International Relations

I suspect most of the AfPak attention will be focused on the revelations that President Hamid Karzai's brother has been on the CIA payroll, the Taliban attack that killed six people at a U.N. staff house in Kabul, and the bombing that killed more than 80 people in Peshawar. Plus, there are new reports that the United States is going to adopt a strategy that eschews counterinsurgency throughout all of Afghanistan and concentrates on protecting major cities. These are all important stories, because they underscore just how difficult it has been, is, and will be to do social engineering on the lives of 200 million Muslims in Central Asia.

But I want to focus on somewhat broader question today. Yet another justification for continuing the war in Afghanistan is the belief that the Afghan Taliban, al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban, and groups such as the Haqqani network form a tight ideologically-inspired alliance that is relentlessly anti-American and dedicated to attacking us no matter where we are or what we are doing. In this view, these various groups are "birds of a feather flocking together." This belief fuels the fear that a Taliban victory in Afghanistan would produce a dramatic increase in al Qaeda's capabilities, once their Islamic soulmates provided them with territory, recruits, and other forms of support for attacks on the West in general and the United States in particular.

Such an outcome cannot be wholly ruled out, I suppose, and well-informed experts like Ahmed Rashid apparently think it's likely. But there are several good reasons to doubt it. The first is that we know that there have been intense frictions between some of these groups in the past, as well as intense divisions between Osama bin Laden and some of his own associates. In his prize-winning book The Looming Tower, for example, Lawrence Wright describes the repeated tensions between Mullah Omar and Bin Laden, which nearly led the former to turn Bin Laden over to the Saudis. The rift was reportedly healed after bin Laden swore an oath of loyalty to Omar, but their interests and objectives are not identical and one can easily imagine new quarrels in the future.

A second reason to be skeptical that these groups are tightly unified by a set of common beliefs or doctrines is the fact that the foreign presence in the region gives them an obvious incentive to help each other. In other words, what looks like ideological solidarity may be partly a manifestation of balance-of-power politics, and these groups' tendency to back each other might easily dissipate once the foreign presence were reduced. Afghan political history is one where diverse coalitions form, dissolve, and realign in myriad ways, and similar dynamics are likely to resurface once the the United States and its foreign allies are gone.

A third reason has to do with the nature of certain types of political ideology. Unlike liberalism, which emphasizes the need to tolerate a wide range of political views, political ideologies that rest on a single authoritative interpretation of "truth" are inherently divisive rather than unifying. In particular, ideologies that call for adherents to obey the leadership because it wields the "correct" interpretation of the faith (whether in Marxism, Christianity, Islam, etc.) tend to foster intense rivalries among different factions and between different leaders, each of whom must claim to be the "true" interpreter of the legitimating ideology. In such movements, ideological schisms are likely to be frequent and intense, because disagreements look like apostasy and a betrayal of the faith.  Instead of flocking together, these "birds of a feather" are likely to fly apart.

During the Cold War, for instance, hawks repeatedly worried about a "communist monolith" and were convinced that Marxists everywhere were reliable tools of the Kremlin. In reality, however, world communism was rife with internal tensions and ideological schisms, as illustrated by the furious Bolshevik-Menshevik split, the deadly battle between Trotsky and Stalin, and the subsequent rift between Stalin and Tito. China and the Soviet Union became bitter rivals by the early 1960s -- on both geopolitical and ideological grounds -- and the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam ended another yet another period of illusory communist unity and quickly led to wars between communist Vietnam, communist Kampuchea, and communist China.

Such historical analogies should be used with caution, of course, but in this case the logic is similar and compelling. Islamic fundamentalists rely in part on specific interpretations of Islamic thought to recruit and motivate their followers, and disagreements over doctrine and policy can easily lead to bitter internal quarrels, especially once the immediate need to cooperate against a common enemy is gone. We've already seen amples sign of division within al Qaeda and its clones, and more are to be expected.

This is not to say that global terrorists won't continue to learn from each other, to inspire imitators (much as Marxism-Leninism once inspired a wide array of fringe groups who had nothing to do with Moscow) and they may even provide each other with various forms of tactical support on occasion.  But there are good reasons to question the facile assumption that they are eternally loyal comrades-in-arms, united forever by a shared set of a deeply held politico-religious beliefs. And if there is considerable potential for division among both the leaders and even more among their followers, then a strategy of divide-and-conquer makes more sense than a long and costly counterinsurgency campaign that gives them every reason to stay united.

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Building on Robert Farley, Matt Yglesias has a smart post about the value of playing "hard to get" in American diplomacy. The basic idea is simple: the United States is very powerful and fairly secure, and so our allies usually need our support more than we need theirs. If we understand that fact, we gain a lot of leverage over their conduct by making it clear that our support depends on their cooperation. If we forget that fact, or we start obsessing about our own credibility and need to demonstrate "toughness," we lose that leverage and others start taking advantage of us.

Of course, I think this point is smart because I made the same argument in the conclusion of Taming American Power. Check out pp. 240-243. And I'm glad Robert and Matt are resurrecting this line of argument, because new ideas don't catch on unless people repeating them over and over and over ...

Should the National Science Foundation stop funding research in political science? Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) thinks so, and the American Political Science Association is predictably upset. I can't say that I think Coburn is right, but I'm finding it hard to get too exercised about it. I say this in part because I think a lot of NSF-funded research has contributed to the "cult of irrelevance" that infects a lot of political science, and because the definition of "science" that has guided the grant-making process is excessively narrow. But I also worry that trying to use federal dollars to encourage more policy-relevant research would end up politicizing academic life in some unfortunate ways.

With respect to the first issue, NSF support has undoubtedly facilitated a lot of useful data collection, especially in the field of American politics, and that the availability of this data has contributed to our knowledge of voting behavior, electoral processes, and other aspects of democratic politics. (See Paul Krugman's blog post for more on this). What's less clear is whether that additional "scientific" knowledge is actually helping real democracies perform better, or helping policymakers devise solutions to real policy problems. And in the field of international relations, I suspect that most of the NSF-funded research has been by-academics-and-for-academics, and hasn't had a discernible impact on important real-world problems.

But I haven't done a comprehensive survey of NSF funding in this field, and it's entirely possible that I missed something important. (The work of Elinor Ostrom, who just received the Nobel Prize, might be a case in point). Here's a suggestion: why doesn't the NSF put a link up on its website, listing all the grants that it has made to political science since 1995 and then listing all the research products that these projects produced, along with hyperlinks to the books or articles? That way, we could easily examine the results and debate if they were useful or not. Or if NSF doesn't want to do that, the APSA could provide this information itself. If the field has a lot of accomplishments to be proud of, surely it won't take long to compile a compelling list. And by the way, it would be interesting to compare the results of NSF-funded projects with research that was either unfunded (i.e., done without outside grants), or funded from other sources. 

But please don't just give me a citation count, because all shows is that some academic has managed to get cited by his or her fellow scholars. In other words, incest. Demonstrating real-world value will require some serious process-tracing outside the ivory tower, to show how new knowledge and ideas are actually shaping policy in positive ways.

My other concern has to do with the relationship between government funding and policy-relevance. Much as I would like more academic research to address real-world problems, I worry that it would inevitably become more politicized once the government gets involved. It is hard to imagine how a serious study of counterinsurgency, the global financial crisis, human rights, or counterterrorism policy would not have important implications for current policy debates, and some of that research would be explicitly critical of key government policies. Senator Coburn is eager to cut off political science because he thinks it is wasteful, but other politicians are bound to try to fund projects that conform to their own political prejudices. Or they will go after government-funded research that they think is "unpatriotic," just as politicians once attacked a major RAND study on the dynamics of surrender by suggesting it was encouraging "defeatism." Academics are human, and some of them are bound to start tailoring their topics and their conclusions to fit the perceived preferences of funders. That's ok in the think tank world, but universities really ought to aim for a higher standard. The other danger is that academics will be encouraged to make their research as bland as possible, so that it doesn’t offend anyone. We hardly need more of that.

As I've written elsewhere, political science ought to place more value on its ability to contribute to solving real-world policy problems, but that will require a shift in the norms and standards that the field sets for itself.   Ironically, that rethinking might happen faster if the NSF gravy train were smaller, or if academics started to worry that ideas like Coburn's might catch on.

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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?

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The Economist magazine is often a source of clear-eyed, trenchant, and moderately conservative analysis, usually written with a wit and verve that puts most of the content in Time and Newsweek to shame. But nobody's perfect, and the latest issue offers a remarkably obtuse leader on the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. The author complains that "China does not always act like a great power," and concludes that we ought to be especially worried by a rising power whose government "is so insecure."

If you read the piece carefully, however, it's clear that their real complaint is that China actually is acting like a great power, which means that some of its policies aren't to the liking of the Economist's editors. They point out that China is not a "status quo power" -- which is correct -- but neither are most great powers most of the time. The European great powers of a bygone era competed more-or-less constantly, punctuating their rivalries with sometimes long and bloody wars. The United States spent the Cold War trying to both contain and bring down the Soviet regime (and Moscow hoped to do the same to the United States), and while neither side wanted to fight a nuclear war to do it, neither side was interested in "preserving the status quo" either. After the USSR collapsed, George Bush Sr. spoke of "standing alone at the pinnacle of power, with the rarest opportunity to remake the world," which is not exactly a "status quo" sentiment. And has the Economist forgotten that Bush's son subsequently decided it was a good idea to "transform" much of the Middle East at the point of a rifle barrel? By those standards, Chinese revisionism looks mild indeed.

Similarly, the magazine is worried because China put on a big military display as part of its 60th anniversary celebration, is gradually modernizing its armed forces, and isn't telling us everything about its plans to build aircraft carriers and the like. Again, is there anything very surprising about this behavior? All great powers like to brandish their military hardware (e.g., there are over 150 military airshows in the United States this year, and the Air Force does a fly-over at the Super Bowl), and one would expect any rising economic power to translate some of its growing wealth into greater military strength.

They also charge that China "still seems to pick and choose the issues where it is willing to help." Shocking, isn't it? No, I guess not, because other states do that too. They are on safer ground criticizing China for overreacting when others criticize its human rights conduct or when foreign governments allow a visit from the Dalai Lama, but China is hardly unique in reacting harshly to outside criticism.

Lastly, China is said to "put its perceived economic self-interest ahead of strategic common sense," most notably in its response to Iran's nuclear program. Once again, what great power doesn't think first and foremost about "self-interest?" Not only did the United States turn a blind eye when the UK, France, and Israel acquired nuclear weapons (the latter outside the confines of the NPT), but it responded to India and Pakistan's nuclear tests in 1998 by imposing some meaningless and short-lived economic sanctions and then returning to business as usual. In fact, India eventually got rewarded with a strategic cooperation agreement and a forgiving nuclear deal. According to a recent article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, "intensive lobbying by corporate sectors in both the United States and India helped overrule the concerns of the arms control community." I guess other great powers worry about "economic self-interest" too.

In short, what's bugging the Economist is not that China isn't "acting like a great power"; it is that China isn't defining its interests the way some conservative Englishmen would like them to. Sorry, folks, that's just not how great powers act. As China's power grows, it will press its own perceived self-interests vigorously, just as other great powers do. It will continue to join and participate in a wide array of existing institutions, but it will use them to advance its own interests and will also try to shape those institutions according to its own preferences and values. Expecting them to conform their behavior to someone else's idea of what is right and proper is ... well ... not very realistic.

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My class at the Kennedy School is examining liberal theories of international politics this week, and the policy issue we'll be discussing is the question of democracy promotion. One of the assigned readings is former President George W. Bush's 2nd Inaugural Address. As you'll probably remember, the address was a soaring anthem to virtues of liberty and America's commitment to promoting it around the world. Some of the its choicer lines included:

The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."

"America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one."

"It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

"The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations."

It would be easy to pick the speech apart, of course, or to point out that Bush's lofty declarations about "America's belief in human dignity" were at odds  with the torture regime that he oversaw as president. It was also the kind of speech that tends to make even America's friends overseas nervous, as they wonder what new crusades the United States might contemplating.

But that's not the point I want to make today. As I read it over preparing for class, I had an odd thought: what if Barack Obama gave the same speech? How would Americans react, and how would foreign audiences perceive it? I read it again, and imagined Obama's voice and cadences uttering the same lines. And you know what? It read a lot better that way. Try it yourself and see. (If you want to make this hypothetical easier to imagine, throw in the phrase "Make no mistake" once or twice).

I draw three rather obvious conclusions from this exercise. First, when you like a political leader, you'll tend to like what he or she says no matter what the actual words are. Conversely, if you've already decided you don't like someone, there's little they could do to convince you. Second, liberal values are deeply infused into American political culture, which is why either Bush or Obama could use a lot of the same phrases and invoke the same sweeping language and get a lot of heads to nod in assent. Third, as long as the United States is very, very powerful, there will be a strong outward thrust to its foreign policy, even when vital interests aren't at stake and even when meddling abroad could make things worse rather than better. 

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Howard W. French has written a fascinating and disturbing review essay in the latest New York Review of Books. It is an assessment of three recent books on the cataclysmic war that has been taking place in Central Africa, and here's the passage that reached out and grabbed me:

The protracted and inconclusive conflict that followed has become what Gérard Prunier, in the title of his sprawling book, calls "Africa's World War," a catastrophic decade of violence that has led to a staggering 5.4 million deaths, far more than any war anywhere since World War II. It also has resulted in one of the largest -- and least followed -- UN interventions in the world, involving nearly 20,000 UN soldiers from over forty countries.

I was aware of this conflict, of course, but as I read French's essay, I realized that I knew very little about its origins, evolution, or the prospects for ending it. I'm a full-time professional in the field of international relations and security studies, and I teach an undergraduate course on "the origins of modern wars" here at Harvard. I go to seminars on various international relations topics almost every week. And yet I knew next-to-nothing about the greatest international bloodletting of my lifetime. Readers of this blog know that I'm usually wary about outsiders meddling in situations they don't understand and that don't involve vital interests, but that's no excuse for being ignorant about a cataclysm of this magnitude.

I could offer up various reasons for this lapse -- I've never studied African politics, the conflict hasn't been high on the U.S. foreign policy agenda, Western media haven't given a lot of play, I've been working on other topics, etc. -- but frankly, none of those reasons are very convincing. Mea culpa. 

I suspect I'm not alone in my ignorance either, and French's essay suggests that U.S. officials who were engaged in this conflict (including current U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice) didn't have a firm grasp of what was going on either. There's probably some "strategic ethnocentrism" going on here too: Western elites pay a lot more attention when people like them are being killed in large numbers, and look the other way when the victims are impoverished Africans.

As for me, I have some reading to do, starting with the three books discussed in French's essay (Gerard Prunier, Africa's World War; René Lemarchand, The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa, and Thomas Turner, The Congo Wars.)

And it's time to make some changes to my course syllabus, too.

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People like me have been spilling a lot of ink (and blogspace) over events in out-of-the-way places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and the like, and I'm not going to apologize for it. But I sometimes think this illustrates the tendency for humans to focus on what is urgent or vivid instead of what's important. People dying and things getting blown up rivet our attention, but sometimes the calm workings of a democratic process might be of greater long-term significance.

Consider the recent Japanese election. I'm far from being an expert on Japanese politics, but I do know there are good reasons to think that genuine reform will be as difficult to enact there as it is here in the United States. (Among other things, entrenched bureaucrats in powerful ministries will be hard to weaken or dislodge.) Nonetheless, if the defeat of the LDP and the emergence of the more populist Democratic Party of Japan leads to the emergence of a genuine two-party system, makes Japanese political institutions more accountable, and generally opens up a set of sclerotic policies, the impact could be far-reaching.

After all, Japan is still the world's second largest economy. Its military spending ranks fifth in the world. It has a highly educated populations and many advanced industries and scientific establishments (including the potential to get nuclear weapons very quickly if it wished). It is the location of several key U.S. military bases, and is bound to Washington by a long-standing security treaty.   

All this means that if Japanese economic and foreign policy were to change significantly, the effects would be quite far-reaching. I'm not saying they will, but I am planning to spend a bit more time keeping an eye on events there.

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