If I were Brad DeLong, I'd call this a death spiral

I'd like to say I've been following the situation in Zimbabwe with great interest, but I've basically been getting all my information from Chris Blattman's excellent development economics blog. However, it does seem to me that you shouldn't, in the course of a single article, credit a man for "successfully negotiating peace resolutions in Congo, Sudan, and, most recently, Zimbabwe", and then immediately claim that he "earned ignominy ... for refusing to join other world leaders in condemning Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's brutal and ruinous rule", as if these two things existed in entirely separate, unrelated universes.

In this case, though, it might not be the Washington Post's fault exactly, but rather our stupid, stupid world for being a place where Mbeki has to take crap for resolving a crisis Zimbabwe when everyone else was standing around with their thumbs up their asses.

This Week in Stupid

Actually, it's technically "last week in stupid," but there was so much chest-beating going around last week that we had a major scheduling crunch. 

Forever Young, by Leon Wieseltier [the New Republic]

Compared to Boot, Wieseltier is a fish of a different color. His problem isn't so much a fundamental misunderstanding of international relations, but a fundamental misunderstanding of absolutely everything from China's economic relationship with the US to the very idea of state sovereignty. On China, I urge you to disregard Wieseltier's "gold medal in tyranny" idiocy and explore the more nuanced view articulated by James Fallows: the $1.4 Trillion Question.

In my opinion, Wieseltier makes the following three mistakes:

1) He blurs the line between "strategic problems" and "strategic choices" into nonexistence.

2) He confuses a "politics of hope" with a "policy of hope."

2a) Relatedly, he conflates motivation--a belief that Americans can change the world for the better--with action, namely the idea that we will change the world for the better by handing out candy to dictators and asking them to pretty please love America.

On the first point, he argues that "George W. Bush was not singlehandedly responsible for getting us into this mess." In some sense, that's true. No one man can take a nation to war. However, to insinuate that the White House--the President being the symbolic if not physical embodiment thereof--was not the prime mover behind the Iraq war is shameless hackery of the first order. I deeply agree with the proposition that the United States had a serious and growing strategic problem in the Middle East around the turn of the millennium. However, "this mess" as Wieseltier euphemistically terms it, is entirely the product of the strategic choices made by the President and his administration. It's not as if he was flying blind, either. Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, was laughed out of the Pentagon when he had the temerity to suggest that it would take several hundred thousand troops to stabilize Iraq. In contrast, we have Paul Wolfowitz's statement:

It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army.

Apparently, our ex-President of the World Bank nee Deputy Secretary of Defense had never bothered to skim chapter 3 of The Prince, by Nicolo Machiavelli. It's difficult to plausibly point to a prime mover responsible for this mess who isn't a Bush appointee.

Wieseltier's second goof is mistaking politics for policy. We can cut him a little slack here, mostly because that seems to be the operating rule of the past few years. For our purposes, "politics" is defined as the strategy by which one acquires power and "policy" as the definite agenda advanced by someone already in power. Wieseltier construes Obama's references to the "politics of hope" as a foreign "policy of hope" or simply a "hope for the best" attitude towards the problems facing American interests abroad. On the contrary, Obama seems to realize that America's reputation abroad has reached its lowest ebb in recent memory, and that improving our international standing is a necessary precondition for any meaningful foreign policy initiatives. Indeed, we've received some not so subtle signals from our allies that this is what they would like as well.

Let's be clear, Wieseltier is not incorrect in his observation that the world is an awful place where awful people do awful things. However, for reasons related to the decline of Europe after WWII and the fall of the USSR, we're sort of running things now. With that in mind, we have to ask ourselves if it's more useful to have a national (and international) audience that believes that America has the ability to be a positive influence on the world, or one that views foreign relations as an intractable quagmire to be avoided at all costs. On a personal level, I find Obama's talking points on foreign policy inspiring, because they evoke an America that is chastened but not defeated, a country that can withdraw without becoming withdrawn. Clearly we need a foreign policy that abandons both the tone-deaf public diplomacy of Karen Hughes and the 1) Topple Gov't 2) Hope for the Best 3) Democracy! approach of the last few years.

Make no mistake, positive change in international affairs is a rarity, but it does happen every now and again. Taking that possibility off the table, as Wieseltier does, in favor of some "hope is for sissies" tough-minded attitude is singularly unlikely to address the issues facing the US in 2008, nor should we expect it to entice bright young people to pursue a career in foreign service.

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.