Short Takes on Recent Events

If you’re anything like me, you find it hard to keep up with the Niagara of events and information with which you’re deluged every day. It used to be a challenge just to keep track of a half-dozen or so professional journals in my field/subfield; now there’s that plus online pubs, bloggers, twitter feeds, and the various books I’m reading in the course of my research. Not to mention reviewing manuscripts, writing tenure letters, and other professional responsibilities. And then there are the "events, dear boy, events" in the real world that we all try to comprehend.

So today, a few short takes on things I wish I had time to comment on at greater length. 

1. Iran. I’ve blogged about this a lot over the past five years, but isn’t it crashingly obvious that we have a golden opportunity to explore a real rapprochement with Iran? Frankly, if we don’t pursue that possibility energetically, creatively and sincerely, it will be the most revealing example of foreign policy incompetence that I can imagine.

2. Putin, Snowden and the aborted summit. I can understand why the Obama administration was annoyed with Russia for not turning over Snowden, but did they really expect Moscow to passively fall in line? Would we have turned over someone who had sent similar secrets about the KGB to the Guardian and then somehow gotten themselves to Dulles Airport? I rather doubt it. The best reason to cancel the summit, however, was the fact that nothing was likely to be achieved there.

3. More good news on the Israel-Palestinian peace talks: Netanyahu gets them off on positive note by expanding government subsidies to settlements in the occupied territories. Next step: John Kerry and Martin Indyk will hint — ever, ever, so gently — that this decision was "not helpful."

4. The Ride of the Valkyries: I find it interesting that some of the most hawkish voices on Syria have been women (e.g., Anne-Marie Slaughter, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton). This doesn’t necessarily contradict Micah Zenko’s observation that women are generally less disposed to using force (or at least drones), but it’s still curious. My hypothesis: it has nothing to do with gender, but instead reflects their lack of knowledge about military operations and a tendency to downplay the unintended consequences of military action. (And no: John McCain’s support for aggressive action doesn’t contradict my point, because McCain’s own operational knowledge seems pretty paltry and his past military judgments have been questionable).

5. The sequester:  There’s no doubt in my mind that the sequester is a terrible way to try to trim defense spending. But given the entrenched interests that fight like tigers to preserve every defense nickel, I’m not sure there was any other way to do it. And I console myself with the thought that the U.S. will still be spending vastly more than any other single country on national security. Now if we could just connect that process to a rethinking of our overseas commitments (cue The Impossible Dream).

6. America the Skittish (Round 2). The terror plot alert that shut down 19 US diplomatic facilities was certainly conveniently timed, wasn’t it? Just when Congress was starting to show some backbone on the issue of NSA spying, we get a report of some new "chatter" (or maybe an Al Qaeda "conference call") that justified a vaguely scary new alert. But what really bugs me is the message that this sends: that the mighty United States can be spooked into closing its doors with remarkable ease. We want to run the world, it seems, but we want to be able to do it without taking any risks at all. And it makes me question (once again) the effectiveness of the whole "war on terror." If we’ve been pursuing the right policies for the past twelve years, why are these guys still so dangerous?

7. "The New Newt" (2013 version). Newt Gingrich isn’t an important politician anymore, as his lackluster performance in the last GOP primary season proved. But he’s still a world-class egomaniac, and like many politicians, he can’t stop seeking the spotlight. He grabbed it again this week by suggesting that the neoconservative foreign policy that he used to champion might have been … well … stupid, and that Rand Paul and Ted Cruz might have some good ideas on that subject. This event is interesting because Gingrich is nothing if not an opportunistic weathervane, and it tells you that he thinks that calls for a more restrained foreign and military policy would find a lot of takers out there in the body politic. As I suggested once before, all it will take to launch a serious debate on this issue is an articulate champion who isn’t saddled with a lot of unrelated baggage.   Rand Paul may or may not be that person (and I fervently hope Ted Cruz isn’t) but he/she is bound to show up eventually.

8. The Death of IR theory: Noah Smith and Paul Krugman had some interesting blog posts up on the "death of theory" in economics. This is as good an excuse as any to remind folks that John Mearsheimer and I have written an article on similar trends in international relations, which will be out in the European Journal of IR next month. Plus, stay tuned for an upcoming symposium on the broader topic of the future of IR theory at Duck of Minerva website.

9. Anarchy, the State, and Dystopia. If nothing else, the events in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo remind us all that the only thing worse than a bad state is no effective state at all. For insightful commentary, see Robert Kaplan’s reflections on the late Samuel Huntington’s best book, Political Order in Changing Societies.

10. I’m off to California tomorrow for a family wedding (congratulations, Lindsay and Bobby!), so blogging will be light-to-nonexistent through the weekend. But you’ve got the rest of FP (and a zillion other bloggers) to tide you over, and nobody’s commentary is indispensable.