There's a terrific article by Jack Snyder and Erica Borghard in the latest issue of the American Political Science Review, entitled "The Costs of Empty Threats: A Penny, not a Pound." Apart from its substantive contributions, it's also a nice illustration of how social science knowledge accumulates and progresses. Indeed, the article is also an excellent reminder of why we need a diverse array of scholars in our business, employing a variety of methods and theoretical perspectives.

In this piece, Snyder and Borghard challenge a well-known argument in the field of IR and foreign policy: namely, the idea that "domestic audience costs" give democratic states certain bargaining advantages in international disputes. The idea originated in a brief comment in one of Thomas Schelling's books, but the seminal treatment is a widely cited 1994 article by Jim Fearon (then at Chicago, now at Stanford). Fearon argued that democratic leaders who issued threats toward an adversary and then backed down risked paying "audience costs" (i.e., their publics would punish them for making the threat and then retreating). By contrast, authoritarian leaders did not face similar audience costs (because they were not accountable to public opinion), so they could retreat without fear of domestic electoral punishment. Paradoxically, this situation could give democratic leaders a bargaining advantage in crises: Because democratic leaders would worry in advance about the dangers of bluffing and then being forced to retreat, they would only issue public threats if they were serious and not going to back down.

Fearon's argument had considerable prima facie plausibility, and the basic idea has been used to explain a variety of international phenomena, including the so-called democratic peace. But Fearon did not provide systematic evidence to support his argument, and subsequent attempts to conduct empirical tests of the idea have yielded mixed results.

The Snyder/Borghard piece is the most serious attempt to test this conjecture to date. They conducted detailed historical investigations of a series of post-1945 international crises, and in their words, they find "hardly any evidence" that audience costs operate in the manner depicted. Instead:

Audience cost mechanisms are rare because (1) leaders see unambiguously committing threats as imprudent, (2) domestic audiences care more about policy substance than about consistency between the leader's words and deeds, (3) domestic audiences care about their country's reputation for resolve and national honor independent of whether the leader has issued an explicit threat, and (4) authoritarian targets of democratic threats do not perceive audience costs dynamics in the same way that audience costs theorists do.

And for your would-be policymakers out there, their bottom line is well worth emphasizing:

Future leaders of democracies should not come away from their political science classes having gained the impression that democracies can safely get their way in a crisis by publically committing themselves to fight for otherwise unpersuasive objectives.

There's also a broader lesson for the social sciences too. Like all fields of study, social science advances through a process of conjecture, debate, argument, and refinement. Fearon's original article was an important contribution that stimulated lots of creative thinking, and the fact that it may not stand up to careful empirical scrutiny is nothing to regret. We would not know what we now think we know had he not written the original piece (assuming, of course, that Snyder and Borghard's critique stands up to subsequent scrutiny too).

Note further that there was a genuine division of labor involved here, operating over more than a decade. Fearon's original piece was in the rational choice tradition, based on a formal mathematical model and buttressed by some suggestive supporting anecdotes. Snyder and Borghard's article, by contrast, is mostly a careful and sophisticated empirical test using qualitative, "process-tracing" methods, designed to tease out whether "audience costs" played a significant role in key decisions or not. But Snyder and Borghard also identify possible flaws in the original causal logic and identify alternative causal paths to account for the observed results. Thus, neither type of work is either purely "theoretical" or purely "empirical."

For the academy, the moral of this story is that study of international relations would be greatly impoverished if one approach, method, or theoretical perspective came to dominate the field. This would produce an intellectual monoculture where scholars with different strengths were less likely to engage in a productive if competitive interchange, and one where research agendas were set largely by what questions could be studied by the reigning method du jour. In addition to real-world relevance, academic departments ought to prize intellectual, theoretical, and methodological diversity, both because they will be better able to deal with new topics and because different approaches have different strengths and limitations. This is not an argument for an "anything goes" approach to methods; rather, it is an argument against the repeated efforts to impose a single template for what is "good scholarship" on the field.

Back in 2009, right after Barack Obama took office, I published the following prediction in the Australian journal American Age:

To be blunt, anyone who expects Obama to produce a dramatic transformation in America's global position is going to be disappointed. There are three reasons why major foreign policy achievements are unlikely. First, the big issue is still the economy, and Obama is going to focus most of his time and political capital there. Success in this area is critical to the rest of his agenda and to his prospects for re-election in 2012. Second, Obama is a pragmatic centrist and his foreign policy team is made up of mainstream liberal internationalists who believe active US leadership is essential to solving most international problems. Although they will undoubtedly try to reverse the excesses of the Bush administration, this group is unlikely to undertake a fundamental rethinking of the US's global role. Third, and most important, there are no easy problems on Obama's foreign policy "to-do" list. Even if he was able to devote his full attention to these issues, it would be difficult to resolve any of them quickly.

I thought of that article and those predictions after two conversations with friends who are both experts in American politics. One is a political scientist and entrepreneur who leans toward the GOP these days, and the other is a political scientist with considerable experience in the Democratic Party establishment. My businessman friend told me bluntly: "Obama is toast. The Republicans could run a scarecrow against him and win." Interestingly, my Democratic party friend was even more outspoken in condemning the president and his advisors, and bluntly called them "a disaster." (As for my own forecasts, I think I was basically right, although Obama did not focus as much on economic matters as I expected and put too much time and capital into the health-care fight. And that is why he's in big trouble now.)

It's still early in the election season, of course, and the GOP field looks none too strong. But there's a lot of solid political science research showing that incumbent presidents have a very tough time when the economy is in the doldrums, and it's hard for me to see how Obama can get things moving again, especially when the GOP leadership has every incentive to thwart his efforts, even if it means keeping Americans out of work for another year or so.

The prospect of a one-term Obama presidency is bound to have important effects on foreign policy too. I'll bet other countries are already starting to think about the possibility, and starting to factor that into their calculations. The obvious implication is that any governments who have serious differences with the Obama administration are going to dig in their heels even more and hope for better after 2012.  It's possible that some governments who fear a more hard-line U.S. response under the GOP might be tempted to cut deals while they can, but I don't think that's very likely because they would also have to wonder if a lame-duck administration could deliver on any deal it made. The absurd length of the U.S. presidential campaign season will compound all these problems, by burning up even more of the president's time and attention over the next year or so.

This is obviously speculative and should not be overstated. But now, as in 1992, "It's the economy, stupid." And the bottom line: Expect even less from U.S. foreign policy in the year ahead. Like I said back in 2009: If you thought this administration would produce a major change in our overall global position, get used to disappointment.

Over at the Belfer Center's "Power and Policy" blog (a relatively new website which is well worth perusing), my colleague Dick Rosecrance has taken issue with my earlier post on Europe, the European Union, and transatlantic relations. Dick is a friend, a highly accomplished scholar, and a great asset to the Kennedy School. His challenge to my analysis is therefore welcome, though I didn't find it convincing.

For starters, Dick begins his sally by misrepresenting my position. Contrary to what he writes, I did not "consign the European Union to the trashheap of history." Indeed, I made it clear that I expected the European Union to remain intact for some time to come. My point was simply that the high points of European influence, EU unity, and transatlantic security cooperation were now behind us, and that U.S. policymakers ought to take these developments into account. I might add that I think U.S.-European relations will be more harmonious if both sides of the Atlantic have more realistic expectations about each other, instead of acting as if we are still in the heyday of the Cold War. And no, I don't think recent events in Libya are going to alter this trajectory.

Dick makes three main assertions in the rest of his response. First, he reminds us that Europe is the largest economic unit on earth, with a combined GDP that is larger than the United States.  Its power would be even more impressive, he suggests, if it imitated the early American republic and became politically united. This is undeniably true in theory, just as I would be Wimbledon champ if I could play tennis better than Nadal, Federer, or Djokovic. The problem is that Europe isn't like the early American republic, and a true "United States of Europe" is not going to happen in our lifetimes.

Second, he says that "in today's world, economics largely determines politics." Dick is hardly the only person who believes this, but has he noticed all the ways that politics -- pure and simple -- keeps intruding into economic affairs? Were it not for politics, managing Europe's debt crisis would be relatively simple. Absent politics, we would have had better financial regulation here in the United States and we wouldn't have had that 11th hour melodrama over raising the U.S. debt ceiling. If politics were as irrelevant as he suggests, it wouldn't have been seventeen years since the last successful multilateral trade agreement and the Doha Round would not have been a bust. If the desire for economic efficiency and wealth consistently trumped politics, most of the conflicts that still trouble us would have been resolved long ago.

Third, Dick argues that the United States is going to need Europe to counterbalance a rising China. Note the contradiction here: after telling us that economics dominates politics, he proceeds to justify a grand strategic partnership on pure balance-of-power considerations. If economics were all that mattered, we could just spend our time worrying about global trade and investment and there'd be no need to think about China's relative power at all.

Equally important, there is no reason to think that Europe is going to get into the business of balancing China in a serious way. The separate European nations have few strategic interests in Asia and hardly any capacity to project power there. They are far more likely to see China as a market. If the United States were to go to its NATO allies in 2020 and ask for help preserving maritime access in the South China Sea, it would probably get Gallic shrugs of indifference, pious statements of German pacifism, and elegant expressions of English equivocation, and then the diplomats and trade reps would hop the next flight to Beijing. What the United States won't get is any serious help from Europe.

States balance against threats, and one key component of threat is geographic proximity. If the United States decides to balance China--based on the long-range desire to remain the world's only regional hegemon -- and if it needs allies to help it accomplish that task, the place to find them is Asia, not Europe.

The steadily expanding "phone hacking" scandal in Great Britain is a good reminder that understanding politics requires a healthy appreciation of the role of arrogance and stupidity.  What began is a seemingly straightforward example of sleazy journalistic practice has grown into a full-blown scandal, and the circle of guilt keeps widening.

Just look at the repercussions so far: 1) the NewsCorp's bid to take over all of British Sky Broadcasting has been scuppered, 2) NewsCorp CEO Rebekah Brooks has resigned and is now under arrest, 3) long-time Murdoch associate and Wall Street Journal publisher Les HInton has also resigned his post, 4) Prime Minister David Cameron has been badly tarnished, and oh yes, 5) the head of Scotland Yard has resigned in the wake of revelations that it had bungled the investigation (which is a charitable way of putting it). The WSJ and FoxNews have been exposed as shills for their boss (Murdoch), which is hardly surprising but is hardly going to help their reputations.   

Oh, what a tangled web we weave....

Gallons of ink (or gigabytes of blog posts) have already been devoted to this story, but one broader element has received less attention amidst all the juicy personal stuff. What the scandal really teaches us is the dangers that inevitably arise when any single company or individual exercises excessive influence in media circles. Why? Because a healthy democracy depends on a well-informed citizenry, and media oligarchs can use excessive influence to skew what the public knows or believes in order to advance their own political objectives.  If the Murdoch scandal doesn't convince you, just look at how Silvio Berlusconi used his media empire to drive his political career and look where Italy is today.

Furthermore, politicians are likely to accommodate powerful media organizations that are willing to play hardball, punishing politicians they didn't like and rewarding officials who played along. The NewsCorp was a master at this, and it is no wonder David Cameron and even Scotland Yard became compliant.

Read on

A couple of weeks ago, Americans were treated to a remarkably clear demonstration of the power of the Israel lobby in the United States. First, Barack Obama gave a speech on Middle East policy at the State Department, which tried to position America as a supporter of the Arab spring and reiterated his belief that a two-state solution is the best way to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The next day, he met with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who rejected several of Obama's assertions and lectured him about what "Israel expects" from its great power patron. Then Obama felt it was smart politics to go to AIPAC and clarify his remarks. It was a pretty good speech, but Obama didn't offer any ideas for how his vision of Middle East peace might be realized and he certainly never suggested that -- horrors! -- the United States might use its considerable leverage to push both sides to an agreement. And then Netanyahu received a hero's welcome up on Capitol Hill, getting twenty-nine standing ovations for a defiant speech that made it clear that the only "two-state" solution he's willing to contemplate is one where the Palestinians live in disconnected Bantustans under near-total Israeli control.

Not surprisingly, this display of the lobby's influence made plenty of people uncomfortable, and some of them -- such as M.J. Rosenberg at Media Matters offered up some personal tales of their own run-ins with Israel's hardline backers. In response to Rosenberg's sally (and the hoopla surrounding the Netanyahu visit), Jonathan Chait of The New Republic has fallen back on a familiar line of defense. After conceding that there is a lobby and that it does have a lot of influence, he argued that "the most important basis of American support for Israel is not the lobby but the public's overwhelming sympathy for Israel." In other words, AIPAC et al don't really matter that much, and all those standing ovations on Capitol Hill were really just a genuine reflection of public opinion. He also said that John Mearsheimer and I believe the lobby exerts "total control" over U.S. foreign policy, and that we claim groups in the lobby were solely responsible for the invasion of Iraq.

To deal with the last claim first, this straw-man depiction of our argument merely confirms once again that Chait has not in fact read our book. I don't find that surprising, because a careful reading of the book would reveal to him that we weren't anti-Israel or anti-Semitic, had made none of the claims he accuses us of, and had in fact amassed considerable evidence to support the far more nuanced arguments that we did advance. And then he'd have to ponder the fact that virtually everything The New Republic has ever published about us was bogus. So I can easily see why he prefers to repeat the same falsehoods and leave it at that.

But what of his more basic claim that the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel is really a reflection of "the public's overwhelming sympathy?" There are at least three big problems with this assertion.

First, even if it were true that the public had "overwhelming sympathy" for Israel, it does not immediately follow that United States policy would necessarily follow suit. U.S. officials frequently do things that a majority of Americans oppose, if they believe that doing so is in the U.S. interest. A majority of Americans oppose fighting on in Afghanistan, for example, yet the Obama administration chose to escalate that war instead. Similarly, numerous polls show that the American people favor the "public option" in health care, but that's not exactly the policy that health care reform produced. Public opinion is an important factor, of course, but what public officials decide to do almost always reflects a more complex weighting of political factors (including the intensity of public preferences, broader strategic considerations, the weight of organized interests, etc.)

Read on

Five years ago this week, John Mearsheimer and I published "The Israel Lobby" in the London Review of Books.  Our goal in writing the article (and subsequent book) was to break the taboo on discussions of the lobby's impact on U.S. foreign policy, and to transform it into a topic that people could talk about openly and calmly.  Because we believed the "special relationship" that the lobby had promoted was harmful to the United States and Israel (not to mention the Palestinians), we hoped that a more open discourse on this topic would move U.S. Middle East policy in a direction that would be better for almost everyone.

Did we succeed?

I'm back in Singapore for the first time in nearly two years, and what a difference two years can make. Back in 2009, Singapore was reeling from the after-effects of the global recession, which hit its trade-dependent economy particularly hard.

The island nation has regrouped quickly, however, and its economy reportedly grew by an astonishing 17.9 percent in the first half of 2010. The harbor is chock-full of ships again, construction is proceeding apace, and the government expects robust growth to continue.

I don't want to go all "Asian values" on you, and comparing Singapore's economy with that of the United States is risky at best. But I've been reading a few books and articles on the endemic corruption (or if you prefer, criminality), embedded within the United States political/economic system (and watching documentaries about it too). And it made me wonder how much this feature might have to do with the varying trajectories of the two countries.

Case in point: today's Herald Tribune reports that Goldman Sachs has concluded that there's nothing really wrong with how it does business. To quote the print version (not the online edition) Goldman decided "its operations need only a fine-tuning, not a complete overhaul." Hmmmm. I don't know about you, but when a major investment bank has to get bailed out by the American taxpayer, and just paid a $550 million fine to settle civil fraud charges (not the first time Goldman has had to do something like this, by the way), one might reasonably conclude that there were more fundamental problems involved. Not from the point of view of Goldman's present profits, perhaps, but from the point of view of what is good for the society as a whole. And the problem seems to be that maximizing political influence is as much a part of Goldman's business model as the pursuit of economic gain itself.

Mind you, I'm not an economist, and I'm sure there are legions of people out there who would be quick to leap to Goldman's defense. And I'm not really picking on Goldman, because the financial meltdown of 2007-2008 suggested that the rot was far more widespread. Instead what troubles a layperson like me -- and maybe ought to worry you, too -- is that we've just lived through the most significant global recession since the 1930s but don't seem to have learned much in the process. That recession was triggered by malfeasance in mortgage and financial markets, and yet not much seems to have been done to create new arrangements that would prevent something similar from happening again. And the main reason isn't conceptual or economic but political: financial interests give a ton of money to politicians, and -- surprise, surprise -- those same politicians tend not to take actions that these donors oppose, like significantly tighter financial regulations. 

Singapore is far from a perfect society, and as I said at the outset, direct comparisons between its situation and that of the United States are somewhat dubious. But I can't help but wonder if maybe we could learn a few things about political economy from them. Like not letting private money play an enormous role in politics, and paying civil servants enough so that more of our best brains choose public service over Wall Street.  

I spent a half-hour yesterday on Warren Olney's KCRW radio show To the Point, discussing defense spending and deficit reduction. The other participants were Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker (the political writer I'm most jealous of because he writes so damn well), William Hartung of the New America Foundation, and Chris Littleton, co-founder of the Ohio Liberty Council and a committed member of the "Tea Party" movement. If you're interested, you can get a link to the entire broadcast here.

The main topic of discussion was whether efforts at deficit reduction are going to include taking a major whack at defense spending. The general view on the panel was that you can't make serious efforts at deficit reduction without cutting DOD, if only because it occupies such a large percentage (i.e., more than half) of federal discretionary spending. Not surprisingly, a lot of the discussion then focused on what the new Congress would actually do and why there is still such resistance to trimming America's very large defense outlays.

For me, however, the most interesting part was listening to the Tea Party representative, Chris Littleton. His views were easily the most extreme of the group and bordered on what would normally be disparaged as "isolationism." He articulated this view very well, I thought, and was particularly good at countering the claim that such views are unpatriotic. He also acknowledged that Tea Partiers are far from unified on this issue: Some favor more hawkish defense policies while others believe the United States is badly overextended, should get out of the business of policing the world, and sharply cut back defense spending as part of an overall effort to shrink the size of government. (He would obviously place himself in the latter group).

As readers of this blog probably know, I also think U.S. defense spending is excessive and that our foreign policy should be more restrained. I don't go nearly as far as Littleton did, however, and I think the Tea Party's basic idea that the United States should drastically shrink the public sector is a Very Bad Idea. If we followed its prescriptions, we would quickly learn that all sorts of public services (good public schools, museums, snow removal, safety nets, police and fire, etc.) make life a lot better for all of us and that life without them would be pretty grim indeed.  

But I came away from the conversation with a new appreciation for what the Tea Party may -- repeat, may -- bring to the national debate on foreign policy. Right now, there is still an overwhelming consensus inside the U.S. foreign-policy establishment for continuing to run the world, a consensus that includes liberal interventionists of the Madeleine ("Indispensable Nation") Albright variety and virtually all neoconservatives. And as I've noted before, there is significant imbalance of power inside Washington, generally favoring those who want to do more overseas. The result is that the United States tries to do more than it should, finds it much harder to set clear priorities, and tends to miss opportunities to "pass the buck" to others. If the rise of the Tea Party creates some significant domestic opposition to that tendency and helps generate a more lively public debate on fundamental issues of grand strategy, the country as a whole may end up with policies that make a lot more sense in the long run. It won't be Mr. Littleton's agenda, but it also won't be the outdated strategy we've been following since the end of the Cold War.

I've been slow to react to the departure of James Jones as national security advisor, and his replacement by Tom Donilon, and it's mostly because I just can't get excited about it one way or the other. You can read a more-or-less favorable appraisal from Steve Clemons here, and a sharply critical assessment from Chas Freeman here. I find myself more-or-less aligned with FP colleague Dan Drezner, who thinks it won't make much difference.

By all accounts Donilon has an excellent relationship with Obama, and people think he'll be good at making the paper flow inside NSC itself. He's also supposed to be an advocate of "rebalancing" U.S. commitments around the world, and something of a skeptic on Afghanistan. That's encouraging, I guess, although it hardly took a genius to figure out that the United States was badly overcommitted in 2008, and anyone with a triple-digit IQ could tell that the war in Afghanistan was not going well.  

My reservations are two-fold. First, has Donilon ever expressed an interesting or novel foreign policy idea, or shown that he has a larger vision for what the United States' position and strategy ought to be? If so, I haven't heard about it. This isn't just an academic's desire for some broader theoretical framework, because foreign policy isn't just about making a "to-do list" and patiently checking off different items. Instead, success depends on seeing the larger picture and figuring out how to set priorities and align different goals, so that actions taken in one arena don't end up undermining other initiatives. That is especially true when a country is facing as many different challenges as the United States currently is, and when you have to make hard choices from among a set of bad alternatives.

Second, has Donilon ever taken a position that involved some level of moral courage? Has he ever done or said anything that might be regarded as controversial inside the Beltway? Given his long career as a lobbyist and political operative, that's hardly likely. What was his view on invading Iraq in 2003, for example? Did he publicly oppose that boneheaded decision? Don't think so. And given that the Obama administration's defining characteristic in foreign policy has been a tendency to spell out promising courses of action and then beat a hasty retreat from them at the first sign of serious resistance, there's little reason to expect someone with Donilon's bio to act any differently.

When my wife and I are asked what we do, we sometime joke that my job is to "think globally," while her job is to "act locally." Translation: in addition to working as a consultant to a number of foundations and think tanks, my wife (Rebecca Stone) is also a member of Brookline's "Town Meeting." A Town Meeting is a venerable New England institution; in our case, it is a 250-person body of elected representatives that debates and approves major town initiatives.  

But sometimes our concerns overlap. A month or so ago, when the Park 51 controversy was stoking the growing fires of xenophobia and nativist prejudice, my response was to write a few blog posts about the issue. Big deal. But she decided to do something more concrete. Specifically, she drafted and sponsored a "warrant article" to be considered and voted upon at the next Town Meeting. Her proposal would amend the town's by-laws and give permanent legal residents ("green card holders") the right to vote in local (i.e., town-wide) elections.

You can read all about it here.

Notice that this proposal is not about giving the right to vote to undocumented aliens, tourists, or temporary visa holders. Nor would it permit green card holders to vote in state-wide or national elections or to run for office. Rather, it is about a single town giving people who are permanent legal residents (the vast majority of whom are taxpayers, including property taxes), the opportunity to participate in local elections only. Most permanent legal residents eventually become naturalized citizens after the requisite waiting period, and permitting them to vote in local elections is also a way to encourage greater civic participation. 

Equally important, it is a way to signal that America remains a country that welcomes people from overseas. It reminds us that we are a country whose very existence, past achievements, and future prospects rest on attracting and integrating future citizens from all over the world. Money quotation:

"A number of legal immigrants pay property taxes and send their children to public schools in Brookline, Stone said, and she believes allowing them to vote in local elections is a way to honor their commitment to the community.

"It may sound schmaltzy, but that's why I did it,'' said Stone, who is also an elected Town Meeting member. "I just got tired of complaining about what everybody else was saying. I figured it's a small thing to do. It's a small gesture. But it's a step in the right direction.''

There are also ample historical precedents for this arrangement. The Constitution is silent on this issue, but the Federal government has long given states and local communities the right to determine suffrage over state and local elections, and over forty different states permitted various forms of local non-citizen voting between 1776 and 1926. Both New York and Chicago have allowed permanent legal residents to vote in local elections as well, as have many other communities.

Massachusetts is a "home rule" state, which means that if the warrant article passes, then the town must petition the State legislature for final approval. Previous petitions from other communities have not been acted upon (if you know anything about the legislature here, that won't surprise you), but a number of other communities are considering similar measures and we may be seeing a turn of the tide. 

In any case, the next time you hear about Newt Gingrich or some other fear-mongering blowhard trying to makes us more suspicious of anyone born elsewhere, be aware that there are other Americans working, in their own communities, to counter such poisonous attitudes. And needless to say, I couldn't be prouder.

I had dinner a couple of weeks ago with a group of Harvard colleagues (and a visiting speaker), and we got into an interesting discussion about America's future as a world power. Nobody at the table questioned whether the United States was going to remain a very powerful and influential state for many years/decades to come. Instead, the main issues were whether it would retain its current position of primacy, whether China might one day supplant it as the dominant global power, and whether U.S. standards of living would be significantly compromised in the future.

One participant (a distinguished economist), was especially bullish. He argued that the United States enjoyed a considerable demographic advantage over Europe, Russia, and Japan, largely due a higher birth rate and greater openness to immigration. These societies will be shrinking and getting much older on average, while the United States will continue to grow for some time to come. He also argued that the United States remained far more entrepreneurial than most other societies, and a better incubator of technological innovation. Despite our current difficulties, therefore, he was optimistic about the longer-term prospects for the U.S. economy and for America's position as a global power.

But then came the crucial caveat. After reciting this long list of American advantages, my colleague remarked: "of course, our political system could screw it all up." And everyone around the table nodded in agreement.

Read on

My distinguished FP colleague Marc Lynch has taken issue with my "glass-mostly-empty" summary of Obama's foreign policy achievements to date, and you should definitely check it out. We agree that the Obama administration has little to brag about on either Afghanistan or Israel-Palestine, but Marc thinks I gave it insufficient credit on both Iraq and Iran. Here's a brief rejoinder.

On Iraq: Marc is correct to point out that Obama has delivered on his campaign promise to get out of Iraq, and Obama is going to make a speech tonight designed to highlight that "achievement." The problem is that Iraq will continue to be a headache for the United States for some time to come, and things could easily spiral back into the sort of internecine violence that was occurring in 2006. The administration and the Pentagon are "accentuating the positive" these days, but as the New York Times pointed out just this morning, there are significant disagreements about the actual level of violence and little doubt that things are heating up as we draw down. A front-page story also highlighted how corruption, inefficiency, and political stalemates are crippling Iraq's electrical power system, even after the United States poured billions into trying to rebuild and repair it.

None of this is Obama's fault. But remember that the end of the "combat mission" doesn't mean an end to a significant U.S. presence there, and he'll face continued pressure to "do something" if the situation deteriorates. And if Iraq does go south, you can be sure that the GOP and unrepentant neo-cons will blame it on those feckless Democrats. They'll talk for hours about how the "surge worked" (which isn't true), and suggest that everything would have been hunky-dory if McCain and Palin were in charge.  

That's palpable nonsense, of course, but my main point still stands: Iraq won't be looking like a success story and Obama won't get any political credit for it. If anything, the right will attack him for letting Iraq spiral back into violence and the left will be disappointed that we still have training missions, air assets, and private contractors there. Bottom line: Iraq will be a hard issue to run on 2012, and Obama's main hope is that people won't be talking about it much.  I'll be he's got his fingers crossed on that one.

On Iran: Marc is also correct to credit the Obama administration with winning greater international support for its approach to Iran, and with successfully isolating Tehran from some past backers (e.g., Russia). And I certainly agree with him that the main GOP alternative -- a U.S. or Israeli airstrike -- would be folly. The problem, however, is that the current approach isn't weakening the clerical regime, isn't halting its nuclear enrichment program, and certainly isn't preparing the way for some sort of détente or rapprochement. Indeed, isolating Iran and tightening the sanctions could easily strengthen the hands of those Iranians who are pushing to acquire a nuclear weapon, as opposed to those who reject this course or want to go near but not cross the nuclear weapons threshold.  

In political terms, therefore, Obama's Iran policy will have failed to produce any tangible benefits by 2012. Iran will have more centrifuges running, and more nuclear material stockpiled. Relations with Tehran will be no better, and maybe worse, than they were in 2009. War will still be an unattractive option -- and let's not forget that much of the international support for tighter sanctions reflects other states' desire to keep the military option off the table -- but that won't stop the GOP from accusing Obama of appeasement, pusillanimity, naiveté, lack of will, etc. Marc is right that their alternative is worse, but assuming we don't actually adopt it, they will be able to pretend that the Iran problem would have been solved by now if we'd just gone ahead and bombed.

As with a lot of my other analysis, I'd dearly love to be wrong about all of this. I would like to see the Afghan campaign succeed and it would be wonderful if Iraq settled down and prospered. I'd be thrilled if George Mitchell proved me wrong and actually delivered a viable two-state solution, and we could all rejoice if Iran and the international community reached a deal that kept Tehran from building nuclear weapons in perpetuity and opened the door to better relations. I like pleasant surprises as much as the next person, but I've learned not to expect them, especially when most of the signs point the other way.

Postscript: The other reason to read Lynch's post is that it is a model of spirited but civil disagreement. Notice how he makes his points without resorting to character assassination, personal attacks, or unwarranted accusations. That's why it's such a pleasure sharing a website with him, and I only wish more bloggers followed his approach.

There are many ways one could respond to the shocking plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczyinski over the weekend, but I was most struck by the reaction of a young Polish man -- Adam Tychoniewicz -- who chose to honor the dead president by riding his bicycle behind the motorcade carrying Kaczyinski's body from the airport to the presidential palace. Tychoniewicz offered a simple but eloquent statement about the value of legitimate constitutional orders and the rule of law. "I'm not afraid," he said. "This is what the laws and the Constitution are for."

Precisely. Poles can react to their shock and grief with calm and resilience because they live in a society where stability and safety do not depend on the leadership of a single individual or the unchecked authority of a single political party. Rather, it depends on the existence of a legitimate framework of laws and institutions than can provide continuity even in the aftermath of an enormous body blow -- the death of a president and dozens of top officials.

In Iraq, by contrast, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the dismantling of the Ba'ath party brought a rapid descent into the state of nature, leading quickly to brutal sectarian warfare.  This is because Saddam's Iraq was an arbitrary order where his will was law. Government there did not exist to protect the people from each other or from arbitrary authority; it existed to keep Saddam and his henchmen in power. Once they were gone, there was no set of stable and legitimate institutions to take over, and as we have learned to our sorrow, trying to create them is a difficult, time-consuming, and uncertain task.

Realists are often criticized for ignoring domestic politics, but the accusation is at best half-true. Realists do tend to think that other factors are more important in explaining a state's foreign policy behavior -- at least most of the time -- but their relatively pessimistic view of human nature makes realists appreciate the importance of legitimate domestic institutions that will constrain our worst impulses.

After all, it was Thomas Hobbes -- a realist if ever there was one-who warned about the harshness of life in the state of nature (it is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short") and who emphasized the need for strong institutions to control our selfish tendencies. Similarly, the American Founding Fathers were well aware of the dark side of human nature and sought to devise a system whose laws could channel it in a beneficial directions. As James Madison famously wrote in Federalist No. 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."

That is why retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens was so worried by the majority decision in Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 Presidential election. It wasn't the outcome of the election that mattered; it was a majority decision he believed would undermine our faith in the legal order itself. In the words of his dissent:

It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. ... Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."

And that is also why Americans should be worried by President Obama's decision to authorize the targeted assassination of an American citizen who is now suspected of supported terrorist activities in Yemen. When any U.S. president can issue death warrants against a U.S. citizen on the basis of suspicion alone (no matter how well documented) and shorn of any due process, we have taken one further step towards a dangerous concentration of executive authority.

We are far from either tyranny or the state of nature today, no matter what some Tea Partiers might think. But a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and when you're on a slippery slope, one or two steps can start you sliding towards the point of no return.

So let us grieve for Poland's loss, and take solace from its resilience. And let us also reflect on the value of living in a constitutional order where the rule of law exists, and imagine how frightening it would be to live in a land where whoever was in charge could do whatever they wanted. Laws and the Constitution exist for a reason. As Mr. Tychoniewicz reminded us, they are there so that we don't have to be afraid.

The always-interesting Matt Yglesias has a nice post on the political feasibility of defense spending cuts, which pivots off an Economist/YouGov poll and some data presentation and commentary by Annie Lowrey at the Washington Indepedendent and Ezra Klein at WaPo. I have no disagreement with what any of them said, but I did want to register one comment.

There are really only two sensible ways to think about reducing defense spending. One is to hold one’s military obligations (aka “roles and missions”) constant and to devise cheaper ways of meeting these commitments. In this approach, you have to identify genuine waste, fraud and abuse in the Pentagon, and devise a convincing way to defend various interests while spending less money. People who believe that the United States could have a robust nuclear deterrent with a much smaller nuclear arsenal are making this sort of argument, and so did the so-called "military reform" movement back in the 1980s.

The second way to cut defense spending is to reduce one’s military commitments; i.e., to decide that there are some missions or obligations that the United States does not need to perform, either because they are not essential, because they are counterproductive, or because other states can and will do them better than we will. Some of us might put the Afghan War under this heading.

The point, however, is that it doesn’t get us very far to talk about reducing U.S. defense spending unless you’re prepared to identify how to do the same missions at less cost, or unless you think there are some things we don’t need to do at all.

P.S. Isn’t the point of having lots of allies around the world to get them to do lots of things that will make us safer (and save us money), instead of simply multiplying the number of countries we think we are obligated to protect?