Cognitive biases and the rise of China

Harvard's Alastair Iain Johnston has a must-read article in the Spring issue of International Security in which he dissects the spread of a meme of China's "new assertiveness" spread among policy analysts, the media, and scholars in the US in 2010. (Available for free as a pdf, at least for the time being.)

As Paul Pillar notes, Johnston not only raises questions about whether China's foreign policy has become more assertive since the 2008-2009 financial crisis, citing numerous examples of continuity, but he provides an important examination of how foreign-policy narratives form in the twenty-first century. By using memetics — the process by which an idea or belief spreads from mind to mind — Johnston provides a new way of thinking about how conventional wisdom forms. As Johnston notes, the media has played an agenda-setting role before, but with the emergence of the blog and the rise of Twitter as a medium for the exchange of serious ideas, foreign-policy discourse, especially in the US, seems qualitatively and quantitatively different, not just moving faster but also occurring in much greater volume than ever before.

After all, not too long ago to receive the latest conventional wisdom on foreign policy you had to wait for the latest issue of, say, Foreign Affairs to arrive in the mail, with a steady diet of newspaper op-eds and weekly magazine articles to tide you over. Now in the time between issues of Foreign Affairs you can read daily the fifteen blogs at the website of the Council on Foreign Relations (which publishes Foreign Affairs), not to mention the fifteen blogs at Foreign Policy's website and numerous other blogs hosted by think-tanks and publications, and the Twitter feeds of the contributors to these blogs and magazines. This all amounts to what Johnston calls a "discursive tidal wave."

Johnston talks about first-mover advantages and herding when it comes to the formation of prevailing narratives in foreign-policy discourse, but there is another, related problem Johnston doesn't explicitly mention but more or less illustrates in his essay. Namely, with so much data streaming past our eyes, the dangers from the cognitive biases are surely heightened. As Daniel Kahneman writes in Thinking, Fast and Slow, the human mind is "a machine for jumping to conclusions." Presumably the more information analysts must sift through, the more they're likely to fall victim to confirmation biases, the halo effect, the availability heuristic, and other mental shortcuts that can lead to erroneous conclusions. Human beings did not need to invent the Internet to struggle with these biases — and one can easily argue that policymakers have always fallen prey to them — but the Internet is uniquely suited to encourage Kahneman's "fast thinking" (intuitive thinking in the face of uncertainty).

Johnston's article, then, is a note of caution to be sensitive to how foreign-policy narratives form today, a warning to analysts to not take shortcuts but instead to use careful scientific reasoning before reaching conclusions and, in the case of China, to be sensitive to history, to avoid making inferences from a small sample size, and to be clear about what they think is driving China's behavior. There probably isn't much that can be done about the state of foreign-policy discourse today, but one can hope that the high-speed, high-volume discourse is at least more amenable to self-correction than the older discourse.

(For other comments on this essay see Daniel Drezner and Graham Webster. Drezner's comment that Johnston falls victim to ahistoricism himself is probably right — I would have liked to see a bit more discussion of how conventional wisdom formed in US foreign policy in the past, beyond a handful of references to media studies articles on the media's role as agenda setter.)

What's normal?

William Gibson (previously discussed here) gave an interview to the science fiction site io9 recently in which he discussed the politics of his latest book, Spook Country.

One comment in particular caught my eye. Asked about Canada, his adopted home since fleeing the US to escape the draft, he said:

Canada is set up to run on steady immigration. It feels like a twenty first century country to me because it's not interested in power. It negotiates and does business. It gets along with other countries. The power part is very nineteenth century. 99 percent of ideology we have today is very nineteenth century. The twentieth century was about technology, and the nineteenth was ideology.

This got me thinking about Japan's "normal nation-ists." While Gibson's characterization is a bit too simple — ideology obviously "bled" into the twentieth century, technology had as transformative an impact on the nineteenth as the twentieth — a "normal" nation in the late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries is not the same as a normal nation in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries.

A normal nation in the late nineteenth century, the salad days of the nation-state, was obsessed with national power, constantly looking to enhance its own power and sizing itself up against other nation-states. It shaped its domestic institutions to enable it to draw on the wealth and bodies of its citizens to build up a modern army and navy and conquered weaker nations for reasons of wealth and honor (and to compete with others, of course). War was the great proving ground of the nation. As Theodore Roosevelt wrote in The Strenuous Life, "If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world."

In their thinking about war and Japanese society in the twenty-first century, Japan's conservatives — the "normal nation-ists" — still see the world through these eyes. To be a normal nation is to compete with other nations, to not "shrink from the hard contests." This is why so many of them want, as Abe Shinzo said, to leave the postwar system behind. In their eyes the postwar system is abnormal, as it led Japan to opt out of the contest for power. It weakened the resolve of the Japanese people for competition internationally. (At least military competition, the only competition that matters; to be a merchant nation, to exert power through money is ignoble, hence the shame of so many Japanese over the country's response to the Gulf crisis in 1990.)

Japan as it exists today is a normal nation. It is peaceful, has abstained from intervention in the internal politics of other countries, and is non-nuclear. It is a signatory to major international treaties and an enthusiastic participant in international regimes. This is normal behavior for a country in the twenty-first century. Japanese, like Europeans, are from Venus (in Robert Kagan's formulation), but Venusian behavior is increasingly normal, even in East Asia, which, despite the persistence of dangerous flashpoints and despite the stirrings of an arms race, is still remarkably peaceful.

Accordingly, the program pushed by the conservatives is the road of an abnormal nation. Perhaps because they take the United States as their model, they assume that US behavior is normal. It isn't. (MTC implies this in this post.) Martial America is almost unique in its adherence to nineteenth-century norms of behavior. American power has played a positive role in supporting international order — there is no denying that. But the motive power behind it is straight out of the nineteenth century, leading to abnormal behavior like the invasion of Iraq. (That the US launched the invasion despite the opposition of much of the world would suggest that the war was "abnormal," i.e. in contravention to a prevailing norm against aggressive, preventive war.)

So it is a misnomer to describe the revisionist advocates of a more robust Japan free of constraints on the use of force as advocates of a normal nation. Prime Minister Fukuda's emphasis on, in MTC's words, "contributing to world security through leadership on disease control, global warming, combatting poverty" looks increasingly like the foreign policy of a normal nation in the twenty-first century. It is also a mistake to describe them as nationalists. Nationalism need not be associated with military power, although nineteenth-century nationalism is. Why can't a twenty-first century nation be proud of more pacific achievements, whether domestic (a society with a low crime rate or high literacy) or international (a commitment to creating a more peaceful, orderly world)? The revisionists do not have a monopoly on pride in their country. Defenders of Japan's postwar system have plenty of which to be proud.

The US in Asia and the world

Princeton's G. John Ikenberry has a long guest post at the Washington Note addressing Kishore Mahbubani's arguments in The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. Not having read Mr. Mahbubani's book yet, I can't speak directly to his argument, but I do want to address the points raised by Professor Ikenberry.

The crux of Professor Ikenberry's argument is that the rise of Asia does not necessarily mean the decline of the West, or, more specifically, the decline of the US. He does not deny Asia's growing influence, but he suggests that while power is flowing Asia's way, the Asian powers have not proposed new organizing principles for world order. He suggests that what might happen — and what will probably be the best possible outcome — is a modified version of the American-led postwar system, a postwar system with an Asian flavor in which China and the other Asian powers recognize that maintaining the system is in their interests. As Professor Ikenberry writes:

China may well be tomorrow's greatest supporter of the American-led postwar system. That system provides rules and institutions for openness and nondiscrimination. These are features of order that China will want going forward as its growing economic weight will be greeted by efforts by others (including some governments in the West) to close and discriminate. Rule-based international order is not a Western fixation. It is a system of governance that all states - East and West - have some interest in maintaining, China not least.

There is considerable value in this argument. Given that China most likely will not have the opportunity to remake the international order anew in the manner that the US and its allies did in the aftermath of the World War II, China, India, and the other rising powers will have little choice but to jury-rig preexisting institutions to reflect their power and their interests.

It's also possible to overstate US decline, both in Asia and globally. As an "Asian" power — the US unmistakably is a great power in Asia — the US will have a stake in shaping the "Asian" world order. Washington will have to reconsider how it exercises its power regionally and globally, of course, becoming less reliant on its military power and more willing to listen to others, but the US has not begun its Recessional yet.

The emphasis needs to change, however. Since the US expanded its role in Asia at the end of the war, its Asia policy has been schizophrenic, divided between a crusading, transformational tendency and a stabilizing tendency. This schizophrenia persists up to today, with the crusaders keen to paint China as the next great threat to the US. But the time for US crusades in Asia is past. For the first time in nearly two centuries, Asian powers are in a position to manage the region's affairs themselves. That doesn't mean there is no role for the US; in fact, it means the US role as stabilizer and pacifier is more important than ever. I think, for example, that the presence of the US military, especially the US Navy, has ensured that political tensions have risen inexorably despite the ongoing Asian arms race. In short, US power should be used less for dictating terms and more for underwriting the efforts of others to create international order. The US should participate in the latter process, but only as one country among many. Its alliances in the region should shift accordingly, measured more in terms of how the support this US role. Transformational ideas, like Abe Shinzo's and Aso Taro's "arc of freedom and democracy" have little place in this order. Asian countries are in no hurry to see the US evacuate Asia; if anything, they want the US to be more involved, to be less obsessed with terrorism and more willing to listen to their concerns. It is imperative that the US start thinking seriously about how it will play this stabilizing role in Asia over the long term.

The US role globally will be more central than in Asia, but the question will be the same: as Professor Ikenberry writes, "...the United States should be asking itself: what sort of international order do we want to have in place in 2040 or 2050 when we are relatively less powerful?" Extending US influence, if not predominance, will depend on developing foreign policy tools other than military power (and with it, a shift in attitude that acknowledges that the US is less able to dictate terms to other countries).

Meanwhile, it is a mistake to refer casually to "Asia" in this discussion. Whose Asia? Is Asia a codeword for China? For India? For ASEAN? Each of these players has a different vision for the region, which redounds to the advantage of the US. Just as the Asian regional future is unknown, so to is the future of an Asia-centered world order unknown. The US is still in a position to shape the Asian and global orders.

The futility of Japan's global popularity

The BBC has released its annual survey of global attitudes, revealing once again that Japan is one of the most positively rated countries among those surveyed.

Jun Okumura provides a good wrap-up of the report's findings on Japan here.

As in years past, the survey found that Japan is viewed favorably in just about every country surveyed except for China and South Korea.

While nationalism and historical issues may partly explain the negative findings, I suspect that the negativity in Japan's relationships with China and South Korea — negativity that goes both directions — correlates with the density of those relationships. Thanks to proximity, the bilateral agendas are crowded with thorny, intractable problems that are regularly exacerbated by the behavior of one or both governments. This dynamic also contributes to Russia's low rating in Japanese eyes (15% mostly positive, 34% mostly negative). (And Russia's favorable view of Japan shows that most Russians aren't particularly attuned to their country's Far East.)

Of course, it is not particularly surprising that the dense, messy relationships in Northeast Asia have given rise to negative feelings towards the others. (40% of South Korean respondents viewed China favorably, compared with 50% who viewed it negatively.) What I'm interested in is what this says about the prospects for Japan's ambitions to play a greater global role, whether in political, economic, or security terms.

Some might argue that Japan's high favorable ratings are a source of soft power, the basis for Japan's extending its influence abroad. But I would argue that it's likely that the more Japan reached abroad, the less favorable it would seem and the less soft power it would possess. Not coincidentally, the one region in which Japan is especially active — Northeast Asia — is home to negative feelings about Japan. Not surprisingly, Japan is viewed favorably in regions where it is known mostly for its money and its culture. Thanks to Japan's economic problems and China's economic rise, Japan's money isn't nearly the negative it was at the height of the bubble. (Indeed, as during the Meiji period, Japan is shielded from negative attention from abroad by China, a much more attractive target for empire then and foreign criticism now.)

Japan simply lacks the dense, complicated relations, relations that entangle publics, that have contributed to antagonism with South Korea and China. Japan remained popular even in countries like Australia (where its popularity increased) and Britain, where media coverage of Japan over the past year focused on whaling, and the US and Canada, where history issues were on the agenda over the past year in the form of comfort women relations. (Although Japan's popularity in Canada did fall thirteen percentage points.) It turns out that these issues are a concern for an exceedingly narrow segment of educated public opinion.

So chalk this up as a success for Japan's low-posture foreign policy, which has become even lower thanks to Japan's shrinking ODA budget. (LDP HR member Yamauchi Koichi frets about Japan's declining ODA here, at his blog.) Japan is well-liked because it is mostly invisible and entirely harmless to most of the countries surveyed. A more active Japan, a Japan that took sides in important international disputes, would likely be less popular.

What does all this international goodwill actually do for Japan? Does it make Japan any more likely to succeed in trade negotiations? Does it make Japanese permanent membership in the UN Security Council any more likely? Does global goodwill yield any soft power for Japan?

Recommended Book: The Peninsula Question, Yoichi Funabashi

In the year since Funabashi Yoichi, editor-in-chief of the Asahi Shimbun, finished The Peninsula Question, the US and North Korea made an agreement that restarted the Six-Party talks, overcame the Banco Delta Asia obstacle, and issued a joint statement with the other parties that included a promise by North Korea to account for its nuclear program and disable related facilities, before progress stalled at New Year's. In the process, the Abe government ensured that Japan would not play a constructive role in the talks.

Dr. Funabashi's book does not suffer from leaving off at North Korea's nuclear test in October 2006. Indeed, The Peninsula Question anticipates much of what's happened over the past year.

The Peninsula Question is, according to its subtitle, "a chronicle of the second Korean nuclear crisis." This is not a polemic — Dr. Funabashi does not deviate from his measured tone except in a few spots in which he criticizes US hawks — and he provides few answers to the titular question. But as a chronicle of the Northeast Asian crisis since 2002, it is nonpareil. Dr. Funabashi interviewed dozens of policymakers in the governments of five of the six parties, providing an intimate look at how the US, Japan, China, South Korea, and Russia approached North Korea in the Six-Party talks.

The result is of interest to both general readers and international relations specialists, as Dr. Funabashi shows the constraints that impact foreign policy decision makers. Dr. Funabashi shows that neither international politics nor domestic politics is the primary constraint on policy makers: both are important, with some variance from country to country. Policy makers are also constrained by history, ideology, and geography. This is not to deny the role of human agency in policy making, but it suggests that policy makers operate exercise their agency within a narrow band. The main protagonists of Dr. Funabashi's book were further constrained because they were, for the most part, not heads of state and government. Perhaps the only figure willing and able to defy the constraints was former prime minister Koizumi Junichiro, who traveled twice to Pyongyang in pursuit of the normalization of diplomatic ties with North Korea.

As a result of his interviews, Dr. Funabashi draws special attention to the domestic constraints on each country's North Korea policy. While Washington and Tokyo were perhaps the most divided of the six parties, each government — North Korea included — had divisions that undermined the pursuit of an agreement. These domestic divisions resulted in first the rift between South Korea, and the US and Japan, and then in the rift between the US and Japan in 2007 as the Abe government took a firmer line on North Korea at the moment that the US approach softened.

Ultimately, though, it may be the international constraints that will undermine any agreement. North Korea, perhaps for good reason, believes that a nuclear weapon is the key to its security. Neither the US nor Japan is willing to live with a North Korean nuke; neither government, however, is in a position to take decisive action to end the North Korean nuclear program. China is clearly annoyed by North Korea, but appears willing to act only so far as to prevent a war on the Korean peninsula. Russia has little influence in Northeast Asia, as illustrated by Dr. Funabashi's chapter showing the failure of Russia's attempt to offer itself as an "honest broker" in the talks.

The result? North Korea will continue doing exactly what it's been doing. In the meantime, the five parties should be strengthening cooperation in preparation for the collapse of the DPRK, because post-DPRK North Korea may be the source of more trouble in the region than the DPRK itself, albeit trouble of a different sort.

Do-nothing leaders

Being back in the US, I have had a chance to reacquaint myself with American politics — and to be reminded of why I find the American political class so disappointing. The problem isn't just the failure to act; it's a failure to find new conceptual categories for the problems of the twenty-first century. US leaders, in the broad sense, including media elites, have an unfortunate tendency to assume that once the US sheds itself of its Iraq problem (and its Bush problem), it will once again be able to wield power and influence around the world.

The world and the US have changed, however. The unipolar moment is over, if it even existed in the first place. The post-industrialization of the US will continue apace. The democratization of information worldwide will also continue, undermining US military power. As the US is learning, it's harder to use power in a more complex mediaspace that undermines the ability of large organizations to control the information that reaches publics, raising the costs of the use of force. Even as it continues to bolster its military power, the US, beset with economic difficulties, is finding it increasingly difficult to get what it wants globally. (Stratfor's George Friedman addresses the shallowness of the US foreign policy debate in this post at his blog.)

The US political elite, however, is not the only group of leaders fiddling while Rome burns.

Indeed, the G8, struggling to remain relevant in a rapidly changing global environment, is a monument to the collective failures of the leaders of the developed countries.

Tokyo is no exception — Japan's political class might be the world leader in ineffectual leadership. Tahara Soichiro, grand old man of Japanese journalism, calls attention to the government's failures in a short article in the March issue of Liberal Time. His particular grievance is the government's failure to deal effectively with the deepening global economic crisis and its impact on the Japanese economy. His ire is directed at the leaders of both parties, and he actually calls for the dissolution of both the LDP and DPJ — and points to the nascent Sentaku movement as a possible solution to the failures of the Japanese political class.

I think he's unfairly critical of Prime Minister Fukuda. Mr. Fukuda might be of an older generation and might have been ineffectual since taking office, but his keen understanding of the problems facing Japan is unique not just among Japanese politicians, but among G8 politicians more generally. The problem is not individual leaders, but a policymaking process that is a relic of better times, when the greatest task for senior politicians was distributing pork and plum posts to supporters. Indeed, if the Japanese political system was up to the challenge, the rearguard action by the Zoku giin on the temporary gasoline tax would be easily dismissed and the discussion would have from the first focused on how best to use the tax revenue. It is unclear, however, whether the government will accede to the opposition's demand for the end to the road construction earmark.

Changing the system will entail more than just replacing one group of leaders with another. Change must be comprehensive: political, administrative, economic. It is on this point that Mr. Tahara falters. He speculates about which leaders will be capable of doing what must be done — he cites Nakagawa Shoichi in particular (an assessment I don't share) — rather than considering the institutional obstacles to change.

To a second-rate Japan

Continuing the theme of Japan's vanishing global presence discussed in this post (and this post by Gen Kanai last week), it's worth looking at what may be this year's hot foreign policy article-turned-book (cf. Paul Kennedy, Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kagan), "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony" by Parag Khanna, a fellow at the New America Foundation.

In both this article and the forthcoming book, Mr. Khanna looks at the emerging contours of the new world order from the perspective of the second world: "Lying alongside and between the Big Three, second-world countries are the swing states that will determine which of the superpowers has the upper hand for the next generation of geopolitics. From Venezuela to Vietnam and Morocco to Malaysia, the new reality of global affairs is that there is not one way to win allies and influence countries but three: America’s coalition (as in 'coalition of the willing'), Europe’s consensus and China’s consultative styles. The geopolitical marketplace will decide which will lead the 21st century."

There is considerable value in this piece, not least in its warning to US policymakers that American hegemony is finished. Over the course of the Bush administration, it has become clear that the US, for all its military strength, is woefully deficient in other areas of power, making it difficult for Washington to solve critical problems. It's not entirely the fault of President Bush, but his administration's actions made it plain the limits of American power, hastening the emergence of a new order.

Mr. Khanna makes clear that competition between the US, China, and the EU will not be primarily in the military realm, but rather over energy, markets, and natural resources. The other point of interest is that the second-world countries might actually hold the upper hand in their dealings with the superpowers. These countries can pocket concessions and aid from all three, maximizing their security in the process. This dynamic is already at work in Southeast Asia, where countries like Vietnam are happy to trade with China even as they deepen their security ties with the US (an example not lost on Mr. Khanna). As a result, this piece is not simply a reincarnation of fears from the 1980s and 1990s about the creation of three exclusionary economic blocs.

Not surprisingly, however, Japan is absent from this piece (except in passing, with Japan's interest in regional monetary cooperation cited as an example of how "Asians are insulating themselves from America’s economic uncertainties").

Where does Japan fit in a tripolar world? Presumably as its population shrinks over the coming decades, Japan will increasingly come to resemble second-world countries busy playing the superpowers off each other. Granted, Japan will likely remain wealthier and more politically stable than the other countries in this group, but as a result of its security and economic needs, Japan will likely engage in the same behavior. In managing its relationships with the US and China, Japan is, in fact, already playing one power off the other, one moment strengthening security cooperation with the US, the next exploring new avenues of economic cooperation with China, ASEAN, and others that exclude the US. It will take some time before Japan fully embraces this "small Japan" path — I suspect there remains too much fear of China and too much dependence on the US — but it may be only a matter of time, with the process hastened by external changes like a mellower China or a prolonged economic downturn in the US that leads it to reconsider its defense spending and foreign deployments.

The question is the extent to which Japan can remain prosperous and dynamic and preserve some modicum of influence in the competition for energy and natural resources. That will depend, of course, on decisions made today to transform Japan's moribund political and economic systems.

Haass on allies and rivals

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, had an op-ed in the Financial Times this week (excerpted from a forthcoming article in The National Interest) in which he reconsiders the nature of US relationships with traditional allies and perceived enemies.

Calling it the emergence of a "Palmerstonian moment," Haass wrote, "We are entering an era of foreign policy and international relations where countries are neither automatically predictable adversaries nor allies. They may be active partners on one issue on one day and largely inactive observers on another issue the next. Or they may carry out alternative or opposing policies."

There is considerable value in his argument, especially from the perspective of the US-Japan relationship, in light of the ongoing debate over Japan's involvement in Afghanistan operations. (Ambassador Schieffer has reminded the Japanese once again — in case they forgot — that the US thinks that it would be a "real tragedy" if Japan were to opt out of the war on terror.) A coalition of the willing is a double-edged sword: if the US is going to wage war without seeking the formal approval of its allies, then those allies are free to opt out, without Washington's throwing a tantrum (i.e., "freedom fries").

As I've argued in earlier posts, strategic flexibility is becoming increasingly important in international relations, in Asia especially. The more potential partners, the greater the ability of a great power to achieve desired ends. Haass cited the example on the role played by China in the six-party talks: "Beijing, in this case – not Nato – was and is the most important partner for Washington in its efforts to denuclearise North Korea. This does not, however, mean China is on the verge of becoming a US ally on other issues."

Haass' op-ed also touches the idea that no matter how cordial relations between the US and its allies become thanks to leadership changes, the US and its allies will not see the world the same way anytime soon. I think that the perceptual gap between a global superpower and regional powers is simply too great, making it difficult for the US and its allies to agree not just on courses of actions, but even on the shared interests supposedly underlying alliances.

Vaarwel and au revoir to Belgium?

The FT's Gideon Rachman weighs in on the Belgian "crisis" in a piece called "For Nations, Small is Beautiful."

(I realize that this has little or nothing to do with Japan, a country Edwin Reischauer once suggested "may be the world’s most perfect nation-state," although with Okinawa as a prefecture, Japan is not nearly as perfect as the late ambassador would have it.)

In it, Rachman dispels some of the irrational fears that have marked responses in the outside world to the prospect of Belgium's splitting into two countries. Namely, that in the twenty-first century, the idea of agglomerating more and more land and people under one government is outdated, and, indeed, counterproductive.

But taking pride in the sheer size of your country is increasingly anachronistic.Traditionally it has been good to be a big country for two main reasons: prosperity and security. A big country meant a bigger market and so more trade and wealth creation. A large nation was also more powerful and less likely to be invaded.

But in the modern world, both these advantages seem to be diminishing.

Globalisation has opened up markets across the world. China and India are getting richer largely because they have access to the markets of the developed world, not because of the size of their domestic markets. Small countries can trade their way to success even more swiftly. Think of Singapore or Switzerland.

Small is also no longer synonymous with insecure.

In Europe, many minnows have enhanced their security by joining Nato. This is sometimes denounced as free-riding. Belgium or Luxembourg can afford to be small, secure and smug – because they are under the security umbrella, proffered by big and generous Uncle Sam.

But joining a collective security organisation is not an absolute necessity for a small country. Ireland and Switzerland are not members of Nato – and neither appears to be in imminent danger of invasion.

The fact is large countries are now less instinctively expansionist than they were in the days of empire. These days, invading and occupying small countries can be a massive pain in the neck – as the US has discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since the traditional disadvantages of being a tiddly country are disappearing, you are just left with the advantages.

As Beijing understands, at some point there are diminishing marginal returns for population size. At some point, an extra 100 million people who have to be fed, housed, clothed, and employed create more problems than the contributions they make in terms of taxes and productivity. Why else would the CCP have initiated the one-child policy? In terms of territory too, at some point the costs of policing a territory are more than the territory's returns for a government.

And the feasibility of small countries should finally mean the end of Europe's nationalities problem, in that every nation that desires autonomy can survive in its own national home. Scotland? Fine. Catalonia? Go ahead. As Rachman suggests, the existence of NATO and the European Union ensure the survival of small states in Europe. With a security guarantee from more powerful states, the security benefits derived from expansive territory and a large population are superfluous, while the EU's single market makes possible economies of scale that states once sought in large continental or overseas empires.

So should Belgium, the product of a political settlement among the great powers in 1831, break, I won't shed a tear, especially since the Walloons and the Flemings have been sleeping in separate beds, so to speak, for years. I'm sure both will be fine.

The larger idea here is that we should not be so wedded to the idea that the nation- and multi-national states that exist today will be around forever. The map will change; arrangements were the product of either political convenience or the contrivances of empires will break down, hopefully peacefully. This trend may prove to be one of the most significant of the century.

The alliance in an Atlantic mirror

I went to Carnegie Hall last night for a panel discussion on US-German relations held as part of the current Berlin in Lights festival underway in New York City. Moderated by Richard Holbrooke, the discussion featured Henry Kissinger, Josef Joffe, John Kornblum (a former US ambassador to Germany), and Karl-Theodor Freiherr zu Guttenberg, a member of the Bundestag from the Christian Social Union (CSU).

In light of recent difficulties in the US-Japan relationship, I was fascinated, if not surprised, by how easy it would be to subsitute "Japan" for "Germany" in the discussion without skipping a beat. Indeed, Japan was mentioned one way or another by every speaker, including Dr. Kissinger, who as readers of Kenneth Pyle's Japan Rising will know has not exactly been appreciative of Japan. In fact, Dr. Kissinger made a point of saying that Japan is a country to watch, as he thinks it is quietly and slowly making itself a substantial player in international security. If by slow he means glacial, perhaps, but Japan's "normalization" is far from linear and is only impressive when compared to what Japan once was, not when it is compared with other countries.

Nevertheless, the discussion had a pessimistic edge to it, and all of the speakers made clear that the reasons for doubt about the relationship are structural and have little to do with George W. Bush. The problem is interests. Just as in the US-Japan relationship, there is a growing gap in how each country perceives its national interests. At the heart of the problem are the differences between global and regional powers. As a global power the US increasingly views the world holistically; few problems are too distant for the US, and thanks to the reach of its military, the US government is capable of considering action (military or otherwise) in response to a range of situations around the world. Germany (and Japan), on the other hand, are firmly rooted in their regions and near abroads. Their publics have a hard time understanding why campaigns in benighted corners of the world have anything to do with them. Indeed, as Karl-Theodor Freiherr zu Guttenberg argued, Germans have a hard time thinking in terms of national interests. (I would say the same thing about the Japanese people and their representatives in the Diet.) But even if they were better able to articulate their interests, the gap with the US would remain.

The US, as Dr. Kissinger argued, will have to change the way it interacts with its allies as a result. It will have to stop issuing orders to allies and start presenting them with problems in the hope of finding solutions. It will actually have to seek out the opinions of its allies, even if those opinions are different from Washington's. Because that is the other side of the "coalitions of the willing" coin. Just as the US is free to choose its partners for campaigns, so its allies are free to say no to the US (without Washington's throwing a tantrum).

The future of America's alliances it seems is one of standing organizations that facilitate cooperation between militaries, intelligence agencies, and other security organizations, but lack the political cooperation they had in the face of the Soviet threat. They will have some value as vehicles for defining international agendas, dealing with terrorism and other nonstate actors, and providing basic security in the form of nuclear deterrence, but it would be a mistake to expect (as the Bush administration seems to do) that they will continue to serve as vehicles for waging protracted wars in distant lands.

Changing terms

Following the discussion in this post from earlier this week, I found this article at the Economist website of interest.
It opens by exploring the evolving terms used to describe Europe, but then shifts into a discussion of democracy, and suggests, "ban the word 'democracy', which has been worn smooth by misuse." It proposes as alternatives "law-governed," "free," and "public-spirited," with Karl Popper's "open society" serving as useful short hand for societies with these qualities.

As per my previous comments on this, the problem with democracy promotion is often one of language, because democracy means different things to different people. Like "empire" or "imperialism," the term has been overused to the point of analytical uselessness. For a government to proclaim itself in favor of spreading democracy almost ensures disappointment, both for transmitters and receivers, as the reality never quite matches what either had imagined. Replacing democracy with more concrete terms, such as those mentioned by the Economist, would provide for more concrete targets — and thus more realizable visions for what the developed democracies can actually achieve in helping other countries develop politically.

The democracy question

In light of the quashing of the "Saffron Revolution" in Burma and the Japanese government's feeble response to the violence, which took the life of a Japanese citizen, it is probably safe to declare MOFA's "value oriented diplomacy" to create an "Arc of Freedom and Prosperity" dead.

But with Japan's following behind Washington in backtracking on democracy promotion, it is worth asking whether there is a danger of going too far in the other direction. Should the developed democracies be in the business of bolstering nascent democracies and goading authoritarian states to democratize? If so, how can they deliver concrete results?

To the former, Stanley Fish writes in the New York Times about participating the making of a BBC program called "Why Democracy," for which he answered ten questions about democracy in the contemporary world. Some of the questions Fish rightly dismisses as fatuous, but there are several questions that get to the heart of the problem when considering whether developed democracies can help others along the same path. Indeed, Fish wonders whether Fukuyama's "End of History" democratic teleology is accurate, and wonders whether perhaps other peoples might value other things above democracy. In other words, it's not that some nations are anti-democratic but rather that they simply value other things more (religiously ordered society, traditional ways of living, etc.). I think this is an appropriate question in light of Japan's own democratic experience. Do the Japanese people value democracy more than the range of "myths" that constitute modern Japanese nationhood?

(This, of course, transforms that perennial topic of bulletin board discussions about Japan — is Japan a democracy? — into a different matter entirely. Democracy isn't a matter of steps on a ladder but shades along a gradient.)

Accordingly, if democratization means not pulling a people up a ladder in the direction of "democracy" but something messier, more rooted in culture and tradition, what can be done about the fifty-eight and forty-five countries classified by Freedom House in 2007 as partly free and not free respectively? Presumably Iraq has, for the moment, discredited the idea of armed democratization — "The End of History" on horseback — although, as Tony Judt notes, the "liberal hawks" of 2003 are finding their voice again and their colleagues on the right are probably only slightly chastened by the Iraq disaster. But are there policy tools short of outright war capable of instigating a transition to democracy?

I'm personally partial to initiatives like those managed by the semi-public US National Endowment for Democracies (NED) and partner organizations, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI) (the latter two are loosely affiliated with the Democratic and Republican parties). These organizations are focused on capacity-building for democracies, training participants (mainly but not only parties) in how to function in a democracy and helping to strengthen public and private institutions necessary for a liberal democracy. Their approach is less visible than high-profile official initiatives and more cognizant of the challenges associated with democratization, acknowledging the time it takes for a society to democratize, the need for robust civil society institutions, and the necessity of adapting institutions to local conditions. It also recognizes that democracy has to come from within; the citizens of a country have to want it themselves. Democracy cannot be a gift given from abroad, but material and intellectual support for those who want to democratize can.

The key may be, as Noah Feldman argues in the New York Times (apologies for this NYT-heavy post), toning down the rhetoric of democratization — used heavily by the Bush administration — that exposes the US to charges of hypocrisy or impotence for failing to live up to its rhetorical commitments, but not abandoning the cause of democratization. Like Feldman, I think there is value to developed democracies using their wealth and power to support democratization, which, as he notes, is unique for great powers: "Empires inevitably fall, and when they do, history judges them for the legacies they leave behind. It would be both sacrilegious and ahistorical to believe that our power will last for eternity. If liberty and self-government are among our legacies, then our strength will not have been squandered."

But the developed democracies need to be aware of their own limits, both material and strategic, and not let their rhetoric run ahead of those limits. There can be no hard and fast rules for when to lean on authoritarian governments and when to cooperate with them — it will take prudence and wisdom on the part of developed governments, coupled with long-term, low-level support for the forces of democratization in non-democratic states.

To return to Japan's "value diplomacy," Tokyo might, in fact, be quite good at this quieter, more patient democratization. Perhaps the DPJ should set up its own version of the National Democratic Institute and expose the hollowness of the government's rhetoric.

Brave old world

Robert Kagan has come out with a new essay that is decidedly less revolutionary than his earlier "Of Power and Paradise," which captured the mood of the 2003 transatlantic feud.

In this new essay in Policy Review, Kagan comes to a realization about the nature of American power and world order that others have been arguing for years: the US, for all its power, has limited power to transform anything, and that calling the international system "unipolar" obscures more than it reveals. The only reason that this is worth calling attention to is that Kagan, of course, is a leading neo-conservative (as is this blog's policy, I use this term descriptively, not pejoratively). He has been a prominent advocate of the use of American power to promote democratization, but in this essay it seems he recognizes that American power has limits after all — and so perhaps 9/11 did not change everything after all, revealing instead the limits on America's ability to transform the world, which had been casually assumed during the 1990s.

To describe the world has he sees it, Kagan borrows a concept from the Chinese: one superpower, many great powers. The US remains, and will remain for decades to come, the single strongest power in the world on the basis of its economic dynamism and military strength (which is unlikely to change given US defense spending, and R & D as a portion of US defense spending). But the global system in which the US appears predominant is more a patchwork of regional systems and balances, with the US alone having a stake in all or most of them, often as an external balancer and maintainer of stability. The Bush administration's policy in the Middle East explicitly departed from a balancing role in the region, disastrously, and seems determined to backtrack and restore some semblance of balance after deliberately overturning it. But the US role is broad but shallow: "Predominance is not the same thing as omnipotence. Just because the United States has more power than everyone else does not mean it can impose its will on everyone else."

For all this, I find it odd that the Japanese government has ramped up its emphasis on the idealistic side of its alliance with the US, at the same time that Washington has been playing down its emphasis on values, democratization, human rights and the like. While the latter will always be a part of US foreign policy, they will clearly be stressed less in the coming years. Rather it should be the "public goods" aspect of the alliance that should be emphasized, because that is what the US brings to the Asia-Pacific; the value of the alliance is based on whether and how it contributes to providing a public goods, foremost among them stability, to the region.

UPDATE: Readers should be aware that I'm not recommending this essay because it's particularly interesting or novel — far from it. In fact, if it had been written by anyone else I would not have bothered to look at it. But when a prominent proponent of the use of American power to promote American values reconsiders and suggests that there may, in fact, be limits to what the US can hope to achieve and that it will have the face the reality of a more competitive international system, I think it is worth noting. In fact, the questions that ought to be asked are why it took someone like Kagan so long to come around to this position, and whether any of his compatriots (and family members) share his epiphany.

Constitutions east and west

In his Sunday interview on NHK, Prime Minister Abe reiterated the importance of constitution revision as a point of contention in next month's Upper House election.

Meanwhile, in Brussels this past weekend the European Union's member states concluded a treaty that wraps up the questions that were intended to be addressed by the nixed constitution. The treaty, however, arguably retains a number of the constitution's substantive changes while jettisoning troublesome symbolic changes.

What do Japan's and the EU's constitutional debates share in common?

Without even considering the content of the documents, both drafting processes are wrapped up for the democratic development of both polities. For Japan, the process by which constitutional amendments are debated and presented to the public for approval will be an important test of the strength of Japanese democracy. Will the process be elite-driven, as every other epochal change in the Japanese political system, or will the Japanese citizenry stake a claim in the process and demand that elites respect their wishes and introduce amendments that reflect public desires? In the EU, which is struggling to craft a democratic polity out of more than two dozen democratic polities (i.e., the democratic deficit), the changes envisioned by the constitution — and now the reform treaty — constitute a substantial change in how the member states, their peoples, and the EU interact, but it is unclear the extent to which the new EU will reflect the wishes of the governed. As George Washington University's Henry Farrell wrote at Crooked Timber in a post reviewing the treaty: "It's a shame and a disgrace that the EU member states have responded to the 2005 defeat by going back to their old practice of seeking to achieve integration by boring the general public into submission, and a very substantial backward step. If people aren’t willing to sign up to major changes in the EU system of governance, then too bad for the EU system of governance."

This comparison only goes so far, of course, given that the Japanese people recognize themselves as a polity — whereas it is as of yet unclear if Europeans really think of themselves as European citizens, as far as governance is concerned.

But what both share is a concern about the role of their state/supranational-confederal organization of states in a world of new rising powers (read China and India) that already dwarf both demographically and are prepared to surpass both in economic performance. Hence the debate about article nine, which is not simply about one-country pacifism but signifies a range of questions about how Japan will relate to the US and other powers in the region. And in Europe, the provisions in the treaty about a European president, a de facto foreign minister and foreign service, and mutual defense clause hint at an EU desirous of a proper place at the table alongside the great powers. Niall Ferguson makes this argument in the Daily Telegraph:

The world is a big, bad place and the relative importance of Europe's individual states is declining economically and demographically with every passing year. As Mr Mandelson has found, it is hard enough to sustain the momentum of trade liberalisation even when Europe speaks with one voice. In other spheres, the EU is simply a negligible quantity. What would have been more absurd than to leave foreign policy divided between yet another set of twins, the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (Javier Solana) and the Commissioner for External Relations (Benita Ferrero-Waldner)? The choice is no longer between national foreign policies and a European foreign policy, but between national irrelevance and collective influence.

(Interesting that Henry Kissinger disparaged both Japan ["little Sony salesmen"] and the EU ["who do you call when you want to talk to Europe"] for their inadequacies as great powers; it seems that they have taken his criticism seriously.)

But those in Europe and Japan who would rush to answer fundamental governance questions to enable the pursuit of power internationally must not be allowed to run roughshod over the rights of their citizens. Power must not be an end in itself; it must be grounded in democratic legitimacy. And so the content of constitution revision (or formation) is less important than the process. Will the voices of peoples be heard?

(I suppose this is a good test for the relevance of realism: if responding to changes in the international distribution of power takes the highest priority, then expect both Japan and the EU to run roughshod over popular opposition and implement constitutional settlements that best enable them to cope with changes in the international environment.)

What a time to be alive, for political scientists anyway.

Idealism, realism, and US China policy

Over at Foreign Policy, China scholar David Lampton and journalist James Mann debate the argument presented in Mann's new book, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression. (The subtitle really says it all.) (Hat tip: China Digital Times)

There is no love lost between Lampton and Mann in this debate, and its implications reach far beyond US China policy.

Lampton challenges the argument in Mann's book that politicians, academics, and corporate leaders are making excuses for Chinese authoritarianism to justify close engagement with Beijing. He argues that policymakers have no illusions about China, but emphasize engagement because "there are economic, security, and intellectual gains to be made from working together."

Mann reiterates his thesis in response to Lampton, saying that his purpose is not to propose a new framework for US China policy but to expose the rhetorical compromises made by American leaders.

Mann's point is well taken, although arguably this problem is a matter of cognitive dissonance: the interests of the US, as observed by Lampton, lead the US to favor engagement in one way or another with China, but China's failure to meet political and moral standards determined by American values mean that engagement with China carries a certain sort of moral repugnance. Democracies, like individuals, often have a hard time coping with the mismatch between their ideals and a reality that falls far short of those ideals, and so they find ways to explain away the contradictions — hence the behavior observed by Mann.

I would prefer that US opinion leaders and policymakers be less squeamish about the contradictions, but their response is understandable.

I ultimately have to side with Lampton in this debate, because, as he suggests in his second contribution to the debate, there are real doubts about the ability of the US to influence political change anywhere, whether through the use of force, sanctions, or rhetorical pressure.

As Lampton asks, "...Even if democracy were to rank first among U.S. goals in dealing with Beijing, could the United States achieve or effectively promote it? Again, consider the dispiriting U.S. interventions in Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Or if it’s verbal condemnations of human rights abuse Mann prefers, consider Myanmar, Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Libya—all states that have blithely ignored the opprobrium of human rights advocates and U.S. politicians for decades."

As he subsequently suggests, the only way for the US — or perhaps more appropriately, Americans — to influence political developments abroad is through the patient support of individuals working to strengthen civil society and building capacity for institutions essential to the rule of law. But as for the pace and content of liberalization in foreign countries, there does not seem to be much that the US can do, which raises the question as to whether democratization deserves the priority in American foreign policy it has been given in recent years.

Does emphasizing democratization, irrespective of whether the US has the ability to advance democracy, serve any purpose other than to resolve some of the unease that comes from having to lead in a world that so often seems to fall short of the high standards demanded by American values? And does emphasizing democratization without being able to follow through undermine the value of the message?

The global order election

As commentators assess the results of the first debate among the (declared) candidates for the Republican nomination for the 2008 US presidential election (check out the summary by Slate's John Dickerson), it is becoming increasingly clear what the central question of the 2008 election ought to be.

Namely, how can the US, as the Washington Post's David Ignatius asks, midwife the complex multipolar order that is coming into being? Is it at all possible for the US, with the help of allies and rivals too, to craft the new global rules of the game?

This question went wholly unaddressed in Thursday night's debate — as Andrew Sullivan writes, "As for foreign policy, very little nuance, very little subtlety, almost no fresh thinking" — even by Senator John McCain, who gave an address at Stanford's Hoover Institution two days earlier that spoke directly to this issue. Instead, the debate seems to have been a cordial softball game, with the candidates trying to one-up each other as to who has the greatest claim to being Ronald Reagan's heir (not surprisingly, perhaps, since the debate was held at the Reagan Library).

Nevertheless, the US and the world need next year's election to be "about" foreign policy, but not a specific foreign policy issue like "Iraq" or "terrorism." Rather, the US is in dire need of a national conversation about when and how American power ought to be exercised; the manner in which the US interacts with countries like China, which may be illiberal at home but share an interest in regional and global stability; and the role of democratization in US foreign policy in the wake of the Iraq war.

The US, as the only country in the world with truly global interests matched with global reach (whether politically, economically, or militarily), desperately needs to determine what it wants the next new world order to look like, and how it hopes to achieve its goals — because no other single power can.

The US cannot, of course, shape the new order on its own, but it can present a vision and begin working with other great powers to hammer out a final version; in other words, what is needed is American leadership, not American dominance. As Ignatius wrote, "American power alone is demonstrably unable to achieve world order; we can't even maintain the peace in Baghdad. But no multilateral coalition has emerged as an alternative."

As such, it is worth looking at Senator McCain's remarks on this question.

McCain stated his theme early in his address: "Now it is our generation's turn to build." McCain is explicitly interested in institution building, domestically and globally, in a manner similar to the Truman administration in the early years of the cold war, a project that the current administration has almost willfully avoided. (And indeed, McCain paid tribute to Truman throughout the speech.)

Then he made a statement that seems like a no-brainer but in fact sets McCain apart from the Republican field: "Today the talk is of the war on terror, a war in which we must succeed. But the war on terror cannot be the only organizing principle of American foreign policy."

Finally, McCain outlined his grand proposal for international order: "a league of democracies." This idea was proposed by Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, of the Brookings Institution and the University of Texas respectively, in the January/February issue of The American Interest, and debated by a number of senior foreign policy thinkers in the same and subsequent issues. In short, McCain — and Daalder and Lindsay — called for an organization of democratic allies that would be able to act when and where other international organizations, especially the UN, fail. As McCain said:

The new League of Democracies would form the core of an international order of peace based on freedom. It could act where the UN fails to act, to relieve human suffering in places like Darfur. It could join to fight the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa and fashion better policies to confront the crisis of our environment. It could provide unimpeded market access to t hose who share the values of economic and political freedom, an advantage no state-based system could attain. It could bring concerted pressure to bear on tyrants in Burma or Zimbabwe, with or without Moscow's and Beijing's approval. It could unite to impose sanctions on Iran and thwart its nuclear ambitions. It could provide support to struggling democracies in Ukraine and Serbia and help countries like Thailand back on the path to democracy.

In short, to the question of what role democratization should have in American foreign policy, McCain answered strongly in favor of its playing a central role.

But, as Scott Paul writes at The Washington Note — echoing questions raised by discussants in the American Interest — there are serious questions about the desirability of such an organization, and whether it can be formed in the first place. What role would a League of Democracies play in cooperation with authoritarian China or illiberal democratic Russia to manage global order? More fundamentally, is such an organization even possible? An organization of democracies acting as a kind of global posse assumes that every democracy acts in favor of democracies in every face of every foreign policy issue. That's obviously not the case.

Think of the manifold cases when democracies act in ways that not only don't further the spread of democracy, but actually hinder it. (Western support for Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf may be the most prominent example at present.) Realpolitik, foreign policy based on the cold calculations of a state's security interests, remains an essential determinant of foreign policy in every democracy. And then there's the influence of history, nationalism, identity, religion, and so forth, intangible factors that shape foreign policy in unpredictable ways. (As an Asia scholar, a question that immediately comes to my mind is the Japan-South Korea relationship, where the fact that both are democracies seems to be the least important element.)

And McCain doesn't even begin to tackle the question of who would qualify, with the implication being that a relatively lax definition of democracy would render the organization too large and unwieldy to be the effective international actor that McCain desires.

So McCain deserves plaudits for daring to think about the future of American leadership in an increasingly multipolar world, but cooperation among democracies is not a panacea for the world's ills.

Instead, the only way the US will be able to rise to the challenge of the new multipolarity is by becoming more flexible, less reliant on old allies incapable of mustering the will to act, more willing to talk with rivals with which the US competes in some areas while sharing interests in others, and more willing to talk with and listen to all interlocutors in pursuit of a stable, peaceful global order — to ensure, in McCain's word, "a new global order of peace, a peace that can last not just for a decade but for a century, where the dangers and threats we face diminish, and where human progress reaches new heights."

But, ultimately, if strength was the watchword of the unipolar moment, then flexibility will be the watchword of the multipolar era that is coming into being.

The problem with foreign policy

George Washington University's Henry Nau has an essay in Policy Review in which he discusses the challenges posed by debating foreign policy (via RealClearPolitics).

I am posting largely without comment, but I want to note that Nau's question is something I've thought about for a while. Ideas about foreign policy depend much more on abstraction and making broad generalizations based on whatever facts are at hand. As the world has gotten "bigger" -- what Raymond Aron called the "dawn of universal history" -- the number of facts needed required to have a coherent picture of the world increased simultaneously, meaning both more abstraction and more reliance on media to provide the basic facts necessary to piece together an understanding of international affairs. Both of these trends are problematic.

I've always liked a passage from an essay by Nathan Glazer on this problem from the May 1971 issue of Commentary entitled "Vietnam: The Case for Immediate Withdrawal":

When an administration does anything in domestic affairs, it affects its own people directly. Someone is helped, someone is hurt, and in a democratic polity, those who are helped and those who are hurt have ways of letting the government know quickly and clearly...Domestic policies get responses, and governments and legislators are sensitive to them. Ideology and elaborate reasoning play a relatively minor role in domestic affairs...None of this happens when a big country fights what for it is a small-scale war. There the destruction and killing are concentrated in a distant country.

What lessons can we conclude from this? For starters, I think it would behoove all actors in US foreign policy debates to speak with greater humility about foreign policy issues, to realize the limits of their (and our) knowledge about the world, and to recognize that while ideological simplifications provide a foundation for thinking about the world, tactical flexibility is imperative. And, of course, they must never forget that all actions have unintended consequences.

Seeking options

I found this op-ed by Gregory Clark in last Thursday's Japan Times fascinating. Clark suggests that North Korea may well be more open to an agreement with the US than commonly assumed, because Pyongyang is looking to expand its foreign policy options: "Even less is there any realization of an even more important factor possibly at work -- namely, the strong hints now surfacing that Pyongyang is eager to embrace Washington as a way to distance itself from Beijing and possibly even from Seoul."

I think Clark gets to an important idea in the foreign policy making of any country. Success in foreign policy is often means a state's expanding its options in a given situation, because, essentially, the more options, the more power. Of course, the number of options a state has at any given moment is finite, limited by norms and values, domestic institutions, material capabilities, the international environment, and so on. But for a state like the DPRK, whose very existence hangs in the balance, having the option of looking to another great power -- slightly more distant than Beijing or Seoul -- for reassurance and aid is a major diplomatic coup, and could well be worth the cost (i.e., giving up nuclear weapons).

And yet as Pyongyang and Washington look to expand their options in Northeast Asia, Japan is going the other direction: drastically limiting its options by staking its Korean diplomacy on the resolution of the abductions issue. As Clark wrote:

That Japan still seems unable or unwilling to grasp these possibilities is a measure of many things. One is its chronic weakness in diplomatic strategy and tactics. Another is the anti-North Korea emotion whipped up here over the abductee issue. Even Pyongyang's insistence that at least one of the claimed 12 abductees -- Megumi Yokota -- is dead, and that this can be easily proved if Tokyo cooperates, is being ignored.

I think Clark nails the point. As I've said before, conditions are such that there is real potential for both a major about-face by Pyongyang that results in its embracing Washington, and for Tokyo's being isolated in the region through its inflexible North Korea policy (even if it gains from a denuclearized Korean Peninsula).

With the signs coming out of the recent working group discussions on security in Northeast Asia and denuclearization showing the US willing to work towards an agreement -- reportedly agreeing to release frozen DPRK funds in Macau -- and North Korea apparently moving toward satisfying requirements to freeze its nuclear activities, alarms should be going off in Kasumigaseki that Japan needs to change course.

Is anyone there paying attention?

The california rolls are safe

After announcing plans to institute a certification system for Japanese restaurants overseas back in November, Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, headed by the beleaguered Matsuoka Toshikatsu (the subject of this superb book -- more on this soon), has decided to abandon these plans after opposition from citizens' groups and after a panel chaired by Ogura Kazuo of the Japan Foundation concluded that it is difficult to determine what exactly Japanese cuisine is.

So ends a bizarre attempt by Japan to flex its muscles in the cultural arena. Given that Japan remains a perennial favorite in this annual BBC survey, it's probably best not to give foreigners another reason to dislike Japan in light of the comfort women issue, which appears to be going from bad to worse, with the Abe Cabinet once again denying evidence of coercion, prompting US Ambassador to Japan Thomas Schieffer to criticize the government's position.

As I've said before regarding soft power: difficult to measure, difficult to wield, and highly sensitive to the slightest change in perceptions. Between the ongoing disputes over whaling and the comfort women issue, I wouldn't be surprised if the BBC finds Japan to be slightly less popular next year.

China's Good Cop?

When I read articles such as this one from the IHT, I have a hard time figuring out if China's Premier Wen Jiabao is simply playing good cop to the PLA's bad cop or if Wen actually believes the argument he advances at every opportunity.

If it's the latter, then the bureaucratic infighting within the PRC's government may be greater than it appears to the outside world, in which case every country in the region must be extremely careful not to act in ways that do not strengthen the PLA's hand within internal policy debates.

For IR wonks, I'm led to think of a book like Jack Snyder's Myths of Empire, in which Snyder looks for correlations between the unity of a regime and its tendency towards an "overstretched" imperial foreign policy. That's not to say that China is imperial, but the concern that the more divided the Chinese government it is, the more its neighbors have to fear is, I think, very real.

All of which suggests that, as I wrote in this post, every country in the region, the US included, must think very carefully about the decisions they make now. Pushing too quickly for an organized "hedge" option without a parallel move towards an Asian "OSCE" risks encouraging elements within the PRC who favor antagonism -- resulting in self-fulfilling prophecies about Chinese behavior and producing a vicious cycle that could rapidly spiral out of control.