The Duck of Minerva

Robert Kelly

Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy, Pusan National University, Korea Home Website: https://AsianSecurityBlog.wordpress.com/ Twitter: @Robert_E_Kelly

Recent Posts

Guest Post – Dave Kang: ‘Military Spending in East Asia is Lower than You Think’

by Robert Kelly | 15 May, 2014 |

The following is a guest-post by my good friend Dave Kang of USC. Below he complements his recent TNI essay with the full flow of charts and graphics they screened out. This post is an important rejoinder to the constant assertion (think Robert Kaplan) that East Asia is on the brink of war and that everyone is freaked out by China. The thing is, East Asian military spending doesn’t actually suggest that at all… “In a recent National Interest essay I argued that military expenditures in East Asia do not appear to be excessively high. In this post I’d like to post the figures that informed the...

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More on Moral Hazard in US Alliances: Explaining Japan-Korea Tension (and Greece-Turkey?)

by Robert Kelly | 27 January, 2014 |

So this post is a bleg to those of you who know more about alliances than me. I am considering writing this up for an article, so I thought I would ‘crowd-source’ early comments on the basic argument. I also wonder if someone elsewhere has already suggested this idea in the vast alliance literature. So please let me know. The motivation is inductive – the deepening tension between Japan and Korea has suggested the addendum to alliance theory I am proposing here. But I wonder if others have said this before. Put briefly, I don’t think entrapment or abandonment captures the US position between...

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Book Review: “North Korea in Transition” – Oh Wait, it’s Not in Transition…

by Robert Kelly | 13 January, 2014 |

I know book reviews bore everyone, but the journal where I published this doesn’t post electronic versions of book reviews. So I thought this would be a good place to put it for internet accessibility. I tried to make this interesting by focusing on trends in NK, rather than just summarizing the constituent essays. It’s a great introduction to North Korea with lots of big names. I learned a lot from it. But I had to object to the title, likely chosen by an ill-informed editor looking for something catchy. North Korea is not in transition. If anything, we should be focusing on how remarkably...

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Why Does South Korea View Japan as a National Security Threat Worse than China? My Hypothesis: Competition with North Korea

by Robert Kelly | 19 December, 2013 |

This has been on my mind a lot because the Korea-Japan meltdown has been so bad recently. And I think it’s a good research question if you are into Asian IR. I have written about this before and just did again this month and yet again. I’ve argued repeatedly that the reason America’s allies in Asia cooperate so poorly is moral hazard. But this is different question. It is meant to explore why Koreans exaggerate Japan so much. Why do Koreans – the media specifically - routinely say things like Japan is run by right-wing fanatics who want to invade the Liancourt Rocks with samurai? These...

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4 Quick Hypotheses on Why China Suddenly Declared this New Air Defense Zone

by Robert Kelly | 29 November, 2013 |

If you haven’t yet seen the zone’s geography, here it is to the left, complete with its overlap with the Korean and Japanese zones. The most important conflict of course is over Senkaku, but Korea watchers will also note that the Ieodo submerged reef, which Korea claims, is also in the zone. Gotta wonder what the Chinese were thinking by giving Korea and Japan common cause over anything. Foolish. Dan Drezner asked the question I think pretty much everyone is wondering now: did the PRC really expect the US, Japan, and SK to just accept this out of the blue? Obviously they’re not, and it’s...

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My Japanese Hate-Mail Tells I am a ‘S— Kimchi Propagandist’ (Hah!) …Where’s Thunderdome When You Need it?

by Robert Kelly | 17 November, 2013 |

Hollywood’s solution to intractable interstate conflicts This is what happens when you write in the area of Japanese-Korean relations. Pretty much everybody hates you, because you don’t tell them what they want to hear, and then maximalists come out of the woodwork to, as Robert Farley aptly put it, “explore Japanese-Korean animosity one angry e-mail at a time.” As I’ve argued before, there’s little domestic cost to the either party for the most outrageous rhetoric, so this just goes on and on. Given that intractability,  the Obama administration’s big idea to untangle this - sending...

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The Endlessly Fatiguing Japanese-Korean Squabbling is the Worst it’s been in Decades

by Robert Kelly | 12 November, 2013 |

I am so burned out on this issue, I’m ready to say we should just nuke the Liancourt Rocks (left) to end this whole thing. But it’s everywhere now in the regional media. Park pointedly won’t meet Abe, which the Japanese media is reading as a huge snub. She even said she’d talk to Pyongyang before Tokyo (yikes!). The Japanese are getting more open in expressing loathing for Korea. The Americans are livid. And the Chinese and Norks are loving it all, I have no doubt. So here’s yet another essay on this topic. This is the English version of a long-form essay I wrote for Newsweek Korea last...

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No More Neocon Faux-Cassandra Posturing: American Defense is not “in Decline”

by Robert Kelly | 7 November, 2013 |

Two pieces got emailed to me in the last few days that nicely illustrate just how entrenched semi-imperial thinking has become in Washington, how wildly disconnected from the reality of US security our foreign policy community’s threat assessments have become, and the hysteria that greets serious debate on DoD’s size in this post-Great Recession era of high unemployment and large deficits. This, by good-journalist-turned-disturbing-militarist Robert Kaplan, and this, by the ‘Iraq was a victory’ crowd at AEI. Here’s Kaplan: “The bottom may be starting to fall out of the U.S. defense budget. I...

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The United Nations and American Public Opinion

The United Nations and American Public Opinion

by Robert Kelly | 27 October, 2013 | ,

The following is a guest-post from Martin Edwards, professor at Seton Hall’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations. Martin’s website is here. How do Americans think about the United Nations? The results of recent surveys by the Pew Research Global Attitudes Project and the Better World Campaign offer some insights on this question. These organizations have tracked opinions on the United Nations since 2004 and 2009, and the findings are based on random samples of adults and registered voters, respectively. One of the findings in both surveys is that there are partisan differences in...

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The Duck of Minerva is blocked in China

by Robert Kelly | 23 October, 2013 |

I was just in China for a work thing, when I checked the Duck for something. Turns out the Duck is screened out by the Great Firewall. Even if you go to Google Search Hong Kong, it’s still blocked. Wow. Who knew even nerdy IR theory and pop culture references posed a threat to CCP rule? Lame. Even more lame - my own website, which gets way less traffic, is blocked too. For sites as small as mine, that’s almost a complement – hah. If only I had readers similarly interested enough to even bother…

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