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

China’s Counter to the Asian ‘Pivot’ (2): ‘Swarms’ in the Pacific

by Robert Kelly | 2 April, 2012 |

Part one is here, where I noted China’s growing fear of encirclement (I get Chinese students a lot who talk about this). So, in the role of China, I argued for an Indian charm offensive to prevent encirclement, and how China might buy off Korea from the US camp by abandoning North Korea. Here are some more ‘B-Team’ style ideas for pushing back on US local dominance, including swarming the US navy in the western Pacific with cheap drones and missiles:3. Build missiles and drones; don’t bother with a navy.I’m not a big hardware guy, but it should be pretty obvious that trying to ‘out-ship’ the...

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China’s Counter to the Asian ‘Pivot’ (1): Korea, India

by Robert Kelly | 30 March, 2012 |

So the US is supposedly going to pivot to Asia and start worrying more about China. This makes sense (which is probably why we won’t do it). The Middle East has become a pretty terrible sinkhole of American power. Increasingly the verdict on the war on terrorism is negative, and we should probably retrench from the Middle East (but we won’t because of the religious right’s interest in the region). Mearsheimer argued that if it weren’t for 9/11 we probably would have focused on China a lot earlier. Kaplan sketched how the US would defeat China in a war. I argued a few years ago, at the height...

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Russia’s Dubious Place in the BRICS: A Response to My Critics

by Robert Kelly | 26 March, 2012 |

My original post suggesting that Putin’s bogus reelection might be cause to eject Russia from the BRICS got a lot of traffic and comment (both here and on my own site). It’s gotten to the point where it’s just easier to summarize my responses to a general set of critiques. It seems there are three main criticisms: 1. I exaggerated; Russia is still a great power. 2. I didn’t provide enough data and links. 3. I don’t really ‘get’ Russia, or I’m just recycling western propaganda. (In passing, I find it curious/frustrating as an author that what I think is my more creative and fresh work in the...

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Seoul 2012 Nuclear Security Summit

by Robert Kelly | 22 March, 2012 |

This week is the big nuclear security summit in Seoul, with something like 60 attending countries and over 40 heads of state or government. A friend from a Korean expat magazine here in town asked me for a brief write-up. Here are the issues as I see them from Korean IR and the local media. For full-blown think-tankery on the summit, try here. 1. Obama’s personal commitment to de-nuclearization: I can’t think of any president since Reagan who seems as personally offended by nuclear weapons as Obama. Back in the day, Reagan watched ‘The Day After,’ ‘Wargames’ and other nuclear war movies and...

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It’s Time to De-Russianize the BRICS

by Robert Kelly | 18 March, 2012 |

With Putin’s ‘return’ to the presidency, Russia is now officially a joke as a serious great power state. True, Putin has been ridiculous for awhile, what with those shirtless photo-ops that came across like desperate, bizarre geopolitical ‘ads’ that Russia is still a superpower. But this is different. Not even Chinese elites play the sorts of merry-go-round games at the top that Putin has engineered in the last 6 months. To their great credit, Chinese presidents and premiers serve and go. Russia is now the only one of the BRICS in which power does not rotate. Instead, Putin is starting to...

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The US will not ‘Pivot’ much to Asia (3): We can’t afford it

by Robert Kelly | 15 March, 2012 |

Here are parts one and two, where I argued that there is no constituency in the US for the pivot, and that Asia is so culturally distant from the US, that Americans are unlikely to care enough to sustain the pivot. But we also don’t really need to pivot, nor do we have the money for it:3. The ME is characterized by so many nondemocracies that the US must be heavily invested (at least to meet current US goals – oil, Israel, counterterrorism). Katzenstein noted this; America has no strong subordinate anchor-state in the region (like Germany in Europe and Japan in Asia). This is why the GOP...

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The US will not ‘Pivot’ much to Asia (2): We don’t really care @ Asia

by Robert Kelly | 12 March, 2012 |

This is my Asian pivot.Here is part one, where I argued that there is no constituency in the US to support an Asian pivot besides the some businesspeople. 2. Connected to the first point is that Americans don’t know much about Asia. Of course, it’s true Americans don’t know a lot about the world generally. We are a superpower, so we don’t have to know about others; others have to know about us. That’s why ‘they’ learn English, and we think Urdu is a country in the Sahara. We are geographically far away, so touring Europe or Asia is very expensive. We don’t (need to) speak foreign languages....

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The US will not ‘Pivot’ much to Asia (1): We don’t really Want to

by Robert Kelly | 8 March, 2012 |

 I found this image here. So the US pivot toward Asia is all the rage in foreign policy now. Obama and Secretary Clinton genuinely seem to believe in this, and there good reasons for it. Briefly put, Asia has the money, people, and guns to dramatically impact world politics in a way that no other region can now. But I think the US Asian pivot won’t happen much nonetheless, because: 1) Americans, especially Republicans, don’t care about Asia, but they really care about the Middle East (a point the GOP presidential debates made really obvious); 2) Americans know less about Asia than any part...

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Some IR Thoughts on the GOP Debate Marathon

by Robert Kelly | 5 March, 2012 |

<img alt="" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('bb5de15d-7c15-4871-a2cc-6763366de6e7'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" src="https://lh5.ggpht.com/-W1vOumSW7Og/T1A4_HIYJyI/AAAAAAAAAGk/26F_nfPYPEE/videof869ee43bf33%25255B4%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" />I guess if you speak a foreign language, you’re a traitorHere were my first, domestic politics thoughts on the GOP debate-run, particularly the competitive, extreme position-taking forced onto the candidates by the audience reactions. But I thought the debates actually...

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Some Political Science Thoughts on the GOP Debate Marathon

by Robert Kelly | 2 March, 2012 |

<img src="https://lh4.ggpht.com/-kdQcW4Vl7-k/T1A4B7ds90I/AAAAAAAAAGc/qah90Do3fTk/videoc8c44ca00ba6%25255B13%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" style="border-style: none" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('1f164c0c-2f86-4021-9047-76be574cf4fc'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" alt="" />Here’s the last one if you haven’t seen it yet So it looks like the GOP debating season is over. Wow. I don’t study American politics, but I can’t remember a marathon run of debates like that ever before. (Can anyone speak to that point,...

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