In the Varsity today, Mr. Mahmoud and I are featured debating the current war in Gaza. It was a pleasure working with such an articulate and insightful interlocutor. Summarily speaking…

Mahmoud:

As Gazans struggle to make ends meet in what is essentially the world’s largest concentration camp, the Israeli government, in its battle to shore up diminishing support for the upcoming election, launched the deadliest attack on Gaza in recent memory: over 400 dead and 2,100 wounded on the fifth day of the onslaught. The grotesque irony is that if this election stunt works and the ruling coalition wins, it would represent a victory for Palestinians, otherwise left at the mercy of the highly bellicose Likud party whose charter calls for the annexation and settlement of the entire “Land of Israel.” In Israel, a shift to the right is complete: diplomacy has been crossed off the agenda, and Israeli politicians remain locked in a contest of exercising belligerency.

The latest blitz follows Israel’s year-and-a-half-long Gaza blockade, described by Richard Falk, the U.N. Human Rights Council special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, as constituting a “flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” In response to his statement, Israel expelled Falk from the occupied territories and barred his re-entry. So much for the only democracy in the Middle East.

Myself:

There are three constants in life: death, taxes, and Israel taking the blame for every misery suffered by the Palestinians. The Western media’s coverage of the latest conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas is no exception. We can already see a general consensus: Israel is accused of being belligerent and trigger happy, a practitioner of human rights violations.

It is not surprising that most observers have offered little to no appropriate context in which to view these events. For example, none of the major media outlets have deemed it necessary to point out the elephant in the room: Hamas, an avowed terrorist organization that presides over the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, is constitutionally committed to Israel’s destruction (“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it”—The Hamas Charter). In ruminating on why Israel has completely “moved to the right” and seemingly “crossed off” diplomacy as a viable solution, my colleague Mr. Mahmoud and others would do well to keep Hamas’ nature in mind. Coupled with repeated violations of established cease-fires and a constant rain of rockets on Israeli civilian centres, is it any wonder that Israeli citizens usually regard peace overtures with cynicism?

Consider this: if Susan Rice gets her way (”If the United States fails to gain U.N. support, we should act without it. Impossible? No, the United States acted without U.N. blessing in 1999 in Kosovo to confront a lesser humanitarian crisis (perhaps 10,000 killed) and a more formidable adversary….”), the U.S. would be leading a multilateral, UN-sponsored coalition to save Darfur from genocide (or at least, salvage what’s left of it). If Robert Gates gets his way, we will be in Iraq a lot longer, and the drawdown a lot more incremental, than Obama had promised. Contingent upon consolidated and continued stability, the U.S. will exit the country along lines much more favorable to the likes of PNAC than say, Moveon.Org. If Hillary Clinton gets her way, we will be a lot more pro-Israel than any Democratic administration has shown itself to be, and given her willingness to label the Republican Guard a terrorist outfit, it is likely we will be far tougher on Iran than the pro-diplomacy Obama has promised. And finally, if Petraeus - now headed for Afghanistan - gets his way, the surge that has already begun there might take off with the same kinds of results that we saw in Iraq circa 2007. Doesn’t this look like a set of policies - a “McCain-2013″ drawdown plan from Iraq, an intervention in Darfur, a tough on Iran/Hezbollah middle east line, and an Afghani “Surge” - that the likes of Robert Kagan, Max Boot, and Bill Kristol would endorse?

Of-course, the idea that Obama’s foreign policy cabinet would be neoconservative is predicated upon each individual seeing their visions completed realized in their own respective fields. In most administrations, a combination of bureaucratic inertia, political limits, and well, intervention from other members prevents that from happening. There’s also the glaring fact that this is Obama’‘s administration we’re talking about, and he is not very hawkish - for the surge in Afghanistan and a gradual drawdown, but more likely to talk to Iran and drag his feet on Darfur. Still, it’s an interesting thought exercise that reveals how “moderate” Obama has been in his cabinet picks so far (for more proof, see his economics team).

I was reading over one of Professor Landsburg’s articles on the minimum wage today. Surprisingly, and I’m embarassed I haven’t come across this information before, he argues that the minimum wage does not in fact hurt low-level unskilled employment. Instead, the real case against it rests on ethical grounds:

In fact, the minimum wage is very good for unskilled workers. It transfers income to them. And therein lies the right argument against the minimum wage.

Ordinarily, when we decide to transfer income to some group or another—whether it be the working poor, the unemployed, the victims of a flood, or the stockholders of American Airlines—we pay for the transfer out of general tax revenue. That has two advantages: It spreads the burden across all taxpayers, and it makes politicians accountable for their actions. It’s easy to look up exactly how much the government gave American, and it’s easy to look up exactly which senators voted for it.

By contrast, the minimum wage places the entire burden on one small group: the employers of low-wage workers and, to some extent, their customers. Suppose you’re a small entrepreneur with, say, 10 full-time minimum-wage workers. Then a 50 cent increase in the minimum wage is going to cost you about $10,000 a year. That’s no different from a $10,000 tax increase. But the politicians who imposed the burden get to claim they never raised anybody’s taxes.

If you want to transfer income to the working poor, there are fairer and more honest ways to do it. The Earned Income Tax Credit, for example, accomplishes pretty much the same goals as the minimum wage but without concentrating the burden on a tiny minority. For that matter, the EITC also does a better job of helping the people you’d really want to help, as opposed to, say, middle-class teenagers working summer jobs. It’s pretty hard to argue that a minimum-wage increase beats an EITC increase by any criterion.

The minimum wage is nothing but a huge off-the-books tax paid by a small group of people, with all the proceeds paid out as the equivalent of welfare to a different small group of people. If a tax-and-spend program that arbitrary were spelled out explicitly, voters would recoil. How unfortunate that when it is disguised as a minimum wage, not even our Republican president can manage to muster a principled objection.

Upon further reflection, Professor Landsburg makes a lot of sense. When we make social justice claims, we are saying that as a society, we have an obligation to help x disadvantaged group. In fact, most proponents of the minimum wage believe that the policy acts as a symbolic statement about our society’s moral progress. But if we share this obligation to elevate our societal standing, then we can’t scapegoat a small group of individuals - usually small business owners - and unload all the financial burden on them for carrying out this moral task. We cannot ask businesses to compensate for our shared sense of guilt - we must atone for it together.

And even if we believed that some businesses should atone for their astronomical profits and excessive greed, which is a questionable assumption in itself, they are not the ones being targeted by the minimum wage. Instead, large corporations are more likely to welcome the minimum wage so they can see labor costs rise for their smaller, weaker competitors. While they take a pay cut, they increase their market share. In the end, it’s a win for them.

So this is all very enlightening and good. But then I read over the comments, and I am reminded of a conversation I once had with a friend of mine who strongly supports the wage policy. At the time, I was very much flustered by what he was trying to (I think) convey: that raising the minimum wage helps workers, inducing them to spend more and thus stimulate the economy. Win-win. I knew there was something fishy about the argument, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. The conversation did not end well. Now, I’ve realized what was wrong with that line of thought, and it is voiced here:

The economic logic of a livable minimum wage seems be very similar to the economic logic of a tax cut and rests on the assumption that the more money available to consumers (through higher wages or tax refund checks) the more consumers will spend. Therefore, a logical conclusion is that an increase in the minimum wage will stimulate the economy, increase consumer spending, create new jobs and generally be good for the economy.

Under this paradigm, all Republicans should support a livable minimum wage…. I wonder why most Republicans don’t?

–LannonMac

Except this is all voodoo economics. No, not that voodoo economics, though it’s about as ridiculous as believing that we are always above the optimum level of taxation on the Laeffer Curve, all the time. It’s voodoo because it assumes that we can magically do some macroeconomic accounting and everything will be all right. First, LannonMac forgets that a minimum wage hike is nothing but a transfer payment. It is essentially a tax on employers and a payment transferred to workers. The federal government taketh away and it giveth. This is not the same as a tax cut, which is a reduction of the amount the federal government takes away. Put it this way: assuming growth is C+I+G+NX, basic economics tells us that a tax cut is an increase in C. This is obvious, and it will result in a GDP/AD increase. On the other hand, the wage hike is an increase in G (through government spending) but an equivalent decrease in C. Why the decrease in C? Because it acts as a tax hike on employers, which is internalized into higher prices if firing employees is too costly. Thus, consumption decreases with the higher prices. No GDP growth ensues.

Published in Doublethink Magazine:

by Joshua Xiong | December 4, 2008

There seems to be no dirtier word in the English lexicon today than “neocon”. Almost everyone has a strong opinion about the ideology, and yet very few have a clear and concise definition of it. To the Left, it’s tantamount to fascism or Nazism; to the traditional Right, it is pure heresy. On this very forum, Danny Polansky and David Donadio, have already penned their obituaries for neoconservatism. While they correctly recognize the true nature of modern neoconservatism—a loose collection of arguments for achieving liberal foreign policy ends using hard power, realist means—they are wrong in their assessments. Neoconservatism, when correctly defined, has far from failed in its endeavors, and has much to offer future administrations.

In “Neoconservative History Fixation”, Polansky argues that neoconservatives cannot rely on history to vindicate their intellectual worth, because what future generations may think of their past is colored by the biases of their own times. But rather than attack neoconservatism on its merits, Polansky simply asserts that, prima facie, neoconservatives deserve a bad reputation because of the blunders of Iraq. This assertion takes for granted that Iraq is destined for implosion. But recent developments have shown us that, if neoconservatives must stake their reputation on the campaign in Mesopotamia, their future might not look so dim after all. Since the 2007 surge, violence has sunk to manageable levels and order has been secured in areas that previously had been on the verge of Sunni-Shia civil war. In the latest agreement between Iraq and President Bush, American troops are scheduled to leave all Iraqi towns and cities in 2009, and completely by 2011. Such a diplomatic breakthrough is a testament to Iraq being stable enough to manage its own security without a significant American troop presence. And in the five years since the invasion, Iraq has grown comfortable enough with the complexities of democracy to witness multiple elections and power-sharing agreements. Iraq may not be a paragon of liberal democracy, but it is certainly on the right track.

But the more important point to make is that the war in Iraq is not by definition solely a neoconservative war: In 2003, it commanded strong support among both liberals and realists. Notables range from Kenneth Pollack and George Packer to George Shultz and James Baker. If Iraq was in fact a sin, then it is one with a much wider culpability than critics like Polansky recognize.

Donadio’s “The Death of Neoconservatism” more directly gets at the heart of the matter, charging that the neoconservatives were far too naive about Iraq’s democratic destiny and too stubborn about bilateral diplomacy with Iran. Furthermore, he says that the Bush administration’s floundering policies in Afghanistan directly reflect on neoconservative thinking.

The first major problem with this is that it seems to attribute the cause of all these failures to neoconservative ideology. To take just one example, there was no discernable “neoconservative” support for what Donadio calls a mistaken counter-narcotics campaign. In fact, aside from the war in Iraq and the promotion of democracy in the Arab world, neoconservatives have been fairly disappointed with Bush’s second term foreign policy: To name just two frustrations, he has twiddled his thumbs on Iran and taken North Korea off the list of terrorist-sponsoring states.

It was indeed naive of some neoconservative Brahmin, most famously Richard Perle, to predict an easy postwar occupation and fast transition to liberal democracy. But such statements have to be placed into context. No one was quite prepared for the level of incompetence in the Bush administration in the task of reconstructing Iraq. The neoconservatives failed to anticipate the lack of a plan for securing the country after Saddam fell, or the course of aggressive de-Baathification he would pursue. Some prominent neoconservative policymakers such as Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz no doubt bear some responsibility for these failures, but, for the most part, neoconservatives were neither architects nor managers of this war. Neoconservative Frederick Kagan, in collaboration with retired four-star general Jack Keane, proposed a larger troop presence as early as January 2007. Kagan’s colleagues at the Weekly Standard shared his views, as did the standard bearer for their cause, John McCain. It was Donald Rumsfeld, himself no neoconservative, who had steadfastly touted a “light footprint” in Iraq.

Neoconservatives still provide a critical perspective on the subject of Iranian diplomacy. They are skeptical of the utility of direct, high-level talks with Iran pertaining to Iraq because they don’t trust the regime’s motives. This is a prudent position to take when Iran has been one of the leading foreign instigators of violence in Iraq, as witnessed by the insurgents’ use of Iranian-supplied IEDs.

Donadio believes that “the Iranians support democracy in Iraq because it empowers Iraq’s Shiite majority, which is the best guarantor of their interests.” That conclusion may prove to be both naïve and simplistic. Given the Iranian track record of supporting disruptive Shiite militants, it is far easier to imagine that the Iranians support a separate Shiite enclave in Iraq that caters to Iranian interests, regardless of the costs of that policy to stability in Iraq. In fact, it’s easy to see how a stable Iraqi democracy might spook the theocrats of Iran. The sight of their Iraqi Shiite brethren flourishing under democratic rule could only encourage Iranians to put more pressure on their own government. Donadio is correct that sometimes we must make deals with unsavory regimes when “common interests” are at stake, but in this case it is not clear Iran wants any of the objectives we desire.

In the end, neoconservatives will always be integral to the foreign policy debate for two important, theoretical reasons: It is the only school of thought that actively tries to integrate both American principles and interests into a cohesive and coherent whole, and it is the only one to offer a plausible path (democratization) to addressing the deep, underlying roots of Islamic terrorism. Realists only seem to want to police the terrorist problem while neglecting its causes, ensuring that the West will engage in a prolonged struggle against a fanatical enemy. The Left believes that terrorism is caused by malign Western foreign policies—an insufficient explanation given that former Western colonies and war zones from Nicaragua to Vietnam have not sent suicide bombers to Western shores.

While we’re at it, we ought to remember to count the times when neoconservatives were arguably right, such as when they supported intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as their prescience about the threat of terrorism in the mid-1990s.

It would be intellectually negligent to write off neoconservatism in any future policy debates. It is a perspective that will remain pertinent for a long time to come.

In the latest Varsity:

Circumstances may have temporarily damaged the GOP, but the party isn’t crumbling

Joshua Xiong
Published on December 01 2008

Alex Nursall’s GOP-bashing article (“The craziest party that could ever be”) is an example of why the Republican Party’s future should be left up to conservatives. More a collection of stereotypes and clichés than substantial analysis, the article revealed all the worst extremes of modern North American liberalism: condescension towards common folk, suppression of intellectual difference, and dismissal of the ideological opposition. I was instantly reminded of why I crossed over to the Right in the first place.

Although my conservative colleagues have sufficiently demolished Nursall’s polemic in The Varsity’s comments section, I am compelled to make a few brief observations. In a cautionary sentence about how evangelicals are increasingly voting Democrat, Nursall writes, “The Republicans are losing their base, and if the trend continues, they’ll be nothing more than a party of fanatics, clutching at their guns and religious texts, weeping bitter tears for an America that never existed in the first place.” Given that evangelicals and social conservatives make up a large portion of the GOP base, this sentence is self-contradictory: if the base is eroding, the party should be left with anything but gun-toting church-goers. She laments that Mr. Obama was unfairly lumped together with Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, but the two indeed served on the CAC board together and Ayers made a small contribution to Obama’s campaign. It was not hatred that motivated Mr. McCain to warn of this association, but concern about Mr. Obama’s judgment.

In any case, Nursall’s “hatred” theory for why the GOP lost the election doesn’t hold water in the face of a few facts. If Americans so resented conservative “intolerance” and had moved to the centre, why was it that Proposition 8—the California ballot initiative to ban gay marriage—passed by vast majorities in the country’s most liberal state? Why is it that the Democrats who beat out incumbents for congressional seats in both 2006 and 2008 were mostly socially conservative populists, like Virginia senator Jim Webb? There is indeed a looming problem for Republicans in the future, but hatred isn’t it. Instead, it is an inability to think and argue innovatively about the economic issues of today—globalization, health care, and education.

In the economic boom times—2002 and 2004—Republicans were able to tout their family values and national security credentials to an inherently conservative working class. But since then, economic hard times have convinced the Average Joe to place his checkbook above partisanship. These woes go beyond the inflation of early 2008 and the financial crisis of the summer. Dating back to the 2004 outsourcing scare, American workers have seen their wages stagnate while corporate profits skyrocket. This is not due to executive greed, as the Democrats assert, but simple economics: American workers have been facing increasing competition from cheaper foreign labour in the rising economic powers of China and India. Increase the global supply of unskilled labour, and the price of labour falls.

In 2008, the Democrats, with their natural big government and pro-union slant, offered an arsenal of solutions: universal healthcare, middle-class tax cuts, and tuition credits, all funded by higher taxes at the “top five per cent” of the income bracket. All the Republicans could come up with was a plethora of tax cuts at a time when marginal tax rates were historically low. They had no plan for education, and McCain’s healthcare plan, though fundamentally sound, was barely mentioned during the campaign. No wonder the working class picked handouts over trickle-down. The data resonates with this line of thought: CNN polls showed that in two swing states, Florida and Ohio, 62 and 61 per cent of voters cited the economy as their top priority, respectively. Of those voters, Mr. Obama beat Mr. McCain by a margin of 7 to 14 points.

If the Republican Party is to make any serious comeback in the future, it must come to grips with its economic problem. It’s correct on the fundamentals: tax cuts and free trade have served the U.S. well since Reagan’s time in power, delivering robust economic growth. But on class equality issues, the GOP must come up with alternatives that help the Average Joe without overweening government intervention.

Bill Kristol writes:

And while he’s at it, perhaps he could tell various admirals to stop moaning about how difficult it would be to deal with the pirates off the coast of Somalia (isn’t keeping the shipping lanes open a core mission of the Navy?) and order the Navy to clobber them. If need be, the Marines would no doubt be glad to recapitulate their origins and join in by going ashore in Africa to destroy the pirates’ safe havens.

Bush has an international legal right, if not obligation, to drive the pirates out of power. It is Jus Cogens - a peremptory international norm - that maritime piracy be banned. Any state can enforce this. It doesn’t address the root cause of piracy in Somalia - namely, anarchy - but it will provide temporary relief. This would be Bush’s parting gift to the world economy as well (the malaise of which the liberal rank-and-file unfairly attribute to the man), securing the shipping lanes for international trade. Do it.

it’s often true in education, where the most interesting arguments are between liberal reformers and liberal interest groups, with conservatives sitting on the sideline talking about vouchers and occasionally praising the Michelle Rhees and Corey Bookers of the world.

This problem is not, repeat not, a matter of conservatives needing to abandon their core convictions in order to win elections, as right-of-center reformers are often accused of doing. Rather, it’s a matter of conservatives needing to apply their core convictions to questions like “how do we mitigate the worst effects of climate change?” and “how do we modernize our infrastructure?” and “how do we encourage excellence and competition within our public school bureaucracy?” instead of just letting liberals completely monopolize these debates, while the Right talks about porkbusting and not much else.

Ross is spot on. This is what I meant when I said I found the New Republican comments “disturbing”: too many conservatives, and young ones at that, simply want to do nothing and/or embrace solutions that require as little government as possible out of the belief that this is what the core principles of conservatism demand. I had the pleasure this past summer of working at the New York Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability, a brilliant think tank and sister-institution to the charter school movement in the Albany area. While teachers unions will have them painted as right-wing jackals out to gut the public education system, the people I knew who worked there were post-partisan pragmatists who had an eye for detail and a deep understanding of education policy. Needless to say I learned a lot from them. One of their key focuses was on charter schools, merit pay, and mayoral control, because they recognized there was little political capital for school vouchers. Moreover, they made it quite clear that any change in positive development in our education system requires not just introducing laissez-faire forces that force government out but instructional, curriculum, and human resource reforms that make the machinery of education much more accountable and results-oriented.

I am at once both mildly inspired and deeply disturbed that education reform has come up as an issue at The New Republican. I’m inspired that they’ve addressed the topic, but I’m disturbed that most commentators want simply a return to states jurisdiction and vouchers. Though I’m an advocate of market-oriented reform packages - vouchers, of-course, but also charter schools and merit pay - I don’t think the federal government is the real reason our education performance is lagging. The argument doesn’t really hold when many of the OECD countries that rank ahead of the U.S. - such as Canada and South Korea - have highly centralized education systems. In fact, I would argue that that it is the notable absence of concrete and coherent federal education policy that contributes to our problems. What is critical here are the types of central policies.

I would argue, (as I’ve argued before) given the empirical data available, that a good place to start would be merit pay and charter schools. States and municpalities are good experimental grounds for demonstrating the effectiveness of such innovative programs. But most of these programs require continuous funding, something cities and towns often don’t have the budgets to provide. Moreover, given that reforms to curriculums or teacher pay is risky activity, not all citizens have the political will to support experiments in the first place, no matter how much they would like to see positive change. It is here that the federal government should be pushing for reasonably-sized programs that can provide, say, emergency or supplemental funding to school districts or states that have demonstrated through trials the success of their reforms. Even better would be a federal government bureau that provided additional funding to states for jump-starting reform based on successful existing models. The point here is that while states and municipalities are good at producing reforms, they need the support of the federal government to sustain these reforms.

A friend of mine has requested I post my International Law essay online. Since this is my first IL paper, I thought it’d be a good idea to get some feedback. The subject is why states comply with international law in the absence of effective enforcement mechanisms.

The question of why states comply with international law is a fundamental one. Unlike domestic legal systems, the collection of international legal institutions that constitute international law lacks a central authority. No actor or group of actors on the international stage possesses a monopoly on legitimacy and force to make laws and enforce them.[1] There are relations between and among states, but no crystallized vertical legal structure exists to order all states.[2] And yet on most matters, most states obey international law most of the time.[3] The theories of rational choice and social acculturation combine to explain this reality in light of the obstacles to compliance.

Under the rational choice model, states obey international law in order to maximize their perceived utility and minimize their perceived costs. States only give their consent to treaties and customs because the benefits outweigh the costs. They will continue to respect such treaties and customs on the same internal calculus. If states violate international law, it is because they have determined that the costs of compliance now exceed the benefits.

The pursuit of interests in the face of collective action problems illustrates the concept of rational choice. For example, member states of the WTO (World Trade Organization) have likely come to the conclusion that universal free trade is particularly beneficial to their interests. Sustaining this activity requires cooperation among trading partners to limit ‘unfair’ practices such as excessive protection or domestic subsidization. In this case, international trade becomes a Prisoner’s Dilemma[4] scenario in which the most desired outcome for all participants is cooperative free trade. States are tempted to engage in unfair practices, or ‘cheat’, because such activity provides disproportionate economic gains at the cost of their unsuspecting trade partners. However, if all states anticipate the likelihood of their partners cheating, all will do the same to prevent disproportionate losses, resulting in the least favorable outcome of trade wars. Treaty institutions such as the WTO provide codified clarity[5] as to when states are truly engaging in unfair practices and a clear procedure for resolving such disputes, making cooperation less difficult. Thus, states often establish international law to facilitate cooperation by reducing ambiguity. Moreover, since international trade is often a repeated activity, member states that are called out for their illegal practices through WTO adjudication will face reputation costs that hurt their anticipated trade relations in the future. All this serves to dissuade cheating in the first place, making cooperation – and thus the compliance with WTO rules – more likely.

The notion of reputation costs in conjunction with rational choice provides further clarity on why states sometimes do or do not comply with international law. Here, reputation simply becomes another factor in a state’s cost-benefit analysis. By establishing a reputation for compliance with previous agreements and long-standing customs, a given state increases its chances for cooperation with other states on future issues of interest because its peers find it to be more trustworthy and reliable. When a state violates international law, it signals to its peers a break from its record, inducing suspicions about its intentions and reliability. A good reputation for compliance thus becomes a reward for obeying international law, and a bad reputation a penalty for violating it. For example, in a repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma such as trade, a reputable state will be regarded as less likely to ‘cheat,’ resulting in the greater likelihood of free trade relations. Or, if the United States were to violate one of its NAFTA treaty obligations to Canada – a state with which it has had long-standing treaty ties – it would ruin its own reputation in Canada’s eyes for being trustworthy and damage the possibility for future agreements.[6]

Social acculturation[7] may serve as a complimentary explanation for instances of state compliance with international law when it is not clear that interests are the motivating factor, as in instances of human rights regimes or environmental law. Under social acculturation, states obey international law because they harbor a complex desire to be part of a perceived ‘international community.’[8] The dominant ideas, norms, and language that pervade the international community foster a world culture. Thus, in order for states to be ‘accepted’ into the international community, they must adopt this world culture. This requires an adherence to the dominant customary international laws and codified treaties that help constitute the world culture. Furthermore, once states adopt this culture, they are socialized through repeated interactions and practices to value international law as part of their identity.[9]

For example, even though in multiple instances it is in their military advantage to do so, most states today do not use chemical weapons during warfare and almost all have joined the Chemical Weapons Convention. There is an established world cultural taboo produced by ideas, norms, and practices that motivates states to comply with such conventions even when they violate military interests.[10] Another instance can be found in Turkey, which seeks membership in the supranational European Union despite the fact that this requires the hardship of altering human rights practices.[11] Perhaps the appeal of inclusion in a supranational community pulls Turkey towards adopting the European Union’s dominant human rights norms.

Rational choice explains the sustainability of international economic law through the benefits of cooperation and reputation. In areas where interests are less clearly delineated, social acculturation attributes compliance with international law to the gravitational pull of world and supranational communities. States that socialize with, and want to be accepted by the international community must adopt its dominant norms and practices, legal institutions included. Taken together, rational choice and social acculturation provide an adequate set of complimentary reasons for compliance in the absence of central authority and effective enforcement mechanisms.

Or the most realistic, least disastrous vision for the confines of a liberal, Obama presidency.

Secretary of Defense: Robert Gates - He has presided over the ever-successful surge. He believes in doing likewise in Afghanistan and shares Obama’s views on talking to rogue states. I don’t agree with the latter, but I would much rather have someone who has a record of success and an understanding of counterinsurgency presiding over the world’s largest military at a time when asymetrical warfare will be more and more prevalent. Also, score one for bi-partisanship.

Secretary of State: Dennis Ross - I know this is a Clinton-era throwback, but the man knows the Middle East better than anybody and is obviously an experienced negotiator. And with Russia and China creeping back into the headlines, I’d say you want a respected big-wig meeting with foreign dignitaries to cover your lack of experience. Plus, he’d be better than actually having Hilary Clinton come on board. *Delusional pick: Robert Kagan.*

Secretary of Treasury: Larry Summers - He will ensure the Democrats don’t revert to their god-forsaken protectionist ways. The man is a genuine centre-left booster of free trade. Important when you don’t want more economic contractions; absolutely vital when you don’t want China to stop buying your debt.

Secretary of Veterans Affairs: John McCain. Who else has more credibility among the military brass? Besides, there is nothing left for him in a party that was ungrateful enough to have entertained Mitt Romney before nominating and that is now moving into the wilderness. I know there’s talk going around about McCain for energy, which seems odd given McCain’s domestic policy weakness. And ideally, I’d have him at State and move Ross to National Security Advisor (or Power, who had to be unfairly dismissed for comments about Clinton), but that’s clearly not going to happen. An interesting day-dream would be ot have McCain at agriculture, where he will proceed to magically axe ethanol subsidies and make the pork-solicitors “famous”.