This is one of your best as you make fun of all the wachos that depend on fearmongering.
Your blog is a kind of minor masterpiece and in a fine spirits.
Thanks

I like how it's filed under: Cute.

on a great blog. Thanks.

I wonder if it is inevitable that our fears are exaggerated. Emotions will always trump reason, that's how we're wired. Add in some demagoguery, crowd behavior and the like and we're doomed, DOOOOOOOOMMMMED, I tell you!

I never noticed the categories before, is there a page that lists them all for future reference?

It's always worthwhile to remember that getting it wrong by exaggerating a threat can be as bad as getting it wrong by underestimating a threat.

I'm willing to bet that we are more likely to exaggerate threats, too. That's probably why horror movies are so popular.

People often give previous generations of immigrants as examples of why the same process must occur now, but the data doesn't back it up. Check out Generations of Exclusion, written by Chicano sociologists from UCLA. After four generations in the U.S hispanic immigrants do not assimilate to middle class norms. In many respects they plateau or fall further behind over time. It is true that the U.S relies heavily on cheap labor. The Arab Gulf states do so as well, but they don't have immigration problems because they use guest-workers who send checks home to their families rather than staying permanently.

Muslims in the U.S assimilate quite well compared to Europe, this may be partly because a more religious society fits them better or because the immigration process is more selective for them here. My impression is that Germany has done alright with its Turkish gastarbeiters, but England & France have some serious problems. Rather than forming a working class, they are contributing to an underclass. Hindus & Sikhs have fared much better in England, though this may be selection effects again.

I think Canada has the best immigration model. They are genuinely multicultural, rather than having a predominance of immigrants from one reason forming a bicultural society marred with ghettos and hostility. They treat immigration as a company might treat new hires, a resource to be exploited as Walt suggests. Since the largest gains come from driving down the wages of high-wage workers, they sensibly take in the most high-skill immigrants, who are the most likely to pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits.

Very nice blog. Very nice indeed.
The ghouls are always with us.
And it is good to play with them a bit.

Outstanding post.

A lot of little "elementary truths" that really need to be said, repeated, and shouted again.

Careful though, your lucidity about the American Empire and the constant lies of official discourse are making you sound increasingly like Noam Chomsky! Not that I have anything against that fine linguist, but you would not want to fall "outside the discourse". (And don't know if I'm joking!)

These sorts of lists are really great. That's all.

The cross Paul Kennedy bears is from the last chapter of his
"Rise & Fall of the Great Powers". He predicted eventual American decline, *IF* like previous hegemons it didn't cut it's foreign & military commitments.
However due to the collapse of the USSR, fighting the 1st Gulf War with Cold War surplus & Arab\Japanese cash & Kennedy's warnings been heeded by many influential Americans, the Americans did reduce their commitments & briefly entered a golden age. Foolish military adventures in response to 9/11 ended that & the decline began anew.
Kennedy's theory is like that of evolution. You may believe
with all your heart in Creationism or American exceptionalism, but the accumulated fossil evidence is overwhelming.

Hey! Wait a Minute...
Isn't avoiding over-extension the raison d'etre of Realism?
With the dissing of Kennedy, a High Prophet of Realism has been blasphemed.
Stephen Walt, you have some 'splainin to do.

"This phrase become popular in the 1990s, in a period when the U.S. faced essentially no significant great power threats. So national security worriers started to talk about the threat from "rogue states" like Cuba, Libya, Syria, Iran, or Iraq, even though their combined capabilities were paltry compared with the United States (let alone the U.S. plus its allies)."

It speaks to the ideological nature of Walt's thinking, plus his willingness to overlook inconvenient facts, that his excludes a very important rogue state from the 1990's: Afghanistan under the Taliban.

1. The "Domino Theory." This hardy perennial posits that a single defeat in one area will trigger a cascade of similar defeats elsewhere, either because allies "bandwagon" with the enemy, enemies become emboldened, or status quo forces become disheartened. It was famously used to justify prolonged U.S. involvement in Indochina, but variants were also invoked in Central America and the basic idea is making something of a comeback in debates about the war in Afghanistan. If we win, Islamic radicals will be on the run everywhere; if we lose, it will be hailed as a great victory and will spawn new troubles throughout the region and beyond. As Jerome Slater and others showed, both the internal logic and the empirical evidence for the theory was always paltry, but the idea that the fate of the entire free world might hinge on a single marginal event in some far-away land was an effective way to scare people into overstating the importance of otherwise peripheral conflicts.

It invokes Maximal Realism (aka "bandwagoning). The idea was that if the hegemon (US) fails at a challenge, its allies will start to break off and bandwagon with the challenger.

As for the "Islamist" thing, it is partially true. The hard-core jihadis used the defeat of the Soviet Union as a justification for world-wide jihad against the "far enemy", and the weakness of US response to attacks on our embassies from the Grand Mosque hostage situation in 1979 to 9/11 was used by Bin Laden and his ilk as a justification for their belief that the US was all talk - that as soon as we took some casualties we'd run.

4. "Monolithic Communism." The Cold War was a fertile source of exaggerated dangers, and this dubious idea was one of the best. Many people in the West believed that all Marxists (and maybe even a few socialists) were reliable tools of the Kremlin, despite the abundant evidence of deep rifts within the international Communist movement and the repeated tensions between Moscow and its various clients. The belief that the Kremlin controlled a potent world-wide revolutionary movement fueled the insane fear of communist subversion during the McCarthy period, and even led some highly placed U.S. officials to view the Sino-Soviet split as a clever communist plot to lull us into a false sense of security. Not only did we exaggerate the threat, but we missed opportunities to wean leftists away from Moscow and fought foolish wars in places that didn't matter, like Indochina.

Certainly the claim that all communist countries were acting as one was bullshit, as can be seen by the Sino-Soviet split. That said, there is considerable proof of connections between the various communist parties abroad (including the US Communist Party before it was effectively neutralized in the 1950s) and the Soviet leadership. Hell, just look at the Communists in Egypt - following Stalin's orders, they accepted the independence of Israel in 1948, and completely discredited themselves in the process with most of the population.

In fact, immigration has long been a great source of strength for the United States, and it will probably remain so for many years to come. And the dirty little secret here is that American society -- and especially certain American businesses -- aren't upset at all about having a low-wage workforce to exploit. Keeping a lot more people out of the United States wouldn't be that difficult if we really wanted to do it-but we don't. That's a good thing, by the way, because it means the United States won't face the same demographic problems that Japan, Europe, and Russia will (i.e., a shrinking and progressively older population).

Going after companies employing illegal labor would definitely be the way to go - they created the system in many ways. There are downsides, of course - the cost of certain things (particularly agricultural products) would go up, and you would also see more CO2 emissions from increased use of mechanization for agricultural purposes.

Unfortunately, the agricultural sector in particular and business in general are well-connected politically, which is why we've never seen any serious attempt at hitting the employers up until recently. They'd say things like "Do you want agriculture in the US or in Mexico?"

Of course, what they portrayed as the ultimate scary monster turned out to be a colossus with feet of clay.

That's the Soviet Union in general, not its military power, which was formidable. Throughout the entire Cold War, the Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces greatly outnumbered the US and NATO forces on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and had a conventional war broken out the Soviets would have overrun most of Europe in a matter of weeks.

Of course, about the time when they started getting towards the Atlantic, American bombers and missiles would be sailing towards the Soviet Union. That's one of the reasons why I think we should always be thankful as Americans for the existence and usefulness of nukes - they saved us the dilemma of either garrisoning Europe at a crushing expense conventionally, or leaving it open for subversion and invasion.

In other words, we were supposed to fear an invasion from an impoverished country whose total population was less than that of New York City. What's really scary is that some of Reagan's listeners probably believed him.

It's an exaggeration, but keep in mind that the first country to go seriously into the Red Camp (Cuba) turned around and sent troops to other places in Latin America and Africa to subvert pro-US governments, as well as allowing the Soviets to station troops and almost place nuclear missiles to hit targets in the US (and in Castro's case, he actually pressed the Soviet Union to launch a first-strike until they told him the fall-out would blow over Cuba). Is it any surprise that they were wary of that happening?

Interesting article, which I enjoyed reading. However, your claim that the Realists had forseen the fall of the Soviet empire is incorrect. The Fall of the Iron curtain took everyone, especially the Realists, by surprise and also contributed to the decline of the Realist doctrine and emergence of neo-liberal institutionalism.
On the other hand, as you mention in your article, the Realist camp was busy scaring the public about the horrors of Communism, and the strength of the Red Army, without taking their domestic problems into account at all. Even if the Realists saw it coming, they would have preferred the rivalry to continue, as the 'fear of conflict' keeps the Realist camp alive and kicking. They have been rather slow in adapting to the changing nature of international politics and contemporary issues leading to the rise of other camps to grapple with them.

Global warming doesn't make the list here. Neither does the American religious right. Interesting omissions.

How you forgot Glogal Warming/Global Cooling is a joke.

Interesting...but this omits consideration that actions by the U.S. and others may have prevented some of these from becoming greater threats. They -- to date -- have not turned out to be capable of doing horrific damage, ergo, they were not threats/did not exist. This strikes me as pretty poor logic.

Another question would be: what does Dr. Walt consider a legitimate threat? What true threats has American power prevented from doing serious potential damage in the past?

In other words, what critical thinking tools do you use to prevent your list of bogeymen from becoming just another tool for justifying your political preferences and ideological instincts?

Is that crickets I hear?

Excellent post Prof. Walt.

I can see you are not much of a Information Technology Security expert, but you were prudent enough not to flat out dismiss cyberthreats entirely.

Computer hacking is no longer the kind of activity that it was when guys like me were much younger. It has not been about bragging rights for quite some time now.

Hacking is a very lucrative business nowadays. The biggest crimes can involve tens of millions of dollars up front.
Go look up the Conficker Worm and you can see that Microsoft, McAfee, Trend, Symantec, etc have offered money for information regarding this because 5 million+ PCs are still infected worldwide and the viruses are being used to springboard attacks, steal credit card numbers, and DDoS attack businesses and govt. networks (As we speak!). So far nothing can be done.

The biggest threat right now is the stealing of trade secrets from Chinese and Russian hackers. The probable creators of Confiker. As the only security admin in a VERY LARGE oil tools and services company, it is very difficult to get the management to take IT threats seriously enough! The stories I wish I could tell would confound you.

I imagine when a Chinese company comes out with an entire lineup of all the drill heads we sell for oil well drilling, will anything be done about it.