Is IR Really a Science? Let's Find Out

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber alerted me to the fact that 3 Quarks Daily has instituted a quarterly award for the best blog post in the areas of science, politics, arts and literature, and philosophy.

Starting next month, the prizes will be awarded every year on the two solstices and the two equinoxes. So, we will announce the winner of the science prize on June 21, the arts and literature prize on September 22, the politics prize on December 21, and the philosophy prize on March 20, 2010.

About a month before the prize is to be announced we will solicit nominations of blog entries from our readers. The nominating period will last approximately one to two weeks. At the end of this time, we will open up the process to voting by our readers. After this period, we will take the top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main daily editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add a wildcard entry of their choosing. And finally, a well-known intellectual from the field will pick the winner, runner up, and third place finisher from these, and will write some short comments on the winning entries.

Just for fun, the first place award will be called the "Top Quark," and will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the "Strange Quark," will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the "Charm Quark," along with two hundred dollars.

Well, I don't know if posts here at the Duck or on other IR blogs would widely be considered science, politics, arts and literature or philosophy (though frankly, I suspect some of PTJ's might count as all of the above.) But the way I see it, IR is a science, which means IR blog posts should qualify for next month's contest.

So, since we haven't yet gotten around to establishing our long-discussed Duck of Minerva "Top Quack" award for IR blogging, if it strikes your fancy head on over to 3QD to nominate an IR blog post of your choosing in the Science contest before June 21. It will be interesting to see which disciplines are ultimately represented among the science awards.

Petraeus Doesn't Take the Bait

A New UN Super-Agency for Women

From the Guardian:

This autumn the UN general assembly will vote yes or no to a new "super-agency for women"; $1bn is being discussed as the starter annual budget.

A major role for the new agency's work will be to close the gap between rhetoric and reality on existing international resolutions on sex discrimination and women's human rights. The priorities cover a lot of ground – to help women earn increased income, stay in education longer, have access to proper health care, and have an equal say in decisions that affect their lives and the future of the planet.

Despite generations of international agreements on women's equality, responsibility for improving the lives of the world's women is spread thinner than Marmite across four poorly co-ordinated UN entities – Unifem, DAW, Osagi, and Instraw. Their senior staff are not part of the UN's main decision-making fora. All have minuscule budgets, little power or influence in the UN system and virtually no operational capacity on the ground. Unifem, the largest of the four, has 47 staff and a budget of $129m to serve the world's three and a half billion women.

All organisations within the UN system are officially mandated to address gender and women's rights. Most treat women's rights and priorities as optional extras, or entirely ignore their responsibilities to half the world's population. A few UN agencies and UN missions in some countries do important work on gender equality and women's rights, but it's patchy and often depends on an individual champion to push for it.

Giant leap for womankind? Or just another expensive UN bureaucracy? My two cents: it may make a big difference whether this new agency consolidates/replaces existing UN gender machinery, or whether it simply adds another agency onto the existing mishmash. If the latter, it is likely to increase the visibility of gender issues within the UN, but also increase redundancy, buck-passing and institutional inertia.

Another thing to keep an eye on will be the power politics involved, once such an agency is established, in defining the UN's agenda on women's empowerment. Culled from comments on the Guardian article:

"The men of Africa are in far more need of help than the women of Europe, America, Canada, Russia, etc. By grouping your "3 and a half billion women" together and claiming they are one big lump of victimhood that has been "let down" you just make a mockery of the whole issue. Perhaps the budget should be targeted at those nations where women really do get a rough deal rather than becoming another plaything of the pampered feminists of the West (a group whose living standards are probably in the top 5% of the world's population). Western women have far more in common with Western men than they do with third world women.

Sadly, the form in which such an agency is likeliest to be effective and transformative is also the one it is least likely to take. What is probably needed is not a "women's" agency but a "gender empowerment" agency. The former approach would focus on women and be contingent on identifying some agenda for all women, which could be politically problematic. The latter would promote gender awareness at all levels of UN policy and could conceivably focus on human rights violations against all gender minorities. Of course, this would be a more radical and far-reaching step (and lots of countries in the UN don't like the term 'gender') so it is politically unlikely.

So perhaps this is not a giant leap, but at least a small step in the right direction.

North Korea explodes nuclear device

Breaking news: North Korea has conducted a nuclear test, this one more successful and powerful than its initial test back in 2006.

You can read some (very) instant analysis, but the short story is that this move seems puzzling, out of context, which is to say that it doesn't fit North Korea's existing pattern of telegraphing its moves and using its nuclear program to extract maximum bargaining concessions from the United States. An initial and early read might be that this test does quite the opposite, confronting a new US administration broadly committed to diplomacy and alienating other could-be allies (Russia, China).

My only additional insight comes by way of Drezner, pointed out a very interesting article on the Administration's take on North Korea's succession politics. Re-reading that in light of the nuclear test reminds us to keep two key points in mind when making sense of this test:

1. This could be driven by domestic politics. From a theoretical point, this is entirely consistent with liberal foreign policy analysis approaches to the study of international politics. However, in areas such as nuclear weapons proliferation and such--the highest of the high politics of security--realism is generally assumed to have an advantage, and states are supposed to put international factors first in making such decisions. That a state would put domestic politics first in matters of such high stakes doesn't fit our standard explanatory models of state behavior.

2. We have no idea what on earth is going on in North Korea. The DPRK is more than just Another Country, its perhaps the most closed and authoritarian regime in the world today. As Drezner points out, much of the analysis of the DPRK has a hint of Kremlinology to it, and we are right to be skeptical. Information is scarce, and context in which to make sense of that information is even more scarce. That said, even in an authoritarian regime there are politics, and in times of succession, the stakes are high. However, few, if any analysts have a clear picture of who the players are and how the game is played.

In that context, a meaningful and effective (from a US foreign policy perspective) response is difficult to construct.

Stephen Bosworth will certainly have his hands full--though it is entirely possible that he'll have his hands full of free time...

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Sesame Street really has changed the way we think about our ABC's. My 2-year old is quite the fan, he's particularly into Ernie and Bert (though in our house, his Ernie has a special relationship with the teddy bear for some reason, not sure how Bert feels about that). Thanks to YouTube, we can spend a good half hour learning the ABC's. For your own entertainment, my current playlist:

Elmo and India Arie do the alphabet

Sesame Street ABC’s Ray Charles and celebrities

Tilly and the Wall sing the ABCs

A very young Billy Joel does ABC’s

Kermit the Frog and Ladysmith Black Mambazo Alphabet

Lena Horne does the ABC

A classic animated Alphabet

Lou Rawls sings the alphabet

Richard Pryor’s Alphabet

Bill Cosby's alphabet

Susan does the ABC’s—very classic

Patti Labelle sings the alphabet

Kermit sings the alphabet

Diva sings the alphabet


James Earl Jones reads the Alphabet


This post has been brought to you by the letters O and M and the number 2.

Sometimes a little IR theory goes a long way

This is just a quick observation for anyone who ever wondered about the value-added of IR theory -- "IR theory" being defined in the broad sense of "tools for systematically reflecting on world politics." The observation consists of four items, and deals with yesterday's non-debate between Cheney and Obama.

1. theoretical claim

As a rule, not survival but other "national interests" are at stake such as the preservation of outlying bases and possessions, the protection of treaty rights, the restoration of national honor, or the maintenance of economic advantages. While it is a prerequisite of the system that nations attach a high if not the highest value to their survival, the same cannot be said of all of these other national interests. As a matter of fact, the moral dilemmas constantly facing statesmen [sic] and their critics revolve around the question of whether in a given instance the defense or satisfaction of interests other that survival justifies the costs in other values. . . . In every case the interpretation of what constitutes a vital national interest and how much value should be attached to it is a moral question. it cannot be answered by reference to alleged amoral necessities inherent in international politics; it rests on value judgments. Even national survival itself, it should be added, is a morally compelling necessity only as long as people attach supreme value to it.

--Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration, p. 60.

I note that 1) Wolfers is usually regarded as a realist, not a constructivist; and 2) this book is, sadly, out of print -- "sadly" because it's a more trenchant analysis of world politics than most of the garbage published by top-ranked IR presses and journals these days.

2. words from Cheney:

"The key to any strategy is intelligence and skilled professionals able to get that information in time to use it. In seeking to guard this nation against the threat of catastrophic violence, our administration gave intelligence officers the tools and the lawful authority they needed to gain vital information.

We did not invent that authority. It's drawn from Article Two of the Constitution, and it was given specificity by Congress after 9/11 in a joint resolution authorizing all necessary and appropriate force to protect the American people.

[. . .]

Our successors in office have their own views on these matters. By presidential decision last month, we saw the selective release of documents relating to enhanced interrogations. This is held up as a bold exercise in open government, honoring the public's right to know. We're informed, as well, that there was much agonizing over this decision.

Yet somehow, when the soul-searching was done and the veil was lifted on the policies of the Bush administration, the public was given less than half the truth. The released memos were carefully redacted to leave out references to what our government learned through the methods in question.

Other memos, laying out specific terrorist plots that were averted, apparently were not even considered for release.

For reasons the administration has yet to explain, they believe the public has a right to know the method of the questions, but not the content of the answers."

3. words from Obama:

"I believe with every fiber of my being that in the long run we also cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values. The documents that we hold in this very hall -- the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights -- these are not simply words written into aging parchment. They are the foundation of liberty and justice in this country, and a light that shines for all who seek freedom, fairness, equality, and dignity around the world.

[. . . ]

I know that we must never, ever, turn our back on its enduring principles for expedience sake.

I make this claim not simply as a matter of idealism. We uphold our most cherished values not only because doing so is right, but because it strengthens our country and it keeps us safe. Time and again, our values have been our best national security asset -- in war and peace; in times of ease and in eras of upheaval.

Fidelity to our values is the reason why the United States of America grew from a small string of colonies under the writ of an empire to the strongest nation in the world.

It's the reason why enemy soldiers have surrendered to us in battle, knowing they'd receive better treatment from America's Armed Forces than from their own government.

It's the reason why America has benefitted from strong alliances that amplified our power, and drawn a sharp, moral contrast with our adversaries.

It's the reason why we've been able to overpower the iron fist of fascism and outlast the iron curtain of communism, and enlist free nations and free peoples everywhere in the common cause and common effort of liberty.

From Europe to the Pacific, we've been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law. That is who we are. And where terrorists offer only the injustice of disorder and destruction, America must demonstrate that our values and our institutions are more resilient than a hateful ideology."

4. theoretically-informed observation: the contrast and controversy between Obama and Cheney is not a dispute about whether extraordinary or "enhanced" interrogation techniques work. It is instead a moral debate about what the proper criteria ought to be for making a decision about the use of such techniques, with Cheney invoking the dangerous world of the international as justification for these techniques (which he then claims were also effective) and Obama invoking the constitutive identity of America as a particular or even peculiar kind of country as justification for not using such techniques (which he then suggests are outweighed even in potential benefits by the benefits provided as a result of American's shining-city-on-the-hill bastion-of-liberty global identity).

What does IR theory -- good IR theory -- do for us? Like all good social and political theory, it clarifies the issues, explicates the stakes, and helps us better understand what particular controversies are actually about. It does not tell us how to resolve those controversies, but it helps us confront them in a more direct way. And it prevents us from simply accepting anyone's political framing of an issue; instead, we can step back and consider that framing itself, as we make explicit things that are often only implied or glossed over in the manifest text.

Ire of Newt

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has declared war on current speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Why? Well, Gingrich says Pelosi lied when she claimed that the CIA withheld information from her about waterboarding in 2002 briefings.

Here's Gingrich on Fox News, May 17:

I was really surprised and even stunned by her comments yesterday, where she alleged that the American intelligence agencies routinely lied to the Congress. I know it's false. I know that it demeans every person who's working to defend this country....

I think Speaker Pelosi's in enormous trouble. I think that lying to the country on national security matters and lying to the House is a very, very dangerous thing to have done.

The next day, on ABC's "Good Morning America," Gingrich called for Pelosi to resign, arguing that "She really disqualified herself to be the speaker."

"She has a unique responsibility for national security. ... She made this allegation that smears everyone who's trying to defend her."

Leaving her in her place would be "very dangerous for the country," Gingrich added.

Other Republicans have piled on as well, including House Minority leader John Boehner who has called for Pelosi to apologize to the CIA. Democrats have defended Pelosi. It all looks fairly partisan.

What's interesting here is the nature of Gingrich's attack. He's saying that the speaker of the House cannot accuse a U.S. foreign policy agency of misdeeds during wartime because that is a threat to national security.

Did he forget his own past? Does anyone else recall Gingrich's war-time broadside against the State Department? In a July/August 2003 piece for Foreign Policy (read the full article here) entitled "Rogue State Department," Gingrich argued that "the president should demand a complete overhaul of the State Department."

In a right-wing on-line publication, Gingrich also wrote in 2003 that State was engaged in "a deliberate and systematic effort to undermine the President's policies." That one almost implies treason.

Gingrich added more in yet another interview with Fox News, in April 2003:

"The last seven months have involved six months of diplomatic failure and one month of military success. The first days after military victory indicate the pattern of diplomatic failure is beginning once again and threatens to undo the effects of military victory," Gingrich told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

Much of Gingrich's rhetoric was aimed at the Near East Bureau of the State Department. Among the complaints, Gingrich blasted [Secretary of State Colin] Powell for planning a trip to Syria, working with Russia, the European Union and the United Nations on a Middle East peace road map, and focusing on prewar weapons inspections rather than regime change.

How embarassing for Gingrich on so many levels. At the time, incidentally, Bush officials said Gingrich had "stepped in it" and his comments were "out of line."

In 2005, Gingrich accused Joseph Wilson of lying about his visit to Niger in the so-called Valerie Plame affair. Wilson, of course, went to Africa for the CIA.

In 2007, Gingrich called the National Intelligence Estimate about Iran, produced by the intelligence community (including CIA) -- "fundamentally dishonest." In Gingrich's defense, he seems to think NIEs are produced by the State Department (which is apparently OK to attack at will).

And finally, when did Republicans start to stifle their critique of government? Or, do they only trust national security agencies?

Why do they trust them absolutely?

KSM: NIMBY?

Republicans say they don't want terrorists in their backyard -- even if their backyard is a federal maximum security prison.

Apparently, Democrats in Congress are somewhat frightened by this stance because they have refused to provide $80 million to finance the closing of Gitmo. They will deny funds until the Obama administration provides a plan to provide justice for the prisoners at Gitmo.

While that use of leverage might make some sense, the Republican argument against moving prisoners to the US is purely political theater. It simply doesn't stand up to basic scrutiny. Consider:

1. U.S. federal prisons already host a number of convicted al Qaeda terrorists.

2. The U.S. has more people in prison than any other country -- both in absolute and relative terms. The U.S. is good at confining people.

3. Many U.S. prisoners were really bad people on the outside -- and some of them tried to inspire violent action by likeminded people. Charles Manson. John Gotti. Timothy McVeigh. Jeffrey Dahmer.

4. Very importantly, most of the detainees at Gitmo are not hardened terrorists. In fact, the evidence to-date reveals quite the opposite.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a bad man, but he's a mid-40s guy in custody and largely isolated from the outside world.

I'm pretty sure the U.S. could imprison him and other inmates without too much trouble.

The War that Matters

There is a massive fight simmering just below the surface here in DC, one that looks to get really ugly, really quick, and with major long-term consequences for national politics. No, its not the pending SCOTUS confirmation fight, but the battle over the Pentagon budget. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has taken on one of the most powerful and entrenched political forces in Washington, the Defense spending lobby, and as Eisenhower had warned, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." How right he was, and its taken a SecDef as powerful as Gates to launch the fight to bring this to the foreground.

The spark for this conflagration was Gates "reform budget" that reallocated defense spending. His proposal to cut or cap certain weapons systems while promoting others has rankled the Services, and their ideas of how they ought to provide for the common defense. Indeed, the US military is now about to embark on the one war it is most prepared to fight--the war for budget share and major weapons systems. Ten years ago, a fantastic little book described the DoD's attitude toward the budget process as This War Really Matters, and its the fight that the Services, Contractors, and Congress are best prepared to wage.

The issues of the day involve the decision to shift money from legacy weapons systems designed to fight a "peer competitor" force (was USSR, now China conveniently fills that role) with weapons better suited for counterinsurgency operations, ie the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I trace part of this struggle to the historical evolution of an overlapping, unclear, and muddled command structure of today's US Military establishment. In World War II, the fights between Army and Navy were epic, leading to two separate theater commanders in the Pacific (MacArthur and Nimitz) fighting, essentially, two separate wars against Japan. The National Security Act of 1947 unified the services under a civilian secretary, creating DoD. However, the Secretary was initially weak and the Services were strong, leading to several subsequent reforms. The most significant was the Goldwater-Nichols Act, giving us the structure we have today. As a result of Goldwater-Nichols, there are two separate structures of authority in the US military. Operationally, the chain of command passes from the President through the Secretary of Defense, and directly to the Combatant Commander who has complete and total command over all units in his theater (or functional area). However, for procurement, training, and equipping the force, authority passes from the Secretary to the Service Secretary and Chief of Staff of the uniformed service, who determine what the services should buy and how they will use it. Thus, the services sense of identity and mission have a huge role in procurement. Thus, combatant commanders must go to war with the army/navy/air force they have, not the one they would like.

Gates seeks to change this, privileging the needs of current combat operations over long-term service identity. Consider the most high profile of these cases in the Air Force. The AF has long seen strategic bombing and air to air combat as its core missions, and has thus pushed for a 5th generation air superiority fighter and new bomber. Gates wants to cut the future bomber and cap the F-22, instead buying more F-35 Joint Strike Fighters and UAV's. Indeed, some have speculated that the F-22 is the last manned fighter plane of its kind, with the future of air-war employing UAVs in combat roles. Current operations in the CENTCOM theater bear this out. The F-22 has not been used at all in either 6+ year long war, while the demand for UAV's has skyrocketed, and they have become some of the most significant (if not controversial) weapons platforms in use. But, what is a modern US Air Force without fighter pilots?

Now the services and Congress are notorious for thwarting Pentagon budgeting plans. Congress sees the DoD budget as an unchallenged lard-fest, where government subsidies can be thrown to companies in a local district. Contractors facilitate this by actively distributing weapons system production in key Congressional districts, gaining allies for particular programs on the Hill. The Services have long had back-channels to lobby Congress to save particular weapons systems or insert new procurement that the Administration did not request. Gates seeks to end this practice.

The stakes are high. Hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake. Contracts, careers, and jobs are on the line. And, somewhere in there, the idea of American National Security almost matters. There will be principled arguments on both sides about the legitimate security needs of the United States. There will be a detailed discussion of the trade-offs between a counter-insurgency focused force vs. a peer competitor force. However, these principled and well reasoned arguments will probably be in the minority. Instead, we'll see a lot more poorly reasoned arguments (I'll let Ricks call it dumb) and faux-grandstanding about the rising China threat designed to produce only one logical conclusion: The Army/Air Force/Navy absolutely must must have the FCS/F-22/DDG-1000 to counter the "real" threats of the future.

Be wary of such arguments. Beneath all the posturing, beneath the future threats, dire warnings, and beneath the demands of 21st century warfare are good old fashion pork-barrel politics, of who gets what from whom: the most lucrative contracts in all the Federal Budget, supplying major weapons systems to the DoD.

If Gates can win this war, it will be as significant to the overall conduct of US National Security policy as operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, This War Really Matters.

Seizing the Middle Ground?

This is an open thread about President Obama's remarks about abortion at Notre Dame's Commencement Speech.

Comment away.

Boldly go [contains spoilers below the fold]

I finally managed to see the new Star Trek film yesterday. Unlike the terrible travesty that was the Watchmen film -- to which I had such an adverse reaction that I still can't manage to grind out a coherent blog post about it, despite having tried on multiple occasions to do so -- this re-imagination and re-invigoration of the franchise actually got it right, in my view: what we saw on the screen combined the best elements of classic Star Trek with a newly open-ended optimism about the human future that captures Gene Roddenberry's initial desire for a "wagon train to the stars."

I am going to follow Charli's example and hide any potential spoilers below the fold. but let me just say at the outset that although this probably doesn't make my top ten list of IR films, I will almost certainly teach it the next time (Spring 2010!) I get to teach my (in)famous undergraduate seminar "Social/Science/Fiction" -- and I'll pair it with Anders Stephanson's Manifest Destiny, which I've traditionally paired with some episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

In our surprisingly authoritative paper on the Borg and U.S. foreign policy, Dan and I introduced what we referred to as a "political economy of consumption" perspective for analyzing serial pop-culture artifacts like Star Trek: a serial pop-cultural product occurs at the sometimes-tense intersection of audience, narrative, and technical considerations. "Technical" catches up the conditions of filming and distribution, including -- especially important for a science fiction film -- the state of special-effects technology; "narrative" catches up the "internal" continuity of the fictional universe; and "audience" catches up the cultural and interpretive resources that the viewers bring to the product, as well as acknowledging the important role of the audience in co-producing the phenomenon in question. We further suggested that by examining how representational dilemmas were resolved in practice -- in this case, on the screen -- could tell us interesting things about the state of the world, and in particular about world politics and the articulation of foreign policy -- itself something of a serial pop-cultural production.

This latest Star Trek film is no exception. I won't say anything about the technical aspects except to join Charli in marveling at how good ILM has gotten at doing CGI space battles and how good Abrams' team was at learning from Battlestar Galactica and the original Star Wars about the pacing of such battles. Wow. Especially in IMAX. I also won't say much about narrative continuity -- I already did my über-geeky reconstruction of the Star Trek timeline in comments to Charli's original post -- but suffice to say that the producers did their homework about fictional Star Trek history. They also managed to create narrative continuity by doing a remarkable job of casting the major parts; the whole bridge crew pretty much nailed their efforts to channel the characters that we already know so well, and I for one had no trouble accepting these new versions as plausible takes on the old versions (special kudos to Karl Urban's turn as McCoy and Simon Pegg's Scotty).

And then there were the fan-community shout-outs: the red-suited Ensign Expendable, Sulu having experience in fencing, classic moments like McCoy referring to Spock under his breath as a "green-blooded hobgoblin" and of course Scotty complaining the the engines "canna take any more." Tip-o-the-hat to former Duck Maia Gemmill who pointed out that I, my wife Holly, Dan, and she herself were some of the only people in the theatre laughing at such moments, which shows what a good job the filmmakers did in crafting a film that appealed to a broader audience than simply the fan community. The fact that the film continues to do well in its second week of release, and has reportedly made back its production budget in only ten days of release, is further testimony to its broad-based appeal. The film largely eschews the technobabble that traditionally accompanies Star Trek movies; instead we get -- as J. J. Abrams famously promised -- something that feels much more like the original Star Wars films, in which technology is basically magical and doesn't get explained. Instead, it becomes a plot device: the producers don't get hung up on the physics of black holes, but they instead have Nero and Spock fall through a PLOT DEVICE to get them back to where they are supposed to be for the action to ensue, carrying with them the PLOT DEVICE ("red matter") that fuels the epic events that unfold.

"Epic" is key; this film is more grandiose, more space-operatic, than Star Trek often is and has been since the days of the orignal series. And here's where Abrams really is channeling Roddenberry, since what he's presenting on screen is a view of the human future in space, suitably updated to avoid the "continuation of the Cold War, but with the Klingons" that the original series featured. The Federation in the canonical timeline was basically an empire in a galaxy of other empires that it did not recognize but instead maintained "neutral zones" with; in this film it's a universalist project from the start, constitutively engaged in peacekeeping and humanitarian relief efforts. (It will be interesting to see -- since I think the studio would have to be completely nuts not to at least give us another couple of films expanding on this re-imagination, if not a new television series (please please please) -- what happens to the Klingons in this new version; do they get invited into the Federation earlier on this time through the chronology?) So this Federation is unencumbered by the paradox of limited universalism characteristic of the Cold War, at least from the outset; this is not the post-Cold War world, but the post-post-Cold War world.

That, to me, is the most striking thing about this film: its open-endedness. The parallel-timeline trick basically allows the producers to do whatever they want to with these characters and the essential situation. They've managed to get Kirk in command of the Enterprise faster than that happened in the original canonical timeline, and have managed to assemble the crew already. The weight of future history is gone, since even "Spock Prime"'s memories won't be of much use to anyone in this timeline any longer; pure unfettered universalism has been restored, and optimism seems to be the order of the day. At any rate, it's a big galaxy, and the Federation's flagship is now in command of a brash young captain with a gift for inspiring his followers. Is this change we can believe in?

And: what will be the Khan-equivalent in this re-imagined Star Trek -- the moment that makes the optimistic humanitarians confront the consequences of their attempts to be merciful?

The Accused

The latest Human Rights and Human Welfare roundtable is online at University of Denver's Korbel School website. This month, I and several other human rights scholars debate the value of Julie Flint and Alex de Waal's recent article condemning the International Criminal Court and, in particular, its Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo.

My two cents:

"Let us assume that Moreno-Ocampo erred, as has been ably described, in failing to launch a full-scale investigation of the atrocities in Darfur. But why single out Darfur as uniquely deserving such an investigation?...

Let us assume that the indictment of President Omar Bashir and Joseph Kony by the court are, as Flint and de Waal say, toothless acts that only undermine peace processes on the continent. At worst, are the authors not accusing the ICC simply of upholding its mandate to prosecute the law?...

Let us assume that Flint and de Waal have accurately depicted the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC as a hopelessly abrasive, procedurally obtuse, and personally corrupt individual whose behavior has undermined morale at the ICC. Must it therefore follow that his conduct has damaged the ICC’s legitimacy beyond repair?

I doubt it, and explain why here.

The dangers of alliterating without a license

Torture and Truth

My reaction to Obama's decision to block the release of detainee photos is up at LGM. In brief:

It's not pictures that inflame anti-American opinion. Brutality has done that already. And trying to cover up that bad behavior only makes it look as if the new Administration is complicit. In short, this is the worst tactical decision I've seen Obama make so far, and I fear the grave consequences of associating his administration with the worst excesses of the past eight years.

Read the whole thing.

Realism, anarchy, and domestic politics: an impolitic response to Peter H.

Peter:

What it is not, however, is a Realist argument. To continue my picking on Walt, if you're going to run around calling yourself a realist and writing a realist blog, for cryin' out loud, advance a realist argument from time to time!!!

Lets review: Realism assumes an anarchic world of rational state actors maximizing security, defined as sufficient military force to defend the integrity of a the state. In that anarchic environment, systemic pressures are the primary factor states rationally consider in security decisions.

In other words, all states act the same, the only thing that differentiates them is their relative position in world politics, ie their relative power.

I hoped that Stacie Goddard's and my "Paradigm Lost? Reassessing Theory of International Politics" would put this kind of talk firmly to rest.

Our exegesis of Theory of International Politics explains in excruciating detail why Peter's reading of neorealism--let alone earlier forms of realism--doesn't stand up to scrutiny. In brief, the structural incentives created by anarchy only "shape and shove" state behavior; they are but one input into the processes that produce foreign policy. Walt's own "balance of threat" theory is consistent with this variant of realism (see both The Origins of Alliances and
Revolution and War.

Indeed, Theory of International Politics spawned a significant body of realist literature doing exactly what structural realism implies (and Peter sees as un-realist): explaining variation in responses to anarchical environments by looking to domestic politics, decision-making processes, and so forth. In other words, many so-called "neo-classical realist" theories are entirely consistent with structural realism.

I apologize for what I'm about to do, but I get tired writing this sort of stuff over and over again. So I'm going to quote from my most recent article (paywalled PDF) making these claims:

We can conceptualize balance of power theories as falling along a continuum. The strongest forms of balance of power theory hold that balance of power mechanisms preclude the formation of international hierarchies. By contrast, the weakest balance of power theory holds that balance of power mechanisms need not concatenate to produce systemic power balances; nevertheless, such mechanisms remain significant factors in determining international political outcomes. Most contemporary articulations of balance of power theory fall somewhere in between, although they tend to cluster on the left-hand side of the continuum; in other words, they view systemic balances of power as likely or predominate outcomes in international politics.

Waltz’s variant of balance of power theory occupies a somewhat ambiguous position on this continuum. Waltz sometimes describes his argument in ways that locate it as a rather strong variant of balance of power theory. Consider Waltz’s claim that the present unipolar system is unlikely to last and that we are seeing the early phases of an “all-but-inevitable movement from unipolarity to multipolarity.” at the same time, Waltz insists that international structures and their associated mechanisms merely “shape and shove” units in the direction of balance of power dynamics. International structural mechanisms provide only a partial explanation for the specific foreign policies pursued by states; they account for why, “through all the changes of boundaries, of social, economic, and political form, of economic and military activity, the substance and style of international politics remain strikingly constant.”

Waltz, therefore, presents a moderately strong balance of power theory, one that allows actors to choose to ignore structural imperatives but that nonetheless expects a tendency toward systemic balances of power. Thus, attempts to discredit the theory on the grounds that many realists invoke unit-level factors—such as domestic political structures, economic arrangements, and governing ideologies—to explain specific outcomes rest on a misreading of Waltz. Structural realism is, at least in broad strokes, consistent with the neoclassical realist “middle ground between pure structural theorists” and those that deny the importance of international structures in influencing outcomes.

Defining balance of power theory in this way raises some interesting issues. First, even though waltz presents a relatively strong version of balance of power theory, he allows for the possibility that other factors will overcome balance of power mechanisms. Second, just as those influenced by structural realism sometimes uphold the general parameters of the theory while jettisoning Waltz’s specific claims about bipolar stability, we can, in principle, recast it as a weaker form of balance of power theory than the one Waltz presents. Third, if we slide structural realism far enough toward the weak side of the continuum, its claims become indistinguishable from those of most variants of contemporary realism.

There are some interesting things going on with Walt's recent emphasis on these factors. First, as I noted above, one can read what he's arguing as a reasonable extension of his own balance-of-threat theory, insofar as he's describing a set of processes that (arguably) produced--and continue to produce--threat inflation. This looks like a pretty straightforward set of claims concerning why the US (arguably) tends towards power-maximizing rather than security-seeking policies.

Second, I take Peter's criticisms to note the risk of real slippage here for realists such as Walt. The more that realists look to processes of social construction and interest-group politics (these are not necessarily exclusive) to explain variation in how threatening states find the international environment, the more they inch towards a line across which "anarchy" ceases to do any significant explanatory work. This is, in fact, why most Constructivists find balance-of-threat theory so convivial for advancing their agenda.

Third, despite the unequivical truth of everything I've written above, realists do have a tendency to slip into naïve versions of their own arguments. In particular, as Jacob Levy noted in his critique of the "Israel Lobby" paper, Walt (and Mearsheimer) have shown a tendency to conflate prescriptive and evaluative implications of realist theory with predictive claims. In other words, they see the United States engaging in policies that they consider incompatible with its own national interests, and find this difficult to understand.

[Mearsheimer and Walt] are committed to the neorealist view that powerful states act in their security interest. They're also, independently, committed to opposition to the Iraq War and to what they see as U.S. overreach in the Middle East; they think that the U.S. does not effectively pursue its security interests in the region. So there's a puzzle, an anomaly-- of their own making. If you are both committed to a predictive theory and committed to an interpretation of a particular case by which it falsifies your theory, then there's a puzzle for your views, but not yet a puzzle about the world.

What's odd here is why realists would react to putatively self-defeating state policies as if they comprised some kind of anomaly. After all, almost all of their "timeless lessons" about international politics involve states screwing things up: provoking counter-balancing coalitions, trying to make collective security work, getting involved in irrelevant peripheral conflicts, and so forth. Moreover, their underlying theoretical architectures are, as we've already seen, compatible with a broad range of state behavior.

But for some reason, many realist scholars default back to the very caricatures of their theories that their critics peddle, whether in academic or policy settings. I can only speculate as to why this is the case, but I suspect it has something to do with the disjuncture between, on the one hand, realist aspirations to produce "scientific" and "predictive" theories and, on the other hand, the actual character of realism.

I'm not entirely sure what the epistemic status of contemporary realism is, but I see three alternatives:

• Realism amounts to a general argument about the parameters in which international politics take place. Call this "weak neorealism."

• Realism is really a normative argument about the priority of "reason of state" in guiding foreign policy decisions. Following Meinecke, let's call this "Machiavellianism."

• Realism constitutes a heuristic for uncovering the power-political dimensions of foreign policy and international relations. Because "Critical Realism" is taken, the best I can come up with is "Critical Realpolitik."

None of these, however, satisfy mainstream political-science criteria for social-scientific inquiry.

See, also, Stefano Guzzini's Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy: The Continuing Story of a Death Foretold)

When I was a child....

I identified with Calvin. Now my sympathies lie at least equally with his parents.

Spurred by Calinball rules via DeLong.

Un-Realist-ic Walt

Stephen Walt asks a very interesting question: why does the US overspend on defense? This is a very smart question, the kind you need to be contrarian theorist to ask. Given the global downturn in the economy, you'd think defense spending would absorb its fair share of pain.

As is well documented, the US spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined. And yet, worried that China may be less than 5 years away from sending a sub as far as Guam, there is a well developed narrative and lobby in US politics that we aren't spending enough. So, defense spending continues to go up and up and up.

Originally, I wanted to tackle this issue head-on, but I'd rather tackle Walt head on instead. His core argument:

America's rise to global primacy was accompanied by the creation of a well-developed set of institutions whose stated purpose was to overcome isolationist sentiments and to promote greater international activism on the part of the United States. American liberal internationalism didn’t just arise spontaneously as America's relative power grew, it was actively encouraged by groups like the Council on Foreign Relations (founded in 1921), and a whole array of other groups and organizations.

He goes on to list many of them by name. Conversely, he finds,

By contrast, there are at most a handful of institutions whose core mission is to get the United States to take a slightly smaller role on the world stage....

In short, what I'm suggesting here is that America's role in the world today is shaped by two imbalances of power, not just one. The first is the gap between U.S. capabilities and everyone else's, a situation that has some desirable features (especially for us) but one that also encourages the United States to do too much and allows others to do either too little or too many of the wrong things. The second imbalance is between organized interests whose core mission is constantly pushing the U.S. government to do more and in more places, and the far-weaker groups who think we might be better off showing a bit more restraint.

In a vacuum, this is an interesting argument, worth exploring. It probably lends itself to some sort of liberal / domestic politics / organizing coalition or constructivist / national identity / lack of isolationist rhetorical commonplaces for legitimation argument, and is an interest case in which to evaluate the two ideas.

What it is not, however, is a Realist argument. To continue my picking on Walt, if you're going to run around calling yourself a realist and writing a realist blog, for cryin' out loud, advance a realist argument from time to time!!!

Lets review: Realism assumes an anarchic world of rational state actors maximizing security, defined as sufficient military force to defend the integrity of a the state. In that anarchic environment, systemic pressures are the primary factor states rationally consider in security decisions.

In other words, all states act the same, the only thing that differentiates them is their relative position in world politics, ie their relative power.

What Walt claims in his post is that the systemic pressures of anarchy have absolutely no bearing on US defense budgetign and policy. Rather, crazy domestic lobbies have hijacked USFP for some damn fool ideological crusade. This analysis is all well and good, but, and here's the kicker, Walt's theory--Realism--says this shouldn't matter, not one lick! States can have all the internal politics they want, but in the end, systemic pressures shape security policy.

The fact that Walt can't 1) adequately apply his own theory to one of the pressing questions of the day he poses, and 2) has to continually rely on ad-hoc explanations of domestic politics when things don't go his way, leads me to believe that Walt has abandon Realism for either Rat-Choice Liberalism, or Hard-core, boarder-line PoMo (gasp!) Constructivism. I'm sure he'd reject both labels. If so, Be a frickn' realist, then Steve!!! Give me a realist explanation for US defense spending over the past 20 years. It should have, as its key explanatory variable, some sort of systemic, balance of power-related force. Inability to do so constitutes a significant failure for realism, and suggests that Walt is fundamentally wrong.

Now, there are a lot of sophisticated attempts to add variation to realism, but, so far as I know, they all retain the rational states in anarchy thing, with a lot of (military) power. If this can't give you any purchase on such an important issue, perhaps its time to re-think the theory.

Because, what you said is that Realism can't explain the budget policies of the signal largest bastion and promoter of Realism, the US Pentagon, then as a theory it needs some work.

Sounds like a degenerative research program to me. Now I an see why no one's a realist any more!

No (tt) Job for You

As if there wasn't enough depressing evidence about the poor state of the academy, Inside Higher Ed covers a new report documenting the disappearance of tenure track jobs. (H/T to Craig)

Take home point: Only 27% of all higher education faculty jobs are tenure or tenure-tracked positions.

The overall number of faculty and instructor slots grew from 1997 to 2007, but nearly two-thirds of that growth was in "contingent" positions -- meaning those off of the tenure track. Over all, those jobs increased from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters of instructional positions.

The growth in these jobs -- and the decline in tenure-track positions -- was found in all sectors of higher education, but was most apparent at community colleges. However, one of the most notable shifts was at public four-year colleges and universities, where over the period studied, tenured and tenure-track faculty members went from being a slight majority to less than 40 percent of faculty members. At the end point of the AFT study, tenured and tenure-track faculty members do not make a majority of faculties in any sector.

"What was shocking to me, even though I think about this all the time, was that the percentage of tenure and tenure-track faculty has shrunk to almost a quarter," said Barbara Bowen, president of the Professional Staff Congress, the AFT chapter at the City University of New York. "The deterioration of staffing has reached a crisis point when only a quarter are tenured or tenure-track."

Not to continue my embittered rants, but the jobs you may have been promised going into grad school simply may not exist by the time you finish. Moreover, we as a profession need to reconsider how we treat the vast majority of practicing professionals not in the cushy TT jobs, and appreciate more 'non-traditional' career paths. To marginalize someone because they spend time slumming with the rest of the non-tenure track crowd does a disservice to your future student will will end up there through no fault of their own.

Spoiler Alert: My Take on the New Sar Trek

It's not going to get on anyone's list of top ten IR movies, that's for sure. But that doesn't mean I'm disappointed, exactly... more like a little shell-shocked.



Lawyers, Guns and Money doesn't have a peekaboo function, and I don't want to spoil it for anyone else, so my reactions from seeing the film only once so far are hidden safely below the fold.

Foreign policy subtext - decidedly post-Global War on Terror. The original Federation always was presented as a metaphor for liberal internationalism ala Western Hemispheric U.S. hegemony; during the Cold War this meant as opposed to a totaliarian Klingon empire (read, U.S.S.R. / "Islamofascism"); the spin-off series' kept this up to some extent with various other collectivist threats to secular humanism, the scientific progress valorized by space exploration pitted against the forces that would pull humanity back into the Dark Ages. But in this new variation Starfleet is explicitly described in UN-esque terms, as a "humanitarian, peacekeeping armada," and the only enemy in sight is someone angry at the absence of (human?) security for his own people.

Battle scenes - awesome. The producers have learned a lot from Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars about how to make ships look as if they can actually maneuver in space / how to think about what space environments can actually do to human bodies (if not what black holes can do to flimsy starships).

Suspension of disbelief - required. Anyone familiar with Star Trek will immediately recognize the multitude of chronological errors, gaps, and inconsistencies in character development. (Like how Chekov isn't supposed to show up until the second season of the classic series. Or how Spock was supposed to be serving under Pike during this period, not writing simulations at Starfleet academy.) Of course, the screenwriters explain much of this away through a plot twist in the end.

Even so, they can't rely on that for everything. Since when, for example, do pregnant family members travel on starships with their husbands? I'll tell you since when - since Galaxy class starships were introduced in the 24th century. Not early on, 35 years before the classic series. And how about the fact that Spock, while capable of love affairs, would never ever ever have one with a student, simply for ethical reasons?

Ultimately, the movie has been created not to satisfy the curiosity of older Star Trek fans but to rebrand the Trek universe to appeal to a 21st century crowd - one with a greater insistence on glamorous battle-scenes, a more human-security focused foreign policy imaginary, a post-feminist gender sensibility, and little pickiness about getting (fictional) facts straight. This is what makes it cinematically brilliant, but also why a few of us may leave theaters slightly shell-shocked this month.

Everyone's a Critic

There’s been a lot of discussion about the Movies and IR, and I couldn’t resist a list. Plus, there’s a Bond movie on TCM—Goldfinger and now Thunderball—and I think Walt is crazy for leaving out war and spy movies, as that’s as much the stuff of IR as anything else.

I’m not a film critic. A lot of the movies I love aren’t “brilliant” by film critic standards but are nonetheless fun to watch, and are very illustrative of particular concepts or moments that make them tremendous fodder for moments such as in-class discussion.

This is a very incomplete list. Its an off-the top of the head list, overly influenced by what I’ve seen on TV recently or talked to people about. Given all that, here goes…

The Hunt For Red October
Read Schelling, Fierke, and then watch this movie. Its all about understanding the Cold War as an elaborate game with rules that allow for a sophisticated signaling process. The two subs know the game, play it to perfection (flood tubes 1 and 2, but do not open outer doors!), and in doing so, recreate the rules of deterrence and the Cold War.

War Games
I have yet to find a better and easier way to explain deterrence and the madness of MAD. Interesting game. The only way to win is not to play.

Red Dawn
Such an insane movie. And yet, look how many of its cast members would go on to further success! The key to understanding this movie is to realize that it is, explicitly, neoconservative propaganda. Its what they fear—more so from weak kneed, cowardly liberals who would not stand up to communists. Really—the Cubans and Nicaraguans parachuting into Colorado? No grasp of reality. But then again, the fears of Red Dawn drove US policy in Central America for the entirety of the 1980’s.
Rodger had a similar reason for teaching this movie.

From Russia With Love
I love James Bond movies. Possibly the two things I on which I feel most comfortable asserting real, legitimate expertise are the Cleveland Indians major league roster and the James Bond films. I think this is perhaps the best of the Bond films. A fantastic job of exploring Cold War tensions in Europe, but also revolutionary for the introduction of SPECTER. An international terrorist organization playing great powers off one another? Not so far fetched, now is it? I find the parallel amusing...

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
A nice exploration of the difficulties for Cold Warriors in dealing with the end of the Cold War. No wonder we stuck with the “Post-Cold War” era for so long, unable to let go of that which had defined us for so long. No wonder the military is still looking to replace the USSR in its procurement plans….

Top Gun
The myth of invincible American air power really begins here.

The Transformers (2007 version, although the 86 animated version was fun at the time…)
Perhaps better than any contemporary movie, shows how incredibly powerful and deadly the post-Iraq US military has become. The scenes of the special forces team attacking the Decepticon, calling in fire support, are just awesome, as its vastly underappreciated how much devastation the modern combined arms force can unleash.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
Some days, I really think that it could happen, with a nod to PW Singer.

I largely agree with the consensus picks of Strangelove, Casablanca, and Wag the Dog and for pretty much the same reasons—I have nothing new to say about that.

Guest Blogging the Afghan Civilian Casualty Count

So I'm guest-blogging over at Lawyers, Guns and Money the next week. My first post is on the latest 100+ civilian dead in Afghanistan. Suffice to say, as the ANSO graph above suggests, the international military forces (IMF) kill fewer civilians by accident than either pro-government or anti-government forces do on purpose. But as I point out, this doesn't mean much politically, and so the US needs to change its counter-insurgency strategy. Check it out.

Everybody's Talking IR These Days

The Rachel Maddow Show weighs in on the Walt/Drezner/Kaplan/Howard/Payne debate over films and IR:

Pakistan To Enforce "Sharia" in Swat

Great. The "peace deal" in Swat is officially off, and not only will Pakistan whole-heartedly address militants in the region, it will also enforce Sharia law itself, ostensibly to rob the Taliban of public support in the region.

What are the assumptions at work here?

Assumption A) That Taliban have begun to thrive in the northeast provinces primarily because the civilian population wants sharia law (and not because the Taliban have guns and the state failed to step in and protect communities in the region). Of course, there is something to this - many people prefer order, even brutal order, to lawlessness, which is what facilitated the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, and the emergence of al-Shabab in Somalia. However the government may be overestimating support for sharia per se, in a region historically practicing a much looser blend of Islam and pre-Islamic custom. Is it strict religious law people want, or is it efficient governance and an end to corruption?

Assumption B) That the international community is more worried about the capture of the Pakistani state by the Taliban than in the human rights consequences (and implications for the radicalization of the nuclear-armed Pakistani state) of a state-initiated religious crackdown in the northwest. This may well be true at first, all things considered, but I bet it won't last long, particularly once YouTube videos of the first high-profile floggings emerge. Pakistan remains between a rock and a hard place.

Much depends, perhaps, on what interpretation of "sharia law" Pakistan has in mind. In the West, we often associate sharia with controversial punishments for hadd offenses, but in many area where sharia is nominally in place, these punishments are rarely implemented. And moderate Muslims in many parts of the world have seized upon Qur'anic doctrine to promote a more equitable vision of society still grounded in religious law. Perhaps Islamabad has an opportunity here to forge a middle path between state and human security as it seizes the moral high ground back from the Taliban.

The Georgia "Mutiny"

A quick note on events in Georgia: be very suspicious whenever the government accuses any opposition group or movement of being linked to Russia. Tbilisi has mounted a concerted effort to paint it opponents as Russian stooges, and to shore up Saakashvili's regime by raising fears of a Russian plot against the country itself.

Of course, the Russians could be involved. But under no circumstances should readers take Tblisi's word for it.

The Guardian has a good rundown as of about 9:00 am Eastern:

Sikharulidze said the commanders of the military base, 12 miles from Tbilisi, had been dismissed and the soldiers confined to barracks.

President Mikhail Saakashvili said in a televised address that the government was taking the mutiny seriously but it was an isolated incident. He said the situation in the country was under control.

The interior ministry said one person had been arrested. "[The plotters] were receiving money from Russia," a ministry spokesman, Shota Utiashvili, told a news conference. "It seems it was co-ordinated with Russia."

However, Georgia's former defence minister, Giya Karkarashvili, told reporters in Tbilisi he was sceptical of claims of a planned coup attempt, suggesting they were fabricated by the government to dampen opposition.

"Today Georgia is in the hands of sick people, who write the scenario themselves, play it themselves, then make a movie and show it to people for intimidation purposes," Karkarashvili said.

Russia's Nato envoy, Dmitri Rogozin, was quoted by the news agency as saying the allegations were "crazy".

Utiashvili claimed the officers had been working in league with Russian special forces and had planned to launch the uprising tomorrow to coincide with the start of military exercises in Georgia co-ordinated with Nato.

Giya Gvaladze, former head of a special forces group called Delta, was named as leader of the plot and Utiashvili showed undercover video footage in which Gvaladze allegedly discussed his plans with co-conspirators, saying: "The Russians will come to help us, 5,000 people all together."

The Russian forces would "liquidate" cabinet members such as the interior minister, Vano Merabishvili, Gvaladze was recorded as saying. He added that if the coup was successful, exiled opponents of President Mikhail Saakashvili, such as the former leader of the breakaway region of Adzharia, Aslan Abashidze, would return to the country.

Utiashvili said negotiations were being held with servicemen from a Georgian tank battalion, based in Mukhrovani, who had announced a "mutiny" this morning. He indicated the men were connected to the coup plot, but their commander issued a statement saying the unit was only disobeying command in protest at the standoff between the government and the opposition, and did not intend to launch "aggressive actions".

There was no immediate comment from Moscow, but the Kremlin has frequently rubbished claims of agreements between its special forces and Georgian elements hostile to Saakashvili's government.

In tomorrow's exercises, around 1,000 soldiers from more than a dozen Nato member states and partners will practise "crisis response" at a Georgian army base east of Tbilisi, around 44 miles from the nearest Russian troop positions in South Ossetia.

The exercises at a former Russian air force base in Vaziani are seen as a signal from the 28-member alliance that, despite doubts over the promise of eventual membership, Georgia has not been forgotten.

Georgia has been plagued by unrest since last summer's disastrous war with Russia, with thousands of citizens taking part in mass protests demanding the resignation of Saakashvili.

The president has been under pressure from the protests for several weeks, and the government's release of audio and video recordings alleging violent plots to seize power by his opponents have become part of the country's daily political struggle.

Walt, Walt, don't tell me....

At one time, I kinda almost liked some of Stephen Walt's work. At another point, I found works such as Origins of Alliances useful pivots in making an argument to move from explanations based on realism to explanations based on constructivism. But to still call Walt a "good" or "eminent" IR theorist worthy of a job at Harvard...

Walt thought it would be fun to list the top ten IR films. Outsourced to Fred Kaplan:

The most jaw-dropping pick of all, though, is Independence Day, which "makes my list," Walt writes, "because it is balance-of-power theory in action: an external threat (giant alien spaceships) gets the world to join forces against the common foe." Here's the thing. Walt is a classic International Realist, the author of such gravitas-beaming books as The Origins of Alliances, Taming American Power, and Revolution and War. Yet this is his view of "balance-of-power theory in action"—the one-worlder's wet-dream cliché about how all the nations join forces to beat back monsters from outer space? A much more cogent portrait of balance-of-power theory is the scene in The Godfather where the five families agree to get into the heroin business and divvy up the territory. (That's nearly a metaphor for the Congress of Vienna.) Better still is the scene in The Godfather Part II in which Hyman Roth, Michael Corleone, and the chiefs of various U.S. corporations, standing on a hotel balcony in Havana, slice up a birthday cake that's decorated with the map of Cuba.

I'll leave the film commentary to Rodger. I'll just say that Kaplan is dead on--if Independence Day is what counts as "Realism" these days, then Realism and Realists are in Real trouble. To call Walt's Independence Day realism a degenerative research program might be too kind!

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