Over-achievers and under-achievers

it's hard to argue that Israel doesn't exert a lot of influence on the global agenda,

Professor, Israel is just a client state, its achievements depend to the push/pull from the EUS (secularists) and the Jews around the world. Therefore, rather than citing the State of Israel as achiever, I would put Jews in the list and evaluate their achievements based on their population, economic resources, intellectual resources.
Here is my categorisation of achievers, in descending order:

1. Secularists
(achievement grade 100, population 18%, support to secularists 100%)
2. Jews (40, 0.2%, 90%)
2. Christians (10, 33%, 80%)
3. Muslims ( 0.01, 21%, 50~60%)
4. Others ( 0.001, 27.8%, 80%)

This picture shows that World is dominated by secularists by the support of Jews, Christians, Muslims and others. Only 10% of Jews, 20% of Christians, 40% of Muslims, 20% of others resist to secularists. Which means about 25% of world population is in conflict with and show non-organised passive resistence to secularists - a significant potential power in idle, easily to absorb/regain 50% of support to reach 75% easily make redundant the Secularist State Tyranny (SST). That is not going to stay idle too long, some realist business-people(?!) are going to notice that;->>

Grand Sen~or.

note: the support % and the achievement grade I give here are based on my perception via media and interactions through Internet, it would be worth measuring them using proper statistical tools.

More suggestions for underachievers:

Indonesia, Bangladesh, Spain, Italy, Egypt, Mexico, Nigeria, Canada, Sudan, Iran

Suggestions for overachievers:

Australia, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, South Africa, Thailand (until recently), the Emirates, Syria, Libya, Russia (I'd go with your first instinct here).

The question is should one consider the ability to translate resources to power to influence? Or simply power to influence?

great analysis. but theoretically I am puzzled.
Walt accepting that individual leaders matter for achievement in international politics? historical legacy as source of power? what happened to structural realism? giving primacy to the individual level is certainly not a loyal student of Waltz would do. please comment on this.

my take on the countries:
Israel: not an achiever on its own only. American Israeli lobby -as you wrote- is largely responsible for this. Israel will not be a major player without the United States.
in the Middle East, the real diplomatic over-achiever is Qatar. LA Times has an interesting article on this.

Singapore: it was a major player during Lee Kuan Yew. Now that Malaysia suffers from a leadership crisis in the absence of charismatic Mahathir, Thailand is in total mess, and Indonesia, a total underachiever diplomatically, there is Singapore.

under-achievers:
Japan and Germany: again, identity due to historical memory. but Germany is a much more active player than Japan.
India and China: history argument again. India lacks an imperial experience and identity. (yes, identity.) China does have a strong Central Civilization identity.
Russia: a dying power, demographics.
Brazil: a careful player in a region of Spanish speaking countries? (I don't know much about this case).
I wonder how you describe Turkey and Iran in your analysis, applying individual leadership and historical (perhaps geo-cultural, too?) legacy.
thanks.

Great post, and great selections. One could obviously add and subtract.

As for Germany, and Japan. We are rather happy they are not too influential anywhere. Last time they tried that, we all had to pay for it. Russia is better marginal, than resurgent, because it is stuck in a time-warp, and like the Chinese, has nothing to offer the world in political terms.

That's what's great about Sweden, your first pick. It has a lot to offer - it is a model for our aspirations, isn't it?

North Korea, on the other hand, is its perfect opposite. The country no one wants to be like - a traumatized land that can't let go of its past - too proud and haughty. The world can't be bothered that it is ruled by an iron dictatorship - who cares about the poor Koreans, right - hey, as long as our military is stationed there.

Just another reason to love the Chinese and Ruskies - who make sure that North Korea never climbs out of its cave.

What about State power? The concept could explain at least some of the cases.

If the State-Society Relations is very strong (Israel, Sweden, Singapore) or very weak (North Corea), then this state is either able to exert bigger influence or to pose such a threat to the others that higher attention is needed.

Vice-versa, staying somewhere in between is a liability. Russia is wide, big, and with a declining population and industrial system. Similarly, Brazil or India have wide territories, poor populations, mafia-mobs or ethnic divisions that inhibit resource-extraction.

On the other hand, Japan's and Germany's very strong industrial complexes, in this sense, could be as well counterproductive. Since both countries' international standing depends on their corporations, their governments cannot take foreign policy courses that are independent from economic logics. Here it follows their lower international role.

Here is just a tentative interpretation. I do not aim to make a meta-theory. :)

Afghanistan is one thing, but with regard to traditional peace keeping missions, I don't think that Canada makes much more of a contribution than Japan these days.

One would have to think of South Africa an an underachiever in this context. The one potentially powerful country in a region with small, weak states, South African influence should be decisive everywhere south of the Congo -- politically, militarily, and with some limitations culturally as well.

It isn't. If anything, the South African government has been deferential to neighboring governments, particularly Zimbabwe's, that pursue policies directly harmful to South Africa. Facing devastating public health problems that also ravage all neighboring states, South Africa waited years before addressing them in any serious way. Blessed with the form of representative government, South Africa has allowed itself to slide toward the status of a one-party state more like the more backward among its neighbors than the advanced countries elsewhere in the world.

If South Africa isn't the face of underachievement as defined here, the word is scarcely meaningful.

Interesting post. Concerning what factors determine whether a nation will be more assertive or more passive, I think it's important to consider the power relationship the nation in question has with its immediate neighbors. For the most part, relatively strong nations surrounded by weaker countries tend to be more assertive while those surrounded by stronger neighbors will tend to be more passive.

This factor is just that: merely a factor in determining a nation's aggression/passivity. It is in no way solely determinative of the whole issue. There are certainly at least a few nations among those mentioned by the professor that would seem not to behave by this rule. However, I maintain that power relationships involving a country's near-abroad hold a significant influence on a state's level of confidence/insecurity.

One last thought: I suppose that to dig deeper into this concept, one would also have to look at whether the relationship the nation has with each of its neighbors is friendly or hostile. Aaaaahhh...why can't IR be simple, like picking American Idol winners?

"Great post - while reading it made me think that Israel's largest export is violence"

You can stop using your cell phone and computer then. Both the cellphone and your intel chip were developed in Israel.

Israel is not an achiever when it comes to international politics, using Walt's meaning of it in his post. Without the US or the West at large backing it, it will not be a significant power, even though it will be capable of defending itself with its nuclear weapons. all the achievements that you listed are nice but they are either scientific or economic. and many of the examples are R&D of American companies who invested in Israel and the Occupied Territories. But Israel is next to nothing in international politics on its own; it is rather a buddy inserted by Christianity in its centuries-old conflict with Islam over Jerusalem. It is a Christian Zionist project and maintained by it.
It is part of the historical struggle major chapters of which are the following:
638: the conquest of Jerusalem by Muslims. Muslims ended 500-year old ban imposed by the East Roman empire for Jewish visits to the city.
1099: Crusader invasion of Jerusalem; expulsion of all Muslims and Jews from the city.
1187: Saladin recaptures Jerusalem. Muslims and Jews and Christians could enter or stay in peace. Attempts by British knight Richard to capture the city fails.
1492: Spanish ends Muslim rule over Andalusia, causing massive waves of Muslim and Jewish migrations into Muslim-controlled territories in N. Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.
19th century onwards: the rise of dispensationalist theology and Christian Zionism in England and the US. This meant that the coming of Jews to Jerusalem would be encouraged to hasten the coming of Jesus.
1917: the British secret agent TE Lawrence organizes the Arab revolt against the Ottomans.
1917: Christian Zionist Arthur Balfour promises Palestine to Zionists.
1920-1948: the British mandate of Palestine
1930s and 40s: Hitler kills millions of Jews and forces the rest to migrate out of Europe and into the Middle East.
1948: the foundation of Israel
present day: the conflict continues.

To sum up, Israel is a project.

Brazil is the country of the future...and it always will be.

For this kind of exercise to be useful, one would need to define and be rigorous about what one means by 'national power', 'international influence' and so forth. The ability to get in the headlines is not the same thing as being influential.

In that sense, Charles de Gaulle is a rather misleading example. He obviously got a lot of attention at the time (and since) for his eloquent and bombastic rhetoric, and innovative, sometimes shocking, foreign policy. Arguably he increased France's power by making her autonomous within NATO through military withdrawal and the nuclear deterrent. However his influence over other countries seems to have been fairly close to nil. His efforts to seduce Germany (away from the Americans), to push the Poles to rebellion, to form a rapport with the Russians and neither were the Europeans willing to accept French leadership of the EEC with the Fouchet Plan. (One can only really cite his influence negatively: in blocking the UK's accession to the EEC, in vetoing the EEC for a while.)

Let us speak of *influence*, not fame or infamy. That is, we are talking about a state's ability to coerce, persuade or shape another state/region according to its desires. Here we find most countries becoming unexceptional, if not peripheral, to one another. Even informal spheres of influence today are rather rare, and whatever power a typical nation such as a Spain, an Argentina or a Malaysia has today, seems rather abstract. But let us explore this exercise..

Some conditions to punching above:
* Be the best in your region: This allows you to be the quasi-formal leader of your region in international fora. This applies mainly to Brazil and South Africa.
* Be powerful relative to your region: A related, but separate concept. Israel is tiny, of course, but its economic, technological and military prowess (not to mention the opposite qualities of its neighbors) give it a kind of dominance over its neighbors. Other examples of this could include Cuba (it used to have troops in various parts of Africa) and (Apartheid) South Africa.
* Pool/join power: The best example of that is the EU. While it is obviously true the institution is a political fractious and a non-entity in any crisis, it also represents a sharing of economic power. Each EU member is economically too small to be of any real influence internationally (with the very slightly partial exception of Germany). EU membership negotiations are done in common, they offer the possibility of structural funds, agricultural funds, trade, aid, investment, and access to the European market. Naturally, the EU's neighbors greatly desire all these things, and the EU's member negotiate collectively to place *conditions* on access to it, the most important being democracy, the rule of law, market economics and so forth. In so doing, the small-to-medium sized EU states, each in themselves of little significance, are collectively using their substantial economic power to literally reshape their neighbors in accordance with their interest (in essence, making them peaceful, prosperous, democratic trading states).

Some conditions to punching below:
* Have too weak military-industrial complexes and foreign policy/national security elites. This is the case of civilianized 'trading states', Japan and Western Europe (partial exceptions of Britain/France) being the typical examples. With military spending at circa 1% of GDP, the ability to project military power is almost nil, making one impotent in crisis situations requiring it (1990-1 Gulf War, Yugoslav Wars, for example).
* Have a too strong (or foolishly used) military-industrial complex and foreign policy/national security elites. Military power today is a double edged sword, and I would argue, not that useful in most instances. Globalization and nuclear weapons have meant that fighting first world countries is both useless and suicidal. Demographic explosion and asymmetric weapons (IEDs, Kalashnikov etc.) have made 3rd world occupation mostly pointless. The typical example of this was the Soviet Union, having vast armed forces, a huge nuclear arsenal, an economy distorted by 15-20% of GDP sucked into defense. Meanwhile, this military power was either A) unused B) used to control an impoverished, expensive, embarrassing and strategically useless Eastern Europe, and the threat it posed precluded much Soviet cooperation with the only places that mattered in terms of trade, aid and technological development: North America, Western Europe and Japan.

Still, this is all very schematic. One would really need appropriate and rigorous definitions. 'National power' seems easy enough, tally up the numbers in terms of GDP, soldiers, nuclear weapons, tanks, trade and so forth. 'Influence' and 'international power' seem much more difficult. Power is often structural and not related to executive leadership (the democratic/capitalistic/pacifying influence of German trade on its neighbors for instance). Power is also often conditional on a (usually problematic) situation for it to be useful. Without Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, for instance, it is doubtful US military power would have seen any 'useful' action since the end of the Cold War. Finally, 'power' can't be judged as a simple number (nation X is 10x stronger than nation Y).

Power is double edged, particularly military power. Germany's influence abroad is constrained by its low military tradition and aversion to intervention. But does vast military capabilities really make a nation internationally powerful? As always, it depends. Military power is useful in some instances, but it also has an intoxicating effect on elites, leading them to military adventures that are extremely costly to the nation in terms of blood and treasure, while not increasing the country's international influence, in fact, often the opposite. The examples are infinite: French Indochina, French Algeria, the U.S. in Vietnam, Iraq, the Soviets and Americans in Afghanistan to cite the most modern examples. As they say, when you have a hammer..