I'd Like Another Cold War
Yay!! My first post on Opti-mates, and I couldn't feel more optimized.
This morning, as I was updating a long-overdue C.H.U.D. Roundtable with a bit about Dana Vale, I got into another discussion with my co-worker, Dave. I work stupidly long hours in a small recording studio, so I just realized I probably have more conversations with Dave, the engineer, than with anyone else. Huh.
Anyway, we got into a discussion about Hard Power vs. Soft Power, and the way in which we can change the state of troublesome (to the U.S.) nations simply by presenting our way of life as more attractive. Unbeknownst to me, there is apparently a youth culture in Iran who live Muslim outdoors, but live western at home. Societal pressure keeps them constrained outside, in Dave's opinion, largely because the escalating paranoia will keep the hardliners in power until it desists. I'm not sure, but I do know that we won the cold war not with bombs or A1M1s, but with McDonald's.
What do y'all think? Is one method preferable to the other? Are they mutually exclusive? Is it too late to hope that Soft Power could defuse the middle east, and how can we present our best side in a culture of alarmism and fear? I want to hear from the people!
This morning, as I was updating a long-overdue C.H.U.D. Roundtable with a bit about Dana Vale, I got into another discussion with my co-worker, Dave. I work stupidly long hours in a small recording studio, so I just realized I probably have more conversations with Dave, the engineer, than with anyone else. Huh.
Anyway, we got into a discussion about Hard Power vs. Soft Power, and the way in which we can change the state of troublesome (to the U.S.) nations simply by presenting our way of life as more attractive. Unbeknownst to me, there is apparently a youth culture in Iran who live Muslim outdoors, but live western at home. Societal pressure keeps them constrained outside, in Dave's opinion, largely because the escalating paranoia will keep the hardliners in power until it desists. I'm not sure, but I do know that we won the cold war not with bombs or A1M1s, but with McDonald's.
What do y'all think? Is one method preferable to the other? Are they mutually exclusive? Is it too late to hope that Soft Power could defuse the middle east, and how can we present our best side in a culture of alarmism and fear? I want to hear from the people!
posted by Pascals Bookie @ 9:10 PM
10 Comments:
Hard and soft power work best in concert. The credible threat of hard power must exist for soft power to be effective, but exclusive use of hard power become counterproductive at a certain point (both with the nation you are trying to influence and your allies). For instance, Europe's negotiations with Iran (which delayed recommencement of uranium enrichment for a year or two, despite their eventual failure) were possible because the threat of American military power was there in the background. I'm not saying that Iran has been much other than a failure so far, but it does demonstrate the point. The threat of the stick, implied or overt, makes the carrot look that much tastier.
It is very much possible for Soft (Cultural/Economic) Power to independently exist from Hard (Military) Power, and it is possible for a culture or a state to have one but not the other, but you would find that having or relying only on one form of power is a precarious perch on top indeed.
To start with, some of the greatest states/civilizations in history have been potent combinations of Soft Power and Hard Power. Rome, China, England/US: these were all rich, culturally vibrant polities that exported not only their armies and navies for conquest but were also admired and emulated culturally by their surrounding neighbors. Having Hard Power engenders Soft Power; as human beings, we usually like the winners and would usually those traits and habits which we observe in winners as our own in order to become winners ourselves. Soft Power can also translate into Hard Power, by means of economic and diplomatic influence; wealth economies are usually able to produce a proportionally stronger armed forces with which to defend and enforce the society's interests abroad.
However, having all one kind of power and not the other is dangerous. For example ancient Assyria at it height was all Hard Power. It's military was basically unbeatable, and it in turn spend its time sacking city after city for spoils and slaves, again and again, until it had no allies, no friendly states. No one wanted to adopt Assyrian culture, no one wanted to trade with Assyria because Assryia didn't believe in trade, only plunder, and when the pastoral Cimmerians came in from the north, followed shortly by the Scythians, all the states that could have had the expertise to help Assyria deal with this new threat instead turned on the Assyrians and wiped them out. Now they only exist in Monty Python jokes.
Japan provides the counter-example: in the 80's and early 90's, it was all Soft Power, thanks to the constitutional limitations on its armed forces. However, Japanese influence was global thanks to its economic strength and it's culture's allure. People in the West got all panicky about the supposed Japanese century. Of course, once the bubble burst in Japan and it's economic growth started to stagnate, Japanese culture began to lose a great deal of its mystique and draw (honestly, how many American Ninja movies do you see these days?). Japan's neighbors began shedding or reforming the previously exported Japanese culture to become its own and in turn export those cultures back out, sometimes even back to the Japanese themselves! (see South Korea, Taiwan, and Mainland China)
So, regarding your last question about Soft Power being used as a diplomatic tool to make other people like us. I would have to say no, this is not what Soft Power does. Soft Power, at its best, can make people predisposed to like you, by exporting your cultural values and norms to them and having them be less alien to other cultures. The man on the street in Islamabad can say, "Well those American people can't be all bad, because they gave us Independence Day, and that was one badass motherfucking movie". But on the other hand, if we do anything specific to piss them off, they'll still go out and burn our embassies regardless of how many Will Smith movies we exported to them. A salient example would be China and Vietnam. Vietnamese culture is intensely Confucian, as they have been influenced by China's proximity for a millenia-and-half. However, that does not stop Vietnamese from distrusting and at times hating the Chinese (granted because the Chinese couldn't stop invading them). Just because you adopt a great deal of your neighbor's culture doesn't mean you necessarily like them; you can think the guys upstairs are complete tools but still think their receipe for bar-b-que ribs is delicious.
Okay, I'm going to go into total dork mode here, but it really is like Civ IV.
If you have a strong military, a persuasive philosophy/religion, and lots of advancements, other countries will be more likely to respect you and deal fairly with you. To what degree you lack one of those, to the same degree you be less influential.
AsianSmiths is right on with the example of the Assyrians, to which we could also add the Spartans; conversely, he's right out about Japan, to which we could add any number of medieval commercial republics.
So what does this mean vis-a-vis our current situation? Well, let's say we want to take the 'Cold War' tack. As I've said before, we've got to have a persuasive philosophy and articulate it in terms that make sense. We have the military power and we have the technology goodies. So we have to have the strength of our convictions that our way of life is a good one.
This is why I argued in another thread that we need to make it clear to a very religious Islamic world that our freedoms do not automatically lead to decadence, materialism, and licentiousness.
Let me put it another way, and return to the Cold War metaphor. Saying 'freedom means licentiousness, yay!' is much akin to saying to those laboring under the Soviet yoke and ideology that capitalism and democracy are really great because they lead to the rich getting richer and special interest group politics.
I guess what I was trying to get at was the idea that our Soft Power capabilities would be stronger if our current climate weren't so intent on treating our conflict as being against Islam. It isn't domestically, save for gitmo, but internationally we're staring down Islamic nations so that any who blink are our ally and any who don't are our enemy. Meanwhile, we've got Michelle Malkin preaching the values of interning Muslim citizens and Ann Coulter calling for us to kill their leaders and convert them all the Christianity. We can show all the images we want of James Deam driving a convertible down the Santa Monica Freeway smoking Camels with a buxom blonde on his arm, but fighting Islam will not win us any converts, only more militant adversaries. If we can make the clear distinction between despotic dictatorships and the people who are forced to serve them, then our way of life will continue to be less and less attractive.
On a side note, and minus the recent sniping in other threads, Tacitian, is your opinion on the draft (or its equivalent) the same for nations other than our own? What about the ones we are fighting?
I look forward to a snipe-free future, my friend.
I have to answer your question in two parts:
1) Yes, in my opinion other nations should have some service requirement or draft. I think the relationship between government and the citizenry (admittedly, a tautology in democracies) is a reciprocal one. It is more than appropriate to require national service programs or conscription as the other side of the "citizenship package," if you will. I think it makes good philosophical sense in democracies and republics and encourages an active citizenry.
2) So when you ask about nations that we are fighting, I have to ask in return - 'are these nations democratic/republican?' If they are legitimate democracies, then yes, they are also well within bounds to draft citizens. If not, then the whole process of citizenship loses its voluntary character and there's no 'contract' relationship that needs balancing.
So if we were to go to war tomorrow with, say, Canada, I would feel it completely legitimate for them to draft citizens. Burma, probably not.
From a strictly military standpoint, of course, I would prefer that we fight tyrannies with really, really incompetent armies who surrender in short order.
And I wouldargue that there are two specific policies which I can't believe I will ever hear a legitimate argument for (from my perspective.) They are the draft, and the death penalty. As both of them neccesitate that the state have ownership over its citizens as opposed to the other way around, I cannot support either one, but to say that the draft - by definition non-voluntary military service - is acceptable in what you refer to as voluntary democracies, to me is an absolute contradiction in terms.
It seems that we are just going to disagree.
But let me offer this analogy as a last attempt to explain my position: you want a house. You want the protection from the elements that the walls and roof provide, you want the privacy afforded by your own bedrooms, you want the comforts of hot & cold running water, and you just want space to raise a family.
So the architect designs your dream house, the carpenters build it, and you move in. Then the bank shows up and wants the first mortgage payment. Am I to believe you say to them "This is a voluntary house! Why should I have to pay for this?!?"
This, to me, is the project of civilized government. Yes, it's voluntary, but it does have a price. We enter into a social contract voluntarily because the goods provided or aided by the existence of government - security, ordered liberty, prosperity - cannot be achieved by any other means.
Of course we can disagree as to the extent of that government, and which liberties it should or shouldn't allow, but I find it hard to deny that, at some point, the government (which is really just our collective agreement) will need us to balance the ledger. The times for this can be debated, of course, and that is the job for the citizenry. But I personally feel that the service itself is requisite.
I think your analogy is a little bit off. It'd be more like if the family was paying their mortgage, but had no interest in helping out with the neighborhood watch committee, or PTA meetings, or school board, or anything else that made that town what it was.
Come to think of it that was a pretty crappy analogy as well. Anyway, I'm actually closer to Tacitean's side about the draft. I guess I would compare it more to jury duty. I don't like it, but I accept it as a consequence of living in a society where we have a justice system. I would support a draft similar (but not exactly the same) to Israel's, where everyone serves, but serving can be as little as working at the Israeli national television station for a year, or working at a state-sponsored inner city service center. There's many aspects of serving your country that have nothing to do with going into battle and killing people. I'm just thinking off the top of my head, but I think it would be a lot better overall than having the poor kids get shipped off to do the bidding of the rich senators. I mean, I think the threat of having their own kids going off into the military would make a lot of people think more about what war means before they start advocating it. Also, there's also the theory that a draft would liberalize the military to an extent that we might not come off so awful in foreign countries as we do now. Anyway, Pascal, feel free to yell at me the next time you see me.
No, I've been avoiding those arguments because I agree with them but they go against my larger point. I have no problem with the Israeli system, which I think is just about perfect actually. I also think that a mandatory National Service would work wonders for civic awareness, and for narrowing the disparity between the rich and poor, allowing for the middle class to regroup. I've got no problem with mandating civil service, but rather with mandating military service. Another problem with the military draft is that it results in inferior tropps, training-wise and motivation-wise, but picture this analogy:
If football were removed from Academic settings, but high-school aged kids could still play on private teams, how many would play? Some would, sure, but not nearly as many as do when there exists a sub-culture built around it among their peers. On the inverse, if everyone were expected to play, the game would be shoddy. The current system (and to make the true analogy, extricurriculars would have to be mandatory, but I think that's a not-so-bad idea either) allows students to make the leap from thinking about maybe doing something to saying - well, that's what I'll do. The actors could pick the drama club, the jocksa could pick the football team, the singers could pick the glee club, the activists could pick the key club. Participation in Something would be required, but participation in whichever of those things you choose would be voluntary. If we had a National Service, people could pick primary school teaching or parks clean-up if they wanted to, but a lot of them would choose the military, because of the subculture that would develop, the inate need for the experience, a feeling that to serve elsewhere would be tantamount to cowardice, or a number of other reasons. I think we'd get a much larger, more cohesive army, with better morale, and every person there would be there by choice.
Your house analogy describes taxes. If the Mortgage broker, instead of asking for money, asked you to go fight the guy who made a pass at his wife the night before, then we'd be closer to reality, but yes, Society demands participation, and if you have no interest in us, we have no interest in you. That much we can agree on.
In terms of sheer military efficiency, I think it would make the most sense to have a core of professional/volunteer officers and the capacity for large conscripted reserves in the case of large-scale war. But I digress.
I'd really like to turn this back to the original thread on a "Cold War," though. I feel as though my previous statements have been sloppy or vague enough to be misconstrued, so let me be more direct this time.
I love Western Civilization. In my biased opinion, one of the greatest adventures in human history was the creation of the United States, a country whose stated goal from the outset was liberty. I think, over the long haul, liberty always leads to the best possible outcome for humanity.
But I am not blind to the fact that individual liberty as we understand it came after centuries of philosophical, political, and military struggle in Europe and America. Nor am I blind to the fact that liberty creates a warm climate for a lot of things to grow, things that the more puritanical among us would call "sins." Our popular culture - the one we export to the world - glorifies sex without love and violence without reprecussions. I mean, let's just take your example of James Dean smoking a cigarette driving a fast car with a buxom blonde. Why not just say "liberty - it leads to Satan"?
So if are to have a "cold war" with the forces of Islamic fundamentalism, we have to be honest about our liberty, and not paint a rosier picture than is warranted. We have to make the case that individual autonomy is better, not perfect; and that its defects are overwhelmed by its many benefits.
To do that, we have to lay out the history of the West and explain how we got to this point and why we're willing to trade the false appeal of the perfect (theocracy) for the merely good (liberal democracy). We have to show those in thrall to theocrats that the true path to sin is thinking that you can control every aspect of another individual's behavior.
It's a trade-off, to be sure. But the genius of Western liberalism is a simple recognition that people have the right to be imperfect and the right to correct that imperfectability in a manner they see fit. Sometimes people aren't very good at it, and sometimes people are. But the alternative is tyranny and the slow degeneration of all virtues.
So I think that should be our pitch.
Post a Comment
<< Home