#Winning the Future

We'll do it by befuddling the rest of the world:

China does not know quite what to make of Charlie Sheen.
The Chinese Communist newspaper Global Times, is running an amazing op-ed by a person named Hao Leifeng listing all the ways in which Sheen is a "classic example of the difference in Western and Eastern values and norms. ... Is he too poor to set up his wives and mistresses in different houses?"

Also: "He ignored his own father's advice to keep quiet, who was once the president of the US. Sheen is a disgrace, unfilial to his father and his fatherland."

More at the link. I do find it somewhat unnerving that China's press thinks "The West Wing" was real. Maybe something was lost in translation. Anyway, I think this represents a good opportunity for American diplomacy. We should make Charlie Sheen a roving ambassador, sent into whatever country we're having trouble with in order to bewilder them into acquiescence. Imagine how Gaddafi would react if he was told a warlock with tigerblood was coming to Tripoli? (And with a his own army of female attendants) Or what if we told him that the youth of Libya actually were on drugs... the drug called "Charlie Sheen" that is so powerful that if normal humans try it once they die. Gaddafi would definitely cede power and leave the country, pronto.

Or imagine how the Taliban would respond if they heard a "total bitchin' rock star from Mars" was the new American secret weapon against terror? They'd quake in their boots. The Taliban can't even handle Earth music... Mars rock and roll would make their heads literally explode.

Just imagine the possibilities. We could get the globe cleaned up in no time. Boom. Winning.

(Pop culture is usually Drezner's beat, I know, but I couldn't pass this one up. HT to somebody on Twitter.)

Dodging the "G" Word

AFoE links to this BBC report indicating a possible thaw in relations between Turkey and Armenia:

They are to hold six weeks of domestic consultations on the move after which their parliaments will vote on it, their foreign ministries announced.

Negotiations on the mending of ties have been brokered by Switzerland.

The two countries remain deeply divided over the fate Armenians suffered under Turkish Ottoman rule.

Turkey has resisted widespread calls for it to recognise the mass killing of Armenians during World War I as an act of genocide.

Interestingly, an impetus for this has been soccer: the two nations are in the same World Cup qualifying group, and are playing next month in Turkey. The Armenian president has plans to attend.

The Turkish-Armenian border has been closed for more than 15 years and the two sides have been in some state of conflict since Armenia gained its independence in 1991. The controversy goes much further back than that, of course, and Turkey's refusal to acknowledge the genocide of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire -- in which 1.5 million Armenians were killed -- has made peaceful relations between the two basically impossible. In fact, that genocide inspired the first use of the phrase "crime against humanity".

The U.S. has not formally acknowledged the genocide either, since that would involve alienating a chief Middle East ally when it already has so few. But most of the rest of the OECD has declared the "events of 1915" (as Turkey calls them) to be a genocide, as have other countries, international organizations, and over half of the individual U.S. states.

The lack of universal international condemnation was encouragement to Hitler, who said 70 years ago (on the eve of the invasion of Poland) that he would not hesitate to murder without mercy, and had no fear of retribution because "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" This quote marks the entrance to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. (image above).

So it is a good sign that Turkey and Armenia are moving towards re-establishing normal relations and re-opening the border. But it will be even better when an honest accounting of the 1915 genocide is taken so that real reconciliation can take place.

For further reading on U.S./Turkey relations, and why Turkey is the most anti-American country on earth, see this report at e-IR. The nut: many Turks dislike American support for Kurds, and are scared of American imperialist instincts in the Middle East.

The Softer Side of Henry Kissinger

The NY Times ran a short profile on Jon Huntsman Jr., the new U.S. Ambassador to China. He represents a bit of a departure from previous ambassadors: he's a former governor (of Utah), speaks Mandarin fluently, spent several years in Taiwan as a Mormon missionary, and his family has had significant business dealings in China (he claims to have no personal stake in the chemical company that bears the family name). It appears that his primary mandate is to get movement on climate change coordination, so good luck to him.

But the most interesting part of the article comes at the end:

Mr. Huntsman’s fascination with China goes back to July 1971, when as an 11-year-old he visited the Nixon White House with his father, who was then serving as a special assistant.

At the time, he says, he met Henry A. Kissinger and helped carry his bags to a waiting car, which was about to take Mr. Kissinger to the airport on a secret and historic mission.

“I said to him, ‘Where are you going?’ ” he recalled Wednesday. “And he said, ‘Please don’t tell anyone. I’m going to China.’ ”

Thirty-eight years later, so is Huntsman Jr., and godspeed. I pretty much despise Kissinger, but it is funny to visualize that anecdote. Actually, it's funny to imagine any interaction between Kissinger and a child.

American Diplomacy and Public Opinion

This post over at the Monkey Cage by John Sides speaks a bit to my earlier post on Obama's global poll numbers.

"Have U.S. public diplomacy efforts during the post-9/11 period successfully improved foreign publics’ appraisals of U.S. foreign policy? We examine this question by estimating the effects of U.S. high-level visits to foreign countries on public opinion in those countries…we show that the effects of such visits were initially significantly large and positive, but weakened once the war in Iraq began and international media started reporting negative aspects of the ‘‘war on terror.’’ Most interestingly, we find some evidence that high-level visits eventually exhibited a backlash effect."

That is from this new paper by Benjamin Goldsmith and Yusaku Horiuchi (gated; ungated). The data come from surveys in 61 countries conducted between September 11, 2001 and 2006, each of which asked questions about how respondents viewed the US. Goldsmith and Horiuchi then determine whether respondents surveyed in the wake of a high-level visit from American officials had more positive or negative views of the US.

Right after September 11th, public diplomacy worked. Compared to respondents in countries with no visit, respondents in countries who had just experienced a high-level visit gave 8% more positive responses and 16% fewer negative responses when asked their opinions of the US.

In the period between the beginning of the Iraq War and the Abu Ghraib scandal, high-level visits had no significant effect on positive responses but were associated with 17% more negative responses.

After Abu Ghraib , high-level visits made responses made things even worse, driving down positive responses by 9 points and driving up negative responses by 20 points.

The lesson, say Goldsmith and Horiuchi, is that diplomacy depends on credibility:

"A U.S. leader perceived as credible abroad, even to the somewhat limited extent that this was so for George W. Bush or Colin Powell before March 2003, can have a substantial impact on public opinion about the United States and its foreign policy in the country he or she visits. As that credibility is diminished, however, our findings clearly show a loss of influence and indicate the potential for negative backlash."

Obama's New International Poll Numbers

During the presidential campaign last fall, many observers as well as candidate Obama himself, predicted that his election would go a long way in repairing America's relations with its major allies in Western Europe, as well as elevate the position of the United States in the minds of people throughout the developing world. The Pew Global Attitudes Project just released its findings on this issue.

Mr. Obama, according to the survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, enjoys greater confidence among Germans than does Chancellor Angela Merkel, and among the French than President Nicolas Sarkozy. His election in itself, pollsters found, helped restore the United States’ image abroad to levels unseen since the Clinton years.

Improved attitudes toward the United States were most marked in Western Europe, but also evident in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as some predominantly Muslim countries.

In Indonesia, where Mr. Obama spent part of his youth, no fewer than 73 percent of those polled said that his election had directly improved their opinion of the United States.

Europeans, in particular, seemed to be responding positively to Mr. Obama. The number of Britons saying that they trusted the American president to do the “right thing” in world affairs soared to 86 percent this year, under Mr. Obama, compared with just 16 percent last year, under President George W. Bush. The increase was slightly larger in both Germany and France.

For the first time since Pew began making the comparison, people in Turkey, Egypt, Nigeria and Indonesia — all predominantly Muslim nations — expressed greater confidence in the American president than in Osama bin Laden.

This finding is without a doubt a good thing for the United States. I expect these numbers to decrease with time, much like we have seen Obama's poll numbers dip in the United States as the honeymoon has worn off and the battles over health care and the economy continue. But, even if the global numbers do fall off from the current highs, it's clear that the United States has regained a lot of its ethical legitimacy in the eyes of its allies and people in the developing world. This change alone, increases the probability of American success in issue areas pretty dramatically.

I don't know how far back the Pew project data on global presidential approval goes, but if the data is available, it would be interesting to see if higher poll levels abroad correlate with greater success in American diplomatic efforts. Intuition tells me that this should hold, but I've noticed lately that intuition can be pretty damn wrong quite often. It'd be great to see some hard data on this topic.