[koholinttakeout]

[koholinttakeout]

It'd be pretty great if he could pull off a run for a new Congressional seat in Washington-he'd be the first ever to make such a clear switch in back-to-back House races.

I'm sort of wondering why the House doesn't just grant itself more seats, though. It'd be sort of a win-win for everyone: Dems would be happy to partially solve part of the rural over representation systemic in the current appropriation of House seats and the GOP would like it because, at least in the abstract, it would mean less government spending. At the very least, it would reduce the amount of fundraising required by House candidates, as right now the average size is something like 600,000 people.
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[koholinttakeout]

I've actually met Ailes. (And Rachel Maddow! But that's another story)

He went off on how the constitution doesn't need to be interpreted, that "its all right there."

I disagree with most of ya'll when it comes to politics, and I can appreciate/respect how Ailes can make shit just happen.

But damn. "Its all right there." I really hate that mode of thinking. That, and I'm not surprised at all about this story.

Good day!
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[koholinttakeout]

I was just alluding to how he took Fox News from nothing to winning the ratings game. He's a terrifying man when it comes to his brutal understanding of how the market works and what people want to watch. It might not please people's ideologies, but I think we can admit he's good at making his network popular-whether that is CNBC or FNC. Sorry I didn't make that clear!
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[koholinttakeout]

If I wasn't on my iPhone in a cramped van right now, I'd write a ton about this. But since I am, all I can point you to is two articles: 1) Josef Joffe's "The Default Power" and 2) Fareed Zakaria's "The Future of American Power." they're both in Foreign Affairs and present two different perspectives on the matter in terms of foreign affairs. Also look at the idea of "demoscrolisis" (I know I mispelled that) for thoughts on domestic decline. I'll write a lot more after I get back. Cheers!
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[koholinttakeout]

BBP-I'm not going to touch the faith issue because I think that'd explode the grounds of debate. I think if I have your posts understood right, there are a few questions that need addressing: 1) Is America an empire? 2) If so, what kind of empire is it? (or what is unique about its rule over the international system) 3) What is decay? 4) Is there a pattern of decay common to the Roman Empire, British Empire and Soviet Union? 5) Is this pattern something we can use to evaluate the United States?

Of course, with each formulation for a question there are a certain number of assumptions I make, not least that decay is something that can be objectively understood and that the actions of states (understood mostly through the inaccurate lens of today's nation-state system) is of prime importance.

1) So is America an empire? I don't know. Maybe. I guess the first question would be "what is an empire." Empire tends to strike up a lot of emotions in people. One definition that might work is a nation-state that uses its might to subjugate the will of other nation-states for purposes of furthering the empire's objectives rather than that of the subjugated state. Now this is obviously an imperfect definition, but let's roll with it. While that definition fits (mostly) the role of the Romans, British and Soviets in the international systems they operated in, I'm not sure it really fits what the United States is within this modern, post-Cold War international system.

2) So if the US is not an empire, what is unique about its role of primacy in the modern world? Walt, Ikenberry and friends have said that there are some real peculiarities of how the world is currently structured. First, the most "imperial" of the US's relationships in the developed world, that of US military bases in Korea, Germany and Japan, is hardly dictated by diktat from Washington. The US has reduced its footprint in all three countries in the last twenty years, wartime control of the ROK Army will be held by a Korean general starting from 2015, thousands of troops are being removed from Okinawa after a fairly messy negotiation process (though there was an admittedly bad diplomatic spat between the new ruling DPJ and the Obama Administration-I think that's more the exception than the rule in the post-Cold War relationship). One of the most bizarre things about this era is the relative lack of other states banding together to balance out US power. You do hear a lot about the Beijing/Moscow axis and the various groups formed by these two states with overt and covert aims at challenging US power, but they have yet to really lead to substantial counterbalancing activities (witness, for example, the Russians now condemning Gadafi and supporting the western intervention in Libya, or the reliance the Russians have on the US to bring them into the WTO, or a whole host of activities the Chinese have undergone that are antithetical to Russian interests). The only entity that can compete with us economically at the present is the European Union, a supernational organization that we actively encourage and its processes of integration is something the US promotes with abandon. Within the arc of instability, the US is acting like a peculiar hegemon, reducing our footprint in Iraq to a paltry force that will be remain only to prevent intervention from surrounding states and will stay as long as the new (mostly) democratic regime in Baghdad has a use for it. Obama has made it clear that our commitments to Afghanistan in terms of a military presence are not infinite, though I'm pretty sure we're going to have a substantial presence there until 2014-the agreed on time frame for when the Afghan forces will take over. Now, you can make a series of arguments about how the US is a postmodern empire, that our domination is very different than previous empires, etc. But what I'm aiming at is that the US role in the world is substantially different than any other hegemon in the past.

3) What is decay? I think there's different kinds of decay-moral, economic, military, etc. And there's arguments for every kind of decay out there and so many kinds of metrics that its really difficult to put one's finger on what is the most telling sign that a society is losing its grasp on how to govern itself and/or retain an empire or hegemonic nation-state.

4) So is there a common kind of decay that has clearly flowed throughout time from the Romans, British and Soviets? I'm not sure. Each of these empires is not only totally different from us, they are each totally different from one another. The Roman Empire is particularly a problematic case because it occupied a time period whose international system is vastly different from our own. The British lost their empire in part because they had no money left to spend and no political willpower to keep the empire together by force or through substantial reform. Churchill wanted more than anything to keep the empire together, but looking back (and clouded by the biases of today) it seems clear that the only real shot was to completely restructure how the Empire was ran-to give full voting rights to everyone in the Empire to elect members of some sort of grand Imperial Parliament. (these ideas are somewhat explored in Niall Ferguson's "How Britain Made the Modern World") That possibility probably died all the way back in the 1920s when the Liberals stopped being a real force in British politics. In terms of values, the US has the most common ground with the British in terms of values and societal similarities. The Soviets fell apart arguably because by 1991, the only thing they had going for them was their military power. Unlike American (and British and arguably Roman) power, nobody was out there trying to emulate Soviet society without being coerced. Soft power was something the Soviet Union struggled to exert through most of its existence. Economically, the SU was a basket case that became dependent on imports of food in order to feed its own people (despite the huge potential it had to grow its own food). When it finally collapsed, the Soviet Union was spending many, many times the % GDP on its military than the United States was, and the US was still getting leaps and bounds ahead of it in terms of R&D. The Soviet system went bankrupt because of the inefficiencies of the state's management of the economy and, maybe, because of the social forces unwittingly unleashed by Gorbachev.

5) So are there lessons for the US to learn from other empires through history? Of course there is. But is there a set course of action that guarantees decline? Ehhh hard to say. Like I said, the other three empires were so completely dissimilar its difficult to see a common cause of decline besides possibly running out of money, which is how any state or organization declines. Obviously there are problems in the United States and its role in the world. We're in unfamiliar territory. The length of time between 11/9 and 9/11 (Fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the current state of affairs) is about to be less time than the post-9/11 world. Since the Soviet Union disappeared the US has struggled to come up with a workable narrative or framework in addressing global challenges. However, despite all the flak he got, Bush's reactions to 9/11 were actually fairly similar to previous actions taken. John Lewis Gaddis of Yale wrote "Surprise, Security and the American Experience" and in it he outlined how Monroe and FDR both expanded the US's role in regional and global security after surprise attacks on Washington DC and Pearl Harbor. At home there's obviously a problem if we have historic highs of unemployment at a stubborn 9%, but a large amount of people out of work is not in and of itself an indicator that America's best days are behind it. It might just mean the kind of recession the US is in is of a fundamentally different character, or that the steps taken to address the recession were less than stellar. Militarily, its obviously having problems caused by a decade of war, but its also the only modern state that has undertaken such a huge commitment for this duration of time, so its difficult to understand what decay would truly look like (as opposed to just natural exhaustion).

While I'm definitely of a different political persuasion than most people on this board, I'm sick of hearing people say "we need to make America great again" or "we just need to go back to being awesome" or whatever nonsense is being peddled by either side of the political divide. America is great. The thing is, is that America is still the only truly revolutionary western state that has been in continuous existence since its founding. Its an experiment in how mankind can govern itself and it stands alone in so many categories it makes it difficult to make a meaningful comparison to other states. Yeah, there's problems, but the problem with decline is that it, along with history and our own lives, is experienced forwards but only understood backwards. I'm an eternal optimist, and while I know that American civilization will eventually fade away, I don't think that time is now. Every generation wants to believe that its problems are the most difficult and complex. The United States has some real issues, but nothing greater than what has already been faced before. This whole mindless meme of "going back" to some point in history where the US was the bomb is sort of horseshit. In 1960 the Twilight Zone had an episode called "A Stop at Willoughby" where the main character wished he could stop living the busy, complicated life of the late 1950s/early 1960s and go back to the Golden Era of 1888. Munch on that, I guess.

Wow, I wrote a lot more than I had thought.
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[koholinttakeout]

Hey thanks! I often mean to, but work takes me away from everything good too often. :( :(
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[koholinttakeout]

BBP-yeah I meant to address how Britain is still around, post-empire but I forgot. I forgot some other stuff too but I can't remember it, so I guess it wasn't important. Also, good point on how a society like Britain survives but Russia, having no living memory of functioning in a market-based pluralistic society has some serious growing pains/reversals. The concept/article/book I was mentioning is actually spelt "demosclerosis" and its about how interest-group activism and redisturbative programs hurt the government's ability to adapt to changing situations and circumstances.
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[koholinttakeout]

CubaLibre: 1) The problem with the notion that the US can go the way of Britain is, like you said, the US is huge. The British Empire was an island nation heading an empire made up of a landmass and population many times the size of Britain proper. Envisioning an end to US power as we know it is therefore hard to conceptualize, in terms of a British-style ending. 2) Robert Kagan said that Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus, and Americans tend to see problems in a paradigm that more often needs a military (or at least hard-power) solution and its foreign policy conceptualizes problems that need such solutions much more than the Europeans, who don't have the same means (and therefore, don't see the same problems, or at least don't see them in the same light-thus the Europeans caring more about global warming, since they can do more about it, than bombing third-world nations or groups because of the security threat they seem to pose, which they can't do quite as well as the US). Put more simply-if you have a hammer, problems look like nails. If you don't have a hammer, you're looking at very different problems (or the same ones, just very differently). Not sure how correct such a view is, but its out there. 3) Defense got slashed significantly during the 1990s both under HW Bush and Clinton (and Gingrich, who controlled the purse strings for half of Clinton's term). The problem is not that the military by its nature is an immovable leviathan demanding more funding (though it absolutely is), its that the policymakers have a certain view of the threats posed to the nation. I mean, hell, Rumsfeld was telling the Army Chief of Staff he was going to have to make due with six Army divisions in mid-2001. (We now have ten+, and during the 1980s we had something like twenty) A true end to military adventurism is when the people who make the policies actually think the threat is gone, or subdued enough. It'll happen. 3) Man I totally forgot to mention soft power in my treatise earlier. But you're absolutely right-American pop culture has so dominated the game of globalization it can have an illusionary effect. Economic decline, more so than any other measure, seems relative. But relative to what? The EU is already a bigger economy (in terms of nominal GDP) than the United States. So what about the third-largest economy, China? What's telling is that US GDP (nominal) right now is hovering a little above $16T, with China's being a less than half of that at $5.8T. Of course, nominal GDP is just one measure, and an imperfect one at that, but the average American makes around $47,000/year while the average Chinese (outside the SARs) makes $4,000/year. So obviously the kind of economic power China is currently exerting is different in form, though these figures also tell us that there is a huge untapped potential in the Chinese population. What's sort of depressing is that that potential may never be tapped due to a couple of interesting dynamics occurring in China. The Economist, the Christian Science Monitor and Reuters have all reported a couple of studies that show that China may grow old before its grows rich-that this year, the population of working-age adults will peak and then begin to decline. As the population of the country ages, there will be a greater push to placate this older population with money from those working (some China watchers believe this to be the reason why there are over a thousand deadly protests a year). Additionally, the one-child policy means that there will be approx. 24 million males more than females (the population of metropolitan NYC), which will mean a whole host of social problems. Furthermore, there are some signs that Beijing is becoming more regulatory and the push to up the wages in China is forcing some American business to relocate back to the United States or to India. Most damning for the Chinese is that they need to continue to grow around 10%/year just to create enough jobs to fill the new job-seeking population. I just don't think that's ultimately sustainable in the long-term. The long-term problem for the Chinese will also be the advent of 3D printing, which will utterly destroy the entire logic of mass production and change the dynamics of the manufacturing sector forever. The Communists have succeeded in being able to feed a billion people, which is no small task, but I just don't see where their economy goes once manufacturing jobs start disappearing altogether. China is a pretty great place with great people (at least in the places I've been), but let's not pretend that this century inevitably belongs to a country with little to no freedom of expression. So yeah, there's your cold water on the Chinese economy. All that being said, the US economy is utterly in the shitter and its going to take some time (and a greater rate of growth) to mean continued economic primacy in the long-term.

Mr. Mechanical-Yeah, I definitely need to read it. Interesting review, too. Obviously this idea is going to be called into question by some, but I dunno, I think I see this phenomena everywhere I look, so...yeah!

BBP-Yeah I forgot to mention this too. The rest of the world benefits greatly from the US fitting the bill in a lot of different areas. Ensuring the free flow of trade in the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz especially means the rest of the world doesn't have to worry about the energy supply of most of the world going to crap overnight. The security guarantee that NATO provides has meant that most European nations can cut their defense budgets to the bone (and past that) with little to no real-world consequences. This sort of crazy amount of freeloading is exactly what is not supposed to happen, at least according to old school IR theorists. IMO, I think that sort of points to that we're at a unique point in human history, where values are trumping realpolitik in a lot of circles. What's interesting is that China and Russia has privileged positions in a lot of international organizations (like a permanent seat at the UN Security Council) and still doesn't seem to want to play ball in terms of acting like a traditionally-understood responsible actor (especially with something like North Korea). We can probably attribute that to misperception of threats by the people running the show in Beijing-I mean, the Chinese I've met all seem to think that the UN is our pawn and it does what we say (which is hilarious considering the viewpoint of American conservatives and quite a few liberals).

psiga-The Tea Partiers are playing politics. Marcy Kaptur is a crazy liberal from my state. They're not going to sign on for something like this, just like almost the entire Democratic Caucus went from supporting the war in Afghanistan (remember, its the Good War, the Smart War!) to voting against it all within a year. I'm not saying any of this is right-it's not-it's just politics.
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[koholinttakeout]

Vikram Ray-I do believe that. Honest people can disagree! I know the "war as a racket" gets a lot of credence and there are some simply awful abuses in defense procurement (my shed is full of them), but I think you're confusing a relatively minor problem with that of the problem of threat construction in general. Buzan gets a lot of milage these days when it comes to threatcon, but I just don't buy it because it assumes the worst possible motives for anyone who thinks that US security interests are by nature incredibly expansive. I agree that the Defense Authorization Act for FY2012 was pretty poorly worded, but I don't think it uniquely impacts the future of American security policy. Before that bill was passed and signed, the US already was fighting a drone war in Pakistan, committed numerous special forces (and the Ethiopian Army) to a war in Somalia, neutered Gadhafi and has entered into Pakistan, Syria and Iran numerous times. You can argue the normative aspects of all these actions, and like I said the Act is pretty terribly worded, but let's realize that the harms you describe are the status quo.

So like I was saying above, honest people disagree. Some people think the US has a fairly limited realm of security interests (ie just defend the borders, prevent an imminent attack directly against the US, etc.) and some people think we have a very wide range of security interests ("Rethinking Security from the Ground Up" by Laura Reed provides a pretty good, six-page introduction to the idea, but read almost anything by Samantha Power, Susan Rice or Condi Rice-they all have wrote quite a bit about what constitutes security concerns). To say that we're just a bunch of assholes practicing Orientalism (as defined by Said) and waging war against the Other just for the money is an argument that has a multitude of problems, not least of which is that the defense budget has actually been significantly slashed in the past and looks like it will be in the very immediate future. All those actions I listed above seem to be coming down in frequency and intensity-of course, time will tell if we really revert back to a 1990s-style approach to our security problems, but the current trajectory looks to be changing, not least because we're cutting the number of people in the military by a significant amount. Also remember that a huge component of the defense budget is tied up in Tricare, Research and Development and reconstruction funds (because, you know, being able to tell a commander that you built X amount of schools in rural Afghanistan looks great on a PowerPoint slide). Not only that, but it ignores a lot of material that you could really argue against better. Also, since you like to think of the US government as running a racket, you might want to read "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime" by Charles Tilly-its a pretty interesting theory about how the modern state is itself a kind of crime syndicate.

Also, its probably a good thing my flabbergast meter takes a lot to actually register anything. I think you and I come from pretty different places if you think government exists to do everything possible to curtail private enterprise. Like I said earlier, I understand honest people can disagree. I just think I need more of an explanation of why you buy some of these arguments regarding war profiteering and the unstoppable forces guiding the American government to fight endless wars. And sorry if I came off as contradictory/condescending/rushed-I had to just type this out real fast.

sawtooth: Interesting take on demosclerosis. I sort of thought it would be more akin to what happened in New Zealand from 1984-1990, where the Fourth Labour Government just wrecked house on the mixed economy and took on nearly every interest group. The same sort of thing looks like it might be happening in Britain today with the Coalition Government, though its too early to tell there, probably. Either way, it looks like overcoming demosclerosis necessarily means going beyond the traditional conceptions of left/right and pissing off everybody. I don't really see Bloomberg nor Brookings is really in that mold-the only thing either of them did was ban smoking and fun and advocate for the Iraq War. Then again, I don't know enough about either in terms of consistent policy perspectives to speak intelligently.

Last note: I'm leaving for a week. That should mean that there will be a ton of interesting shit happening. Over the last six months, every single time I've been in the field there's been crazy shit happening. The Arizona shooting, the Egyptian revolution and the Japan earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster each happened the last three times I've been gone. Hooray!
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[koholinttakeout]

Hi everyone I'm back. Good to see the only news story I missed is Nintendo making the iPad.

And the news media caring about our not-so-secret war in Yemen.

Vikram Ray and Mr. M-I've been thinking a lot (like, this entire past week) about my hasty defense of how the US security apparatus works, and I owe you a more reasoned argument for how I believe things to be, in terms of threat identification and the like. Don't know if I'll put it in this thread or start a new one-you tell me which would be better. I feel a little bad about my long, drawn-out responses that rely more on academia and abstract argument taking away from discussing other news items.

edit=forgot to add the link the first time I put this post up. Whoops!
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[koholinttakeout]

Hey before I go any further with some sort of spin-off topic: Would you all say that the two most common criticisms of US foreign policy (at least on this board) is that 1) Its run by ideologues/idiots and 2) There is an inherent, inevitable push toward a militaristic, interventionist foreign policy within the US government and related institutions? 3) Both of these things are true together?
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[koholinttakeout]

Huntsman announces, but all I can think of is this clip from Freakazoid:



Edit: Something a little more relevant (though Freakazoid is always relevant!): The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote "Secrecy: The American Experience" which is a pretty fair examination of balancing the need for state secrets and the need to have open and transparent government. I've only read a few pages of it but it seems worth checking out.

Also, tomorrow Obama will announce how many people are going to leave Afghanistan. I'm willing to bet it'll not be an altogether significant number.
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[koholinttakeout]

Senate Votes to Streamline the Confirmation Process

Really interesting, though not mind-blowing or sexy enough for any front page.

[koholinttakeout]

You may be living this story right now, but for those of us not living on the eastern seaboard of the US: Earthquake hits Virginia, felt in DC, NYC and even as far as Ohio

Weird timing(?): Quake hits Colorado
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