You know the old joke about administrators who have three boxes on their desks: one says "In," another says "Out," and the third says "Too Hard." There are a lot of problems out there in the world that seem to fit that latter box, vexing challenges that seem to have been around forever.   Ambitious policymakers and idealistic academics often think up clever ways to address them, but most of the time these schemes go nowhere.

What are my Top Ten Intractable Problems? They will undoubtedly be solved someday, but nobody knows when. Pay attention: There will be a quiz at the end.

#1. Cyprus: The Greek/Turkish division over Cyprus is a legacy of the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, as Cyprus was the main place where the Greek and Turkish populations weren't forcibly separated after the war between Greece and Turkey that lasted from 1919 until 1921. The conflict has been with us in various forms ever since, and despite some near misses, it is still unresolved today. Any guesses on when it will get settled? I have no idea.

#2. The Arab-Israeli Conflict: This one's been around since 1947, or 1936, or 1919 or even the 1890s ... pick whatever date you want. Who's willing to bet it will get settled soon? Warning: Nobody's lost money being pessimistic in the past.

#3. The Korean Peninsula: There is no peace treaty ending the Korean War, and the Korean people are still divided between two countries. Germany was divided for a long time too, and one suspects that Korean reunification will happen some day. But when?

#4.  Kashmir: High on anyone's list of dangerous and intractable conflicts is the long-running dispute over Kashmir, which has helped keep India and Pakistan at odds with each other for sixty-five years by now. Is a solution in sight? Not that I can see.

#5. UN Security Council Reform: Everybody knows that the current structure of the UNSC makes little sense, and the current membership of the P-5 is especially anachronistic. But past efforts to devise a better structure have been stymied by rival ambitions. We all agree it ought to be changed, but nobody can agree on who the new members should be. Result: even more gridlock than in the US Congress.

#6. The Democratic Republic of the Congo: The DRC was badly governed back when it was called Zaire, and then it suffered through more than fifteen years of incessant internal warfare and repeated foreign interventions. There have been a few efforts to rebuild a more effective central state, but the country remains a desperately weak black hole in the center of Africa. How long will this continue? No one knows.

#7. The Cuba Embargo: The U.S. has had an embargo on Cuba since 1961 intended to bring down the Castro regime. This monument to domestic lobbying and diplomatic rigidity has been a complete failure, yet may continue as long as anyone named Castro is in power and maybe beyond that.  

#8. The European Union: Until relatively recently, the EU was a great success story, but now it looks like one of those soap operas where the players lurch from crisis to crisis without either divorcing or reconciling. Will the Euro survive? Will the UK leave? Will right-wing fascism return? Will Berlusconi apologize to Merkel? Will Turkey ever become a member? Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of "As the Continent Turns..."

#9. Climate Change: Except for a few flat-earthers like Senator Jim Inhofe, we know now that human activity is altering the earth's climate ... and not in a good way. But there are major conflicts of interest between the key players, as well as huge intergenerational equity problems. And how do you convince politicians to impose big sacrifices on their constituents today, in order to benefit people who aren't even alive? Will a solution be reached? Probably, but I wouldn't hold my breath. And that's just one of the big environmental issues that mankind is facing.

#10. The Former Soviet Fragments: Lastly, what about all the remnants of the former Soviet empire? Some of these fragments have become effective states, but there are still a lot of unresolved conflicts lying around. Think of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nadgorno-Karabakh, the potential for further unrest in Chechnya, or the breakaway provinces of S. Osetia and Abkhazia, who are recognized by Russia, each other, and hardly anyone else. It hardly seems likely that these entities could be around for very long, but stranger things have happened in the past.

And now for your quiz.

First, which of these conflicts will be the first to be resolved? (My bet is #7, because neither Fidel nor Raul are going to live forever. But they can always designate a successor to try to keep the regime going.)

Second, what are the most important unresolved disputes that I've missed?

It's the holiday season, but Death does not observe such man-made conventions.  I've been more conscious of that fact this past week, in part because my mother would have been 84 last Thursday and she is woven into a whole tapestry of my holiday memories.  It is at such times that the loss is most acute.

And as it happens, we have seen three notable departures this week.  Herewith a brief comment on each.

 1. Christopher Hitchens.   I never met Hitchens (though my wife knew him slightly back in the 1980s), but I've enjoyed several of his books and a fair bit of his commentary over the years.  His talents were considerable and his achievements worthy of note (and I'd give a fair bit to be as able and witty a writer as he was), but the outpouring of tributes this past week struck me as decidedly over-the-top.  (I can't help but think that he would have been first in line to skewer most of them).  I don't doubt the sincerity of his friends' affection and or question their sense of loss, but as Glenn Greenwald notes, if you want people to say nice things about you when you're gone, make sure a lot of your friends are well-connected Establishment writers.

Like a lot of public intellectuals, Hitchens embraced an odd set of ideological fixations at various points in his career.  He started out a Trotskyite, and ended up a cranky neoconservative fellow-traveler (at least regarding the Iraq War and the threat from radical Islam).  And his public persona never seemed tempered by self-doubt, despite having been massively wrong on more than one occasion.  A bit more humility might have made him a less successful writer, but also a more sensible one.

Is it possible that his oscillations reflected a lack of deep intellectual foundations?  He was clearly formidably well-read, but apart from his outspoken atheism, I'm not sure he had a well-developed theory for how the world really worked.  By his own account, the unifying core of his thinking was a hatred of "the totalitarian"--and especially any movement or ruler who tried to control what we think--but isn't that about the easiest target for anyone (and especially a writer) to pick?  I mean, who's going to rise to totalitarianism's defense in this day and age, and especially inside the American Establishment?   (Civil liberties may be under siege these days, but we have a ways to go before we come close to true tyranny.)

That said, I was also struck by one more thought upon reading all those commentaries on his career.  I cannot imagine the American system of higher education producing anyone quite like him, and especially not the typical American Ph.D. program in the social sciences.  Whatever his flaws may have been, Hitchens was wide-ranging, provocative, willing to take unpopular positions, and above all fun to read.  Whereas graduate education in the United States is increasingly designed to take smart and ambitious young students, stamp most of the fire and creativity out of them, and make them safe, largely indistinguishable from each other, and above all, boring.   (There's a reason we call them "academic disciplines").   So if Hitchens is your role model, for god's (note the small "g") sake don't go get a Ph.D.

Read on

I've just arrived in Seoul, after a long but uneventful flight from New York. Korean Airlines did a nice job getting me here, but why do all airlines (not just KA) feel compelled to feed you a meal right after takeoff? In this case, we took off from JFK at 1:15 AM, and were immediately served a nice but wholly superfluous dinner. Even if you skip the dinner they don't dim the cabin lights for an hour or so, when you'd really rather be sleeping.

But I digress....

As I mentioned last time, I'm here for a conference on Asian security issues. I'll be talking a bit about issues on the Korean peninsula, and the fine line that South Korea has been walking in recent years as its economic ties with China have grown. But my main contribution -- such as it is -- will be talk a bit about the balance-of-power dynamics that I anticipate in East Asia in the years ahead. Here's an edited version of the key portion of my paper (disclaimer: the following reflects just my views, and not those of the conference sponsors or any of the other participants).

In general, states seek allies to balance against external threats. The level of threat, in turn, is a function of the power of potential rivals, their geographic proximity, their specific offensive capabilities, and their perceived intentions. As states grow stronger and amass greater power projection capabilities, nearby countries worry about how these capabilities will be used and to look for external support.

Ideally, states facing a rising threat would like to "pass the buck" to some other country, so that they don't have to bear the burdens of balancing against the threat. If "buck-passing" is not feasible -- usually because there is no other country to pass the buck to -- then states have little choice but to increase their own defense capabilities and form external alliances in order to preserve their autonomy and security.

In rare cases, weak or isolated states may be forced to "bandwagon" with a powerful state. Weak states can do little to affect the outcome of a great power contest and may suffer grievously in the process, so they must choose the side they believe is most likely to win. They may be willing to stand up to a stronger power if they are assured of ample allied support, but a weak state left to its own devices may have little choice but to kowtow to a larger and stronger neighbor. That is how "spheres of influence" are born.

What does this logic tell us about alliance patterns in East Asia? On the one hand, prospects for balancing ought to be fairly good. Although China has the greatest power potential in Asia, several of its neighbors are hardly "weak states." Japan has the world's third largest economy (despite a lengthy period of stagnation), a latent nuclear capability, and significant military power of its own. Despite a rapidly aging population, it would be hard to intimidate unless it were completely isolated. Vietnam has never been a pushover, India has a billion people, a rapidly growing economy, and is nuclear-capable, and states like Indonesia and Singapore possess valuable strategic real estate and (in Singapore's case) military strength disproportionate to their size. Last but not least, the Republic of Korea is now an impressive industrial power with advanced military capabilities and a number of strong alliance partners.

Furthermore, even a far more powerful China would have some difficulty projecting power against its various neighbors, because it would have to do so via naval, air, and amphibious capabilities and not via land power alone. And given the U.S. interest in preventing China from exercising regional hegemony, the potential targets of a Chinese drive for regional dominance would have a great power ally ready to back them up.

It should not surprise us, therefore, to observe that China's rise is already encouraging balancing behavior by many Asian countries. Japan, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and South Korea have all begun significant defense modernization programs, and each of these states has taken steps to strengthen its ties with the United States. These responses, it is worth noting, are both a response to China's growing power and a reaction to its increasingly assertive regional behavior. Their desire to improve ties with the United States has found a welcome audience in Washington, which is also concerned about China's rising power and regional ambitions.

Read on

It's Christmas Eve, and my brain has been deadened by hours of grading a take-home final exam. (The papers themselves aren't bad, but reading dozens of answers to the same questions can get a bit mind-numbing). I can't dull the pain with egg nog or some other suitable spirit until this evening, so I'm taking a quick break to offer this holiday post.

My own holiday shopping is finished, thank goodness, but I began wondering about what sorts of gifts I'd like to see some prominent world leaders receive. In the spirit of the season, here's a hypothetical gift list for a few people who've been on my mind over the past year or so.

1. For Barack Obama.  A copy of Machiavelli's The Prince.   President Obama is ending the year on an up note, having successfully managed to end Don't Ask Don't Tell and obtained Senate approval for the New Start Treaty. I think the former achievement is more important than the latter, but both are worthy accomplishments. The new Congress won't be nearly as friendly (and the last one was no picnic), so the president will need all of Machiavelli's wily advice to confound his opponents. Let's hope he learns that it's better to be feared than loved, at least when you're dealing with today's Grand Obstructionist Party.

2. For Hillary Rodham Clinton: a pair of reading glasses, an espresso machine, and a couple of days off.   Why?  So she can read the new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.   I just downloaded this sucker, and it's over 200 pages of bracing bureaucratic prose.  I plan to read it myself over Xmas break, but I'll bet it takes me a few espressos to get through it too.  And I have a sneaking suspicion that it will be cited more than read, even by people at State.

3. For Julian Assange: A DVD of Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies, to enjoy while he's under house arrest, and a copy of Sexual Etiquette 101, to help him stay out of trouble in the future.

4. For Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas:  A copy of Roger Fisher and William Ury's  Getting to Yes, and Ali Abunimah's One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Because if we don't get to "yes" on two states, one state is what you'll end up with.

5. For Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez:  A copy of The General in His Labyrinth, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Chavez has been obsessed with Simon Bolivar -to the extent of exhuming his remains in an attempt to prove that the South American hero was poisoned-but Marquez's novel also offers a warning of the sort of fate that Chavez himself may be destined for.

6. For UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon: A copy of Albert Camus' essay "The Myth of Sisyphus." Running the United Nations must sometimes seem like a Sisyphean task, and every bit as absurd as Camus judged the fate of man to be.  But perhaps the Secretary-General can take comfort from Camus' conclusion -- "we must imagine Sisyphus happy."

7. For North Korean heir apparent Kim Jong-un: A DVD of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The question is: will he govern like Nurse Ratched, or like McMurphy?

8. For General David Petraeus: A Youtube link to Pete Seeger's "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy." There just might be a lesson in there.

9. For Chinese General Secretary Hu Jintao: A framed reproduction of Matisse's Fall of Icarus, as a reminder of what can happen when one flies too high too fast.

10. For readers of this blog: My thanks for your interest, your sometimes spirited dissents, and your generous words of support. May each of you bask in the love of family and friends this holiday season, and may we all grow a little bit wiser in the year ahead.

Happy holidays!

How should we respond to North Korea's latest bit of infuriating behavior? So far, the Obama administration's decision to send a US carrier for joint naval exercises with South Korea strikes me as about right. Overreacting would just give North Korea what they usually want-i.e., more attention than they deserve-but a purely verbal statement of support would have been seen as too modest by South Korea and our other Asian allies.

At the same time, we want to let Seoul take the lead in responding to this attack (while letting them know that we have their back), because we want our Asian allies to start taking more responsibility for their own security. South Korea is far wealthier and stronger than the North (which has a large but poorly trained and equipped army), and there's little danger of escalation if South Korea chooses to retaliate in a measured way.  A real war on the Korean Peninsula would almost certainly bring about the final death knell of the North Korean regime, and somehow I don't think Kim & Co. have a death-wish.  

But there's another step that I'd consider. Specifically, I'd try to initiate some quiet discussions with China on how to deal with the whole thorny issue of a post-Kim environment and the prospect of reunification. We're already asking China to intercede, but I'd go further and push them to talk about what our two countries will do in the event that the Pyongyang regime begins to unravel and reunification suddenly begins to look like a real possibility. One of the reasons China keeps protecting North Korea is their legitimate concern that the collapse of the Kim regime would cause enormous headaches for them. Among other things, they worry about a massive influx of refugees, the emergence of a major public health crisis just across the border, the security of North Korea's nuclear arsenal, and the possibility that a reunified Korea would remain allied with the United States, thereby putting a traditional U.S. ally right next door. Because China doesn't want any of those things to happen, it doesn't want the Kim dynasty to disappear. And this situation gives Pyongyang some leverage.

Yet even though I don't think North Korea is on the verge of collapsing, there are two good reasons to start some quiet conversations about what we would do it if did. First, North Korea might implode at some point in the future, and it would be nice to have thought about how we should respond and to have discussed this problem with China in advance. The second reason, and the one more relevant to today's concerns, is that news of these conversations would inevitably leak, and Pyongyang would undoubtedly be deeply concerned if they thought that Beijing was having serious conversations with Washington about the implications of a post-Kim world.

Of course, it is possible that China would just stiff us on this issue, either refusing to discuss the matter or using the conversations as an opportunity to back up Pyongyang once again.   But at this point they may be growing tired of North Korea's unpredictable antics, and the steps outlined above would be a subtle and low-cost way for them to show it. And if they refused to help on this issue, it will undercut their attempts to portray themselves as an increasingly responsible "stakeholder" in the East Asian security environment.

I had a very pleasant R & R -- thank you -- and I'm grateful to Justin Logan for filling in with such clear and well-argued pieces on unipolarity and Iran's nuclear program. I would only add that I'm a big fan of the work that Bill Wohlforth and Steve Brooks have done in recent years, despite my various disagreements with some of what they've written, and I'm glad that Justin put their work up in bright lights.

I managed to avoid the Internet almost entirely while I was away, and even skipped the New York Times most days. So I'm playing catch-up on the week’s events, and have only a few thoughts on recent developments.

On North Korea: The freeing of the two journalists strikes me was a clear case of pragmatic realism in action, and President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton deserve points for their calm, clear-eyed approach to a vexing but ultimately not-very significant problem. They achieved the U.S. goal -- getting the two women out -- and Kim Jong Il got a photo op but nothing more. Even getting a former president to drop in isn't all that significant these days, because North Korea has welcomed former presidents before. True, North Korea got Bill to visit without having to pay his normally whopping speaker's fee, but they also didn't get a speech. Indeed, the fact that they seem to place so much value on a brief drop-in by an ex-president reveals a lot about the regime's pathetic need for attention. As for the former president, he deserves credit for staying on message and not grandstanding while he was there, though the real work was almost certainly done behind-the-scenes and he didn't have to do any actual negotiating.  

In the end, the whole business was not that big a deal (except for the two journalists and their families, of course), and I think it confirms the value of not over-reacting every time Pyongyang does something annoying. Being annoying is its only diplomatic asset these days, but our best course is to treat them as a minor irritant and reserve most of our attention for more important problems. And it's probably good for Hillary if Bill has something constructive to do every now and then.

So props all around, and I would love to hear how conservative critics of the administration's handling of the problem would explain their positions to the journalists or their families.

On Afghanistan: The Times reports today that the Obama administration is still trying to come up with suitable "benchmarks" to measure progress in Afghanistan. Taking time to develop meaningful yardsticks for success or failure is a good idea in theory, but such measures are usually elusive in the context of counterinsurgency warfare. Body counts are a terrible measure, for example, because rising counts may simply reflect greater insurgent activity (and recruitment), and signs of diminished insurgent activity may simply mean that they are lying low. Testimony from civilians is also suspect, because they have obvious incentives to tell whoever is currently in charge of their village or region whatever they think the occupier wants to hear. Remember what a South Vietnamese general told a U.S. official back in the 1960s, in reference to the late Robert McNamara: "Ah, les statistiques! Your Secretary of Defense loves statistics. We Vietnamese can give him all he wants. If you want them to go up, they will go up. If you want them to go down, they will go down."

More broadly, the fact that Obama's team is having a tough time devising good measures is another sign that we don't really know what we are doing there. And I mean that in two senses: 1) what are we trying to accomplish, and 2) what ARE we doing there? I'd also remind everyone that the Bush administration spent a lot of time laying out various "benchmarks" in Iraq, and then focused primarily on the ones where there was progress.

Via Matt Yglesias (linking to Mark Kleiman), we've also learned that the U.S. expenditures on Afghanistan are now more than five times greater than the country's entire annual GDP. That allocation of resources might make sense if we were trying to corner the opium market and sell it ourselves, but otherwise, it suggests that we aren't thinking very clearly about our strategic priorities. It was reasonable to spend a lot of money deterring Soviet expansion in Europe during the Cold War, and one can make a similar case for spending money to preserve a balance of power in the Persian Gulf, because Europe was a "key center of industrial power" and oil is the lifeblood on which the world economy runs. But spending five times more than it would cost to buy up everything a country produces (and committing the U.S. to do so for many years to come), is like putting an elaborate burgler alarm on a tar-paper shack, and then hiring an expensive security service to guard it for the next decade. Not smart.

KNS/AFP/Getty Images

Contrary to what I suggested last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates took the bait that Pyongyang dangled last week. In a direct response to North Korea's nuclear test, Gates told the delegates at the "Shangri La Dialogue" (a major Asian security conference held in Singapore) that “we will not stand idly by as North Korea builds the capability to wreak destruction on any target in the region -- or on us."

Strong words, but they will ring hollow if the United States and its various Asian allies (and China) do not actually do anything, and I’m betting they won't. Gates warned that North Korea could "continue as a destitute, international pariah, or chart a new course," but it's been clear for quite awhile now that pariah status doesn't bother the government in Pyongyang. And because none of North Korea's neighbors want to deal with the consequences, there isn't much support for the kind of pressure that might cause the North Korean regime to collapse. Unfortunately, that’s also the only kind of pressure that might make it change course.
   
Gates was on firmer ground when he warned North Korea that the United States would consider any transfer of nuclear materials to other countries or terrorist groups a "grave threat" to the United States and its allies. Even here, however, a bit more discrimination was in order. We obviously don't want North Korea giving nuclear know-how or nuclear material to other countries, but it's not clear we would do anything to them if we discovered that they were. After all, as Georgetown's Matthew Kroenig has documented, giving nuclear assistance to another country is hardly an unprecedented act. Russia assisted China's nascent nuclear program when they were allies, France gave key support to Israel's nuclear program, and China helped Pakistan's nuclear program as well. Pakistan's A.Q. Khan network subsequently spread nuclear technology in several directions, and North Korea appears to have provided nuclear assistance to Syria. The key point: in none of these cases was it seen as grounds for war.

But giving nuclear technology to a terrorist group is another matter entirely, and we need to make it clear to Pyongyang that this is an act that would lead us to discard our normal reservations and remove them from power once and for all. Not only do we want to deter North Korea from ever trying something like this, but we also want to establish and reinforce a clear precedent for other nuclear powers. Regime survival seems to be the paramount concern of Kim Jong Il and his associates, and they must be under no illusions about what nuclear transfer to terrorists would mean for their own futures. This scenario should be the topic of some serious contingency planning by the U.S. military, as well as some serious discussions among the other interested parties, beginning with the other members of the Six Party talks (Russia, China, Japan, and South Korea).  None of these states have an interest in nuclear leakage to terrorists, so it should not be that hard to get them to agree that giving nuclear materials to terrorists would be clear and immediate casus belli.

ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP/Getty Images