Foreign Policy Pedantry

As the narrative of Obama's run at the presidency moves from "insurgency" to "inevitability," there have been an increasing number of attacks on his foreign policy positions. Before we go any further, I'd like to state that the purpose of this series of posts is to show that the positions staked out by these critics are fundamentally idiotic, both in terms of substance and rhetoric. I don't intend this exercise as a defense of Barack Obama, but rather as an expose of the profound mental inchoerence afflicting our foreign policy pundits. Here's today's article:

Go With The Tough Guy by Max Boot, the LA Times

Fortunately, Boot's shotgun-and-rocking-chair lunacy allows me to get into some fundamental ideas in international relations and hopefully educate the non-existent readership while also debunking his ideas.

Boot's major flaw lies in his fundamental premise: the idea that fear of America--more specifically, fear of the President--determines the foreign activities of rogue regimes. His essential position is that if we elect McCain, all those awful people in the world will overlook the vast public opinion crisis surrounding the war in Iraq as well as the publicly available information about our broken army and our faltering economy. Instead, they'll prioritize vague information about McCain's character over the evidence of their intelligence services and, say, the New York Times. What's more, beyond the ridiculousness of that idea, Boot implicitly requires us to believe that the emotional state of a foreign leader directly determines the actions of other states. To draw an extremely reductive comparison, Adolf Hitler was a very scary man. You could make a good argument that he was, in fact, the scariest man. Fear of Hitler, however, did not stop the nations of Europe from fighting against him when he decided to invade them. 

Now for a little IR theory: There are two assumptions one can make about the way other nations react to an accumulation of power. The first is that they attempt to offset that power disparity by forming alliances and aggregating their power. In IR parlance, this is referred to as "balancing." Here, we'll refer to it as "the Voltron effect" because honestly that's what it should've been called. Tragically, Kenneth Waltz was 60 years old in 1984 and his work must therefore be considered terminally un-hip. In any case, the alternate explanation is that nations join up with a vastly powerful nation in order to play remora to its great white shark. Although it's technically known as "bandwagoning" we'll refer to this as the  "Doctor Doom" paradigm. 

Now, I can't speak to your level of nerdiness, but casual observers may have noticed that Doctor Doom has a problem: no matter how much power he amasses (and let's be clear, the guy achieved omnipotence at one point) or how many allies he has, people always seem to be ganging up on him and reducing him to his base state: tin pot (literally!) dictator of a make-believe country. I have it on good authority that this is the crappiest sort of dictator. Beyond my half-baked comic book analogy, the vast sweep of history also provides ample evidence that Voltron is the preferred way to solve your power asymmetry problems.

So, to return to the point, in order to take Boot seriously we not only have to accept that it's a bandwagoning world, but that John McCain's reputation alone, against all the evidence of our strategic, political and economic disarray, would be enough to cow these rogue eastern potentates. Perhaps if McCain were to have his rivals ritually sacrificed upon his ascension to the presidency and was also seen to be visibly rejuvenated by their blood, Boot might have a case to make. Alas, Jimmy Carter, treehugging liberal that he was, put a stop to all that.