The UAE rolls over.

Regrettably, I have to post this without comment: the BBC reports that the UAE seized North Korean cargo containing conventional arms bound for Iran. Why without comment? Because it’s either too small to be consequential or too big to get my head around. As an argument for the latter, consider it phrased this way: an Arab ally of the United States moved of its own accord to uphold a United Nations Security Council resolution to the detriment of another Middle Eastern country’s ability to support terrorists in another state in the region. (Rocket-propelled grenades are not used for putting down dissident revolts.)

Hegemonic coercion? Bandwagoning? Regional balancing? Reputational gains? Normative socialization? Thanks, but no comment.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Arms Control, Middle East , DPRK, uae

How much does a transaction cost?

Since the start of mature liberal institutionalist theory, which we typically date to 1984 and Keohane’s After Hegemony, the rationalist explanations for international institutions have remained remarkably consistent. Keohane’s assertion that institutions are intended to ameliorate uncertainty among contracting members (properly, risk, by bumping up enforcement mechanisms and the dispersal of reputational information) and transaction costs (by providing a centralized forum where bargaining and enforcement processes are regularized) has stood the test of time. Constructivists have added hypotheses about socialization others have offered propositions about domestic hand-typing and signaling, but especially if one includes enforcement and bargaining costs as transaction costs (which economists traditionally have), the importance of transaction costs becomes paramount. The conjectures of the Rational Design school of Koremenos, Lipson, and Snidal bear this out.

The problem is— nobody seems to know how much a transaction costs. To my knowledge, no-one has attempted to estimate these costs or adumbrate parametric conditions for when and how they vary.

International theorists have traditionally assumed that transaction costs are high. Keohane argued originally that institutions’ reduction of transaction costs made institutions attractive to states, made the cost of illegitimate bargains higher than legitimate ones, and allowed states to capture economies of scale in generating agreements through institutions, and allowed issue linkages and side payments that made agreement more likely. The rational design school argues that two of their independent variables (number of participants and [risk] between them) exert the leverage they do through transaction costs (so centralized control of international institutions should increase as number increases, flexibility should decrease, and so on).

An excellent recent article by Daniel Verdier in International Organization posits even further-reaching effects for transaction costs. Multilateralism and bilateralism are not substitutes for states but rather complementary strategies: states wishing to found a regime will institute a multilateral contract among states for whom the cost of the institution is relatively low, complement this institution with bilateral deals to buy the next level of states (with moderate costs), and exclude states with too-high costs of compliance. This segmented arrangement is attractive to regime-founding states because the transaction costs of bilateral arrangements are prohibitively high to deal with this way, and multilateralism economizes on them. The Nonproliferation Treaty, he says, exemplifies this logic.

But what if transaction costs are low? Verdier’s multi-level arrangement looks less necessary: as transaction costs fall, more can be accomplished through bilateral bargains and both other options, multilateral institution and exclusion, become rarer. Likewise, we can invert other hypotheses depending on transaction costs: issue linkage would be rarer, institutions should be less centralized, more flexible, and less appealing generally. (And there are myriad other propositions of this type that not included here that would evince similar adjustments.)

But how much rarer, how much more and how much less? Well, more (less, rarer) than we thought previously—but beyond that it would be difficult to say without some numerical value. This is hard to estimate because the costs are hard to observe and vary by situation: the category presumably includes the cost of forum shopping, the time involved for negotiations to come to agreement, the opportunity cost of spending time on negotiation, the salaries of diplomats, and so on. These will vary by issue area and by institution, but the costs of each will also vary by the contracting states involved, each of whom will have their own unique utility function for each of these terms. For states with a strong interest in a given agreement become accomplished in a certain way, transaction costs may be so marginal to the utility of concluding an agreement that states will not assess them completely. States that employ large contingents of international lawyers (the United States and the EU) will find transaction costs less burdensome. States that do a good deal of business, or are naturally amiable toward one another, may confront lower transaction costs. (And so on and so forth.)

If these conditions could be codified as hypotheses, the far-reaching influence of transaction costs in the institutionalist literature may make the findings of a formal model or specific estimation very drastic indeed. But maybe not. They’re just transaction costs, after all.

a.j.m.

Filed under: International Organization, Theory , Keohane, transaction costs

Thinking creatively about nuclear status

I was at first intrigued by Hugh Gusterson’s latest column for the Bulletin. But then I found myself a little disappointed.

The crux of Gusterson’s argument:

There is more than one way of being nuclear and, in the emergent international system, stealthier and more virtual forms of nuclear weapons ownership are becoming more salient.

He then goes on to suggest a number of schemes that would leave formal control of North Korea’s arsenal in the hands of Kim Jong-Il while supposedly ameliorating the political havoc quasi-recognition would undoubtedly wreak on both the region and the nonproliferation regime.

One obvious problem with this approach is that nuclear weapons are just too dangerous to leave lying around. More to the point, however, is that unless the North Koreans can reap the benefits of nuclear weapons ownership, any kind of creative agreement isn’t likely to be sustainable. And those benefits derive exactly from giving the North the kind of control that poses a threat to the security of the region and the stability of the nonproliferation regime.

It’s all politics

It seems to me like Gusterson is going about solving the problem in reverse. He’s right to point out that there are noticeable political distinctions among states in possession of deployable nuclear warheads (leaving aside the question of how deployable the North’s nukes are). France’s nuclear arsenal, for example, is not the sole lynchpin of its international status; France’s position in the top tier of the international system depends on a number of other factors, including its veto on the Security Council, its economic influence in Europe and the Middle East, its relationship with other Western powers, and to some extent its conventional superiority. On the other hand, U.S. policy toward Pakistan would be very different if it didn’t have nuclear weapons.

Few countries are more aware of this reality than North Korea. Its ongoing pursuit of nuclear weapons is intended to address what are fundamentally political concerns. Nuclear weapons are a way to put their country on the map while staying out of the West’s sights in basic security terms. Achieving these goals depends very little on whether they retain formal custody of a dozen nuclear warheads. What matters is the international recognition that flows to a state that poses a threat to its neighbors, particularly through the control of complex technology. If Kim Jong-Il thought he could provide for the North’s security and influence without investing in an expensive and technically complex weapons program, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

Gusterson is essentially fudging the “thinking creatively” about the politics of the situation in order to maintain a technical status quo that is meaningless without the politics.

To be or not to be nuclear

Still, I think Gusterson makes a key point, namely that the distinction between nuclear haves and have-nots is, to some extent, malleable. If the Iran case tells us anything, it’s that in the space between nuclear and non-nuclear lies a vast expanse of technology and politics. States can walk right up to the nuclear threshold technologically while remaining far behind politically. (The converse is also true, but, well, a lot less threatening.) It would take Japan, for example, very little time to turn its stockpile of plutonium into a nuclear weapon. But the odds of that happening are next to nil because the political climate in Japan remains inimical to weaponization.

The framework for solving a problem like Korea is to find a political outcome that also mitigates the technical threat—to force the technical reality to conform to the desired political one.

In concrete terms, this means developing alternative ways of getting international recognition that do not rely on nuclear weapons, maybe starting with symbolic but materially insignificant gestures, such as visits by and talks with top-level officials in exchange for cooperation on disarmament. In the medium and long term, it is necessary to demonstrate that there are prestige dividends to rejoining and complying the nonproliferation regime. It might also be necessary to satisfy the need to demonstrate technological prowess by cooperating on a number of showy technical projects, particularly nuclear ones.

Obviously, if any of this were easy, we still wouldn’t be talking about this. We’re not talking enough, however, about developing concrete ways to satisfy North Korea’s stated desires. Negotiations involve give and take, and unless there is something to fill the prestige void, any solution the Six Parties stumble upon isn’t likely to be sustainable. Gusterson, I think, would agree.

When we talk about the prestige or status implications of nuclear weapons, we’re talking about a political reality of which the nukes themselves are only a symbol. The problem is that nuclear weapons are too dangerous a charm to keep hanging around.

Brian

Filed under: Arms Control, Symbolism , North Korea

When moderation is extreme.

I don’t read Paul Krugman regularly, either his blog or his columns, but I do check in occasionally. I don’t read him regularly because I, like many who are inclined to centrism or moderation, can find him shrill, extreme, reflexively partisan. I keep checking in because I respect three things about him: first, we shouldn’t forget that he is a once-in-a-generation economist; second, he very consciously grasps his own shrill extremism and wrestles with it; third, he’s right—a lot.

In the post cited above he comes to the following conclusion: by the time the colored threat level scheme came around and Krugman denounced it as a political ploy, in the absence of hard data it was nevertheless rational to distrust the Bush administration, who had already established a very poor reputation for trustworthiness. This seems right, and is worth noting to any of us centrists who are generally inclined to accept the government’s benevolence in matters where sensitive information is involved. But Krugman is correct on this point: the Bush administration, by its own extremism, inverted the normal presumption of political discourse and created a world in which the moderates were taking an extreme and irrational position; people like Krugman, and Glenn Greenwald, and Russ Feingold, and Ron Suskind, and even, maybe, Dennis Kucinich were the sanest among us.

We should all hope ardently that the world doesn’t require this type of adjustment of us again in our lifetimes, but we should remember to recognize the possibility: there are political situations so extreme that extreme dissent is the correct stance. If the Bush administration is one example, of course there are others that persist constantly (some would pick drastic inequality, global hunger, genocide; others have other causes). The key to being an astute practitioner of politics is to move smoothly and accurately along this scale, from the presumptive position of moderation to strident dissent when necessary, to be articulate in both positions, ashamed of neither, and principled always. Can you?

a.j.m.

Filed under: Practicing Politics , hysteria, Krugman

New elite interrogating unit.

Tony Arend alertly reposts an NPR story detailing the creation of a new elite civilian interrogating unit in the FBI, which is almost certainly an excellent move. The suggestion for the unit came from a high-level panel Obama appointed just after taking office, and it is now being put into effect. The development is likely to be positive for two reasons.

First, despite all the tremendous attention being given to interrogation tactics in the previous administration, the consensus among knowledgeable observers seems to be that a) very little good information came out of the extreme interrogation methods we did apply, and that b) we had few productive methods of extracting information. The article cites experience of Matthew Alexander’s elite interrogating team that eventually located al-Zarqawi by eschewing torture and employing alternative techniques. His subsequent piece in the Washington Post was one of the very best and most haunting reads of last year. He and Steven Kleinman had been pushing Obama’s panel toward reaching this conclusion.

The other reason is that locating the unit in the FBI is one more step toward transitioning the “War on Terror” to a question of civilian law enforcement, which is what it should been in the first place. Alexander’s quote to NPR underscores the point: “Al-Qaida has more in common with a criminal gang or criminal organization than it does with rank-and-file soldiers,” he said. Properly classifying terrorism as a problem of transnational criminality rather than as a “war” could have avoided the calamitous costs associated with the misclassification—trying to pursue the former with the methods of the latter.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Other transnat. , interrogation, Obama, terrorism

Principles of health care reform.

Jonathan Cohn, in the New Republic yesterday, writes another excellent article that succeeds in conveying what a weird amalgam the current health insurance proposal is. The guiding principles of the current debate are these: (a) reform should be as bipartisan as possible, (b) it should push as much insurance as possible through employers (the “you can keep the plan you’ve got” clause), and (c) it should be revenue-neutral. The difficulty, of course, is that both of these principles make for worse policy—fewer insured, less choice, higher costs, worse care.

Because we are trying to claw our way gradually up a continuum to a sustainable solution (single-payer health care, for example), we end up with this bizarre and universally suboptimal middle-ground. Take the case of the exchanges, which I’ve written about before. The current plan will establish a marketplace through which individuals could purchase insurance from both public and private providers; the exchanges are regulated, exclusion because of pre-existing condition is prohibited, subsidies are provided to low-income families entering the exchange, and so on. The trouble is that the current plan would prohibit any individual who currently receives coverage from their employer to enter the exchange. This makes employers unhappy because small businesses will have to provide costly health insurance; it gives consumers worse care because they’re prohibited from entering an efficient market that drives down costs if they so desire. And even if the exchange does attract a significant number of uninsured Americans, they may not have the benefit of a competitive public option now, or this public option will be made worse off.

The long and short of it is, the principles that Obama has put in place to guide the debate make for worse policy, no matter how much maneuvering is done within those guidelines. The guidelines, not just political opposition, prohibit reasonable options from rising tot he surface. Notice that there is a perfectly simple middle-ground between a single-payer plan and the current proposal: allow any American to enter the exchange or keep their current option as they please. Those who don’t want a public health care plan because they’re worried Obama is going to come into their homes and put a pillow over their children—just don’t switch. It would be difficult for those who do leave their employers’ plan, join the exchange, and opt for the public option to argue that they are being coerced simply because the government can offer better care. You will have ever liberals’ heartfelt condolences for being enticed into health. This is not even what many experts feel is the optimal solution, a single-payer plan; this is a simple adjustment to the current compromise that would provide better coverage.

So here is the point: more and more it seems like health care is not an issue that this polity can cope with adequately. There is too much vitriol, too much opposition, too much fascination with democratic procedure to accomplish anything worthwhile. The Democrats botched this thing from a start: you can’t fight hyperbolic fire with an ongoing negotiation. Health care reform is one of those things that should be negotiated by technocratic, bipartisan experts, behind closed doors, with access to every shred of information and data available to the American populace, and then voted on by congress, yes or no, in one fell swoop. Health insurance is not a point for compromise and posturing: health insurance is one of the basic duties of a civilized populace, and one the United States currently does not live up to. Health insurance should be expensive for its government, unabashedly successful, so capable it becomes transparent, and this accomplished by any reasonable political means necessary. Our government do what it takes to ensure that none of us have to think about health care again—because it is one of that scant handful of things a government must do for its people.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Domestic, Health, Practicing Politics , single-payer

Make the right case

Pouring through working papers from the last few NPT preparatory conferences, I stumbled upon this indictment of Iran by the U.S. delegation:

Iran…has not complied with its nonproliferation obligations, particularly Articles II and III of the NPT and its safeguards agreement with the IAEA…Indeed, its violations continue to this day and, in some respects, thus present an even greater challenge to the nonproliferation regime.

Iran has been found in violation of Article III by the IAEA Board of Governors. No beef with that part. But let’s review Articles II and III of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, shall we?

Article II

Each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; and not to seek or receive any assistance in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.

Having not built or taken delivery of nuclear weapons, having not been given oversight over another country’s nuclear arsenal, the boldface clause is where Iran’s guilt would lie. But it’s not clear what the U.S. is basing its case on.

State’s Noncompliance Report only points to Iran’s enrichment program as evidence of its noncompliance with Article II. A stronger case would point to Iran’s possession of documents for casting uranium metal into hemispheres and its research into multipoint initiation explosives. While those documents do little to advance Iran’s tangible progress toward a nuclear weapon, they’re at least evidence that Iran was considering weaponization.

Why am I bringing this up now? Isn’t this all just low-hanging fruit…more evidence of the Bush administration playing fast and loose with logic and international law? Because until the United States says otherwise, this document is U.S. policy. If we’re going to be taken seriously going into the 2010 NPT Review Conference, we might want to square the evidence with the charge.

Brian

Filed under: Arms Control , Iran, NPT

The next American cities.

A couple of days ago, this marvelous little page on frumin.net was going around pretty hard. The page describes the contents of a report from the New York Met. Transportation Council that gives traffic numbers for various routes into Manhattan, which are staggering. The summary is well done, so I’ll simply quote it here:

Just to get warmed up, chew on this – from 8:00AM to 8:59 AM on an average Fall day in 2007 theNYC Subway carried 388,802 passengers into the CBD on 370 trains over 22 tracks. In other words, a train carrying 1,050 people crossed into the <CBD every 6 seconds. Breathtaking if you ask me.

Over this same period, the average number of passengers in a vehicle crossing any of the East River crossings was 1.20. This means that, lacking the subway, we would need to move 324,000 additional vehicles into the CBD (never mind where they would all park). [...]

At best, it would take 167 inbound lanes, or 84 copies of the Queens Midtown Tunnel, to carry what the NYC Subway carries over 22 inbound tracks through 12 tunnels and 2 (partial) bridges. At worst, 200 new copies of 5th Avenue. Somewhere in the middle would be 67 West Side Highways or 76 Brooklyn Bridges.

More complete numbers are available on that site and, naturally, on the report itself. He goes on to calculate roughly the additional amount of space needed to park all the cars that the subway saves from coming onto the island, which leaves massive black blocs down that stretch from 3rd Ave to 9th and take up three times the size of Central Park.

What the author neglects to note is that the continuum does not run between the current situation and this counterfactual New York made up of huge black blotches—in fact there are possibilities that extend in the opposite direction. Right now New York is in a large part made up of those huge black boxes, it is just that they are split into a capillary grid that covers the entire city. When the streets are punctuated by blocks, it is difficult to see just how much city space is taken up by surface streets. So I got curious.

The images below were hacked together very casually and unscientifically in Photoshop, without any help from my seventh-grade art teacher. They are in no way precise or accurate—but they are illustrative of just how much precious urban space is taken up by surface streets. That’s a lot of space! And yes, we do make use of it, but think of the opportunity cost—could we make better use of precious urban land that we mostly use for baking asphalt.

I’ve said it before on this page and I’ll say it again—the first day an American urban area prohibits private cars in its limits will be a great day for the human race. Note that not every street would have to vanish immediately, to provide for access for emergency services—but every other one perhaps could be closed to provide space for public markets, parks, playgrounds, gardens, what have you. Public transportation could expand to drop nearly everyone within a short walk of their home, and covered bike thru-ways could be expanded. Private cars could be parked on the outskirts, but if high speed rail is expanded, rapid regional downtown-to-downtown transport would make this option less and less palatable over time.

As far as I’m concerned, it looks like another of those win-win-win possibilities: shared common spaces could encourage communities to form, gardens and doing away with cars could encourage public health (through exercise, diet, and respiratory benefits), the environmental impacts would be unimpeachable. And, perhaps best of all, we wouldn’t all have a strip of asphalt mini-mall outside our homes. Not all of us have cobblestone streets like Georgetown—but obviously even they could fare better.

I’m being a little dreamy, I understand—but I bet it’s closer than you think, in places like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco. We already regularly impair the efficacy of private cars, with speed bumps, one way streets, cul-de-sacs, dead ends, and so on—and for good reason. And, of course, bicycle ridership has been up this depression (they were already 75,000 on average daily in New York, or 8.6% of all traffic by number, by 1992; 20% of everyone who go over Portland’s Hawthorne bridge are on a bike). It’s a smaller step than you might think.

a.j.m

Filed under: Health, cities, sustainability , bikes, food, roads

Good reads today.

• Greenpeace has up with more than its fair share of absurd and counterproductive strategies of resistance in its history, but its recent tack is a clever one. Aiming at the enormously destructive practice of bottom trawling, in which boats drag nets across the sea floor, leaving huge, barren scars and killing large quantities of both wanted and unwanted wildlife, Greenpeace is sinking large 3-ton boulders into the ocean at strategic intervals to try to prevent the practice. In the past, the organization has struggled to find productive uses for its capabilities (like many environmental groups), but this seems particularly clever: if the governments of the world refuse to regulate overfishing in their waters, they certainly shouldn’t regulate a group moving some rocks around. Ho hum. Don’t mind us.

• The New York Times has an excellent article today about a survey by health insurance companies that intends to highlight exorbitant doctors’ bills, particularly for out-of-network procedures. $20,120 for a knee operation for which Medicare pays $584; $72,000 for a spinal fusion procedure that Medicare covers for $1,629—and so on. This dovetails with Atul Gawande’s influential piece in The New Yorker that points to collective culture among doctors as a culprit in spiraling healthcare costs. These kinds of statements belie the Republican talking point of government-run healthcare coming between patients and their doctors: with very little accountability for what tests doctors order and how much they charge for them, a room that holds just a doctor and a patient has no actor with the knowledge and the interest in holding down unnecessary costs that don’t improve the patient’s health.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Health, sustainability

A Theory of Change

Today, as we steer a new course at the United Nations, our guiding principles are clear: We value the U.N. as a vehicle for advancing U.S. policies and priorities, and universal values…We work for change from within rather than criticizing from the sidelines. We stand firm in defense of America’s interests and values, but we don’t dissent just to be contrary. We listen to states great and small. We build coalitions. We meet our responsibilities. We pay our bills. We push for real reform. And we remember that in an interconnected world, what’s good for others is often good for America as well.

—UN Ambassador Susan Rice, speaking today at NYU.

Brian

Filed under: Grand Strategy, International Organization, Liberalism, Practicing Politics, Who We Are, the next order