface and burned. That's about five times the upper limit identified above. The problem, of course, is that the companies that own these reserves will want to pump the oil and gas out and sell it -- that's the business they're in -- even though spewing that much more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would be disastrous. In the absence of effective government action to discourage consumption (i.e., by taxing carbon to raise the price and diminish consumption) we're in deep trouble.

The second article, from yesterday's New York Times, offers a cheerier view. In the words of business reporter David Leonhardt, "behind the scenes. . .a somewhat different story is starting to emerge -- one that offers reason for optimism to anyone worried about the planet." He describes how investments in clean energy are reducing the price of solar and wind power and how shifts from coal to natural gas (which is less carbon-intensive) for electricity generation have accelerated. And he dangles that hope that government-sponsored R and D will eventually create "disruptive technologies" that "can power the economy without heating the planet."

To be sure, these two articles aren't totally at odds. Leonhardt acknowledges that we have a long way to go, and that many experts believe that you need a combination of regulation to raise the price of carbon along with further reductions in the cost of alternative energy sources. Similarly, McKibben's account accepts that there is probably still time for effective political action to address this situation (Indeed, his whole article is clearly intended as a clarion call for greater activism).

As is so often the case, the issue boils down to politics. And that's why I'm pessimistic, because I can't think of any issue where the barriers to effective political action are so great. First of all, you have an array of special interests with little or no interest in allowing the government to interfere with their ability to make money in the short-term (see under: Koch Brothers). Second, you have a political system in the United States (the world's second largest greenhouse gas producer) that is unusually open to lobbying and other forms of political interference. Third, climate change is a classic example of an intergenerational equity problem: it's hard to get people to make sacrifices today (i.e., in the form of higher energy prices, less comfortable houses and offices, more expensive travel, etc.) for the sake of people who haven't even been conceived yet. That same principle applies to politicians too: Why should they jeopardize their re-election prospects for the sake of voters who won't be around until they are long gone? Fourth, there's also a thorny equity issue between advanced industrial countries like the United States (whose economies were developed before anyone knew about climate change) and emerging economies like China or India that don't want to slow their economic growth by reducing greenhouse gas emissions today. Even if there is a rapidly growing consensus on the need to do something soon, everybody wants somebody else pay most of the price or bear most of the burdens.

For all these reasons, the well-publicized effort to devise an effective global solution to the problem of human-induced climate change has largely failed thus far. It's possible that some new disruptive technology will swoop in and solve the problem for us, or maybe some of the intriguing proposals for "geo-engineering" the planet may prove workable and effective.

Maybe, but such hopes remind me of this old cartoon. If we're going to need a miracle (whether political or technological) we're going to have to be more explicit about what happens in step two.

China's remarkable transformation over the past three decades is obviously an event of major geopolitical proportions, with far-reaching ramifications in both economic and security affairs. It has also led some observers to conclude that the PRC is destined to eclipse the (decadent) United States and its various feckless allies in part because its leaders are more farsighted and disciplined and able to set a course and stick to it despite occasional vicissitudes. This view implies that our own unruly political system needs more executive power and less democracy. (I'll confess to occasional grumpy thoughts along those lines, mostly when I'm bicycling to work and pondering how China can build whole cities or an Olympic Village in a year or two, while the state of Massachusetts and the city of Boston can't manage to renovate a single bridge in less than three.)

But I digress. Anyone who is convinced that China is on a relentless march to world domination ought to read today's New York Times article on China's authoritarian response to its water shortage. The basic story is that China is engaged in a historically unprecedented effort to redistribute water resources, which involves massive dam and canal construction and has all the signs of a major ecological, social, and maybe even political disaster. Then go read Chapter 12 ("China, Lurching Giant") in Jared Diamond's Collapse, which details the ecological consequences of China's rapid development in greater detail. And then follow that up with a book I've plugged before: James Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Scott argues that authoritarian regimes inspired by "modernist ideologies" tend to produce major socioeconomic disasters, largely because they can impose grand schemes but lack adequate feedback mechanisms and institutions of accountability to correct errors or deal with unintended consequences. By the time they realize the full consequences of their actions, it is too late to prevent enormous harm.

None of this is to suggest that we are about to see a replay of the Great Leap Forward (Mao Zedong's disastrous attempt at forced-march development, in which at least 20 million people starved) or that China won't continue to rise. But I suspect there's a day of reckoning ahead, when the ecological and social consequences of this unprecedented transformation are fully felt and the political consequences will be profound.

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

What happened in Copenhagen? The answer is: not much. Facing a very real possibility of complete failure -- a two-year buildup to a cacophonous conference that ended in de facto deadlock -- a select group of major powers cobbled together a non-binding “agreement” to undertake various purely voluntary actions, aimed at an arbitrary target for limiting future atmospheric warming. As Greenpeace noted on its Twitter page: “2 years planning, 2 weeks negotiating = worse than half-assed deal in the last 2 hours. Climate change you can believe in.” And I assume you didn’t missed the symbolism of Obama leaving the conference a day early so he could get back to Washington before it snowed.

Environmental issues aren’t my main thing, you understand, but I can’t resist the urge to offer a few comments.  

First, you shouldn’t be surprised by this outcome, especially if you’ve been reading this blog.  As the Economist  noted a week or so ago, “Climate change is the hardest political problem the world has ever had to deal with.” In addition to the scientific uncertainties (not about the fact of climate change, but about the impact of different policy responses), dealing with man-made climate change is a classic collective action problem. All countries would like to avoid the consequences of atmospheric warming, but they would also like someone else to pay the costs of addressing it. Furthermore, the worst negative consequences won’t be evenly distributed and won’t occur for several decades, which means that today’s leaders would have to impose costs on their citizens now in order to leave future generations better off. That’s do-able, but hardly a tempting prospect for most politicians. In addition, there is still no consensus on the best way to proceed: some states favor “cap and trade” systems while other prefer a straightforward “carbon tax.” Finally, the main polluters are in very different economic circumstances; the developed world created the problem but now wants to get rising powers like China and India to undertake potentially costly measures that could slow their own growth. Needless to say, that's not very attractive to Beijing or New Delhi. Toss in the reality that any agreement would be unwieldy, expensive, and rife with verification problems, and you have an issue that makes reforming health care here in the United States look absurdly simple by comparison.

Second, the outcome in Copenhagen does lend support for FP chief Moises Naim’s concept of “minilateralism.”  If you can’t get 192 states to agree on a global agreement (and it sure looks like you can’t), then focus on getting the biggest economies (who are the biggest source of the problem and the states with the resources to help the others), and see if you can get some sort of agreement among them. Thus, an optimist could see the face-saving “deal” that emerged at the very end of the conference as the building block for a new initiative that would eschew a grand global bargain in favor of a more focused deal among the major powers.

Third, this episode offers another revealing glimpse at Obama’s diplomatic style; indeed, his entire approach to politics. A master of soaring rhetorical style, he sets ambitious goals and imposes short deadlines (remember when he said he wanted to get a two-state solution in his first term?). When those lofty goals (inevitably) turn out to be unreachable, he grabs what’s available (a flawed health care deal, more photo-op "diplomacy" in the Middle East, a compromise “surge” in Afghanistan, etc.), and talks about the need to keep “moving forward.”

The “glass half full” interpretation is that this approach avoids complete deadlock and helps Obama avoid the appearance (and maybe the reality) of complete and obvious failure.  And in some cases—most notably health care—you end up with a reform that is better than having done nothing, even if it is far less than the American people deserve. Given the complexity of some issues -- such as climate change -- and the barriers to bold action that are central to America’s checks-and-balances, multiple veto-point system of government, this may be the best he/we can do.

But there’s a “half-empty” version of this story too. By setting too many lofty goals, and showing a too-ready willingness to cut  deals in order to save face, Obama is teaching his opponents that he’s never going to walk away and that they can always get a better deal if they stonewall him and drag things out as long as they can. That’s a problem no matter who is doing it: the GOP, China, the Karzai government, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Iran. What makes it worse is Obama’s penchant for thrusting himself into the middle of negotiations at the wrong time, as he did over the City of Chicago’s Olympics bid and as he appears to have done in Copenhagen as well.  (If climate change is really that important he should have been there longer; if it was clear that no deal was going to happen, maybe he shouldn’t have gone at all).

But what really worries me is that Obama is in fact making the best of a set of bad options, and that it still won’t be nearly good enough.

Professional economists may be dismayed, but scholars and students of international politics should be delighted by the decision to award this year's Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences (aka the "Nobel Prize in Economics") to Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University.  She is not only the first woman to win the economics prize, she's also the first political scientist.  She holds a Ph.D. in the subject from UCLA and is a past president of the American Political Science Association.

Ostrom's main research is pretty far from my own concerns, but I did list her book Governing the Commons on one of my "top-ten" lists earlier this year.  She is primarily known for her work on institutional solutions to collective action problems, most notably in the area of resources and environment.  Via a combination of "soft" rational choice theory and careful empirical work, she shows that common resources can be shared and managed through various institutional mechanisms, but also shows that there is nothing inevitable about this outcome, due to familiar dilemmas of collective action (that's why we call them dilemmas!), and the complex interactions of humans, institutions, and larger ecosystems.

Ostrom (and the co-winner, organization theorist Oliver Williamson) join a group of recent winners chosen more for theoretical insight and real-world relevance than for mathematical scholasticism.  Others in this same group would include economic historians Douglass North and Robert Fogel, behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, game theorist/strategist Thomas Schelling, and economist-philosopher Amartya Sen.  Scholars with an international orientation have been doing pretty well in recent years too: Schelling was awarded for game-theoretic work on international conflict, Paul Krugman for his work on international trade, and Sen's work on poverty and famines has clear international implications.  Kudos to the prize committee for their eclectic approach to the award--if only more economics departments thought this way.

One more thing: need I mention that Ostrom received the award for work she had already done, as opposed to some other Nobel Prize winners I can think of?

Photo: Indiana University via Getty Images