Professor of Political Science, Pusan National University - 부산대학교 정치외교학과 교수; BBC Dad; Cleveland native
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Dec 4 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
🧵on the S Korean semi-coup
1. This sure looks like a soft or semi-coup, like a SK version of January 6 in the US.
Declaring martial law in response to the gridlock of divided government is just a ridiculous rationale.
And declaring late at night, when half the country is
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asleep is hugely suspicious.
2. It was remarkably inept. In fact, it looks impulsive, as if Yoon decided this the same day
The declaration targeted the media, opposition, & public political expression. That would require a sweeping move across the country to enforce.Instead
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Nov 8 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
🧵Foreign Policy Implications of Trump’s Victory
1. Do not read a huge foreign policy public opinion shift into T’s victory.
Voters do not choose based on FoPo. This is really well-established in pol sci, & polling. I am seeing a lot of FoPo analysts
saying the election means the US public has turned against the liberal int'l order, Ukraine, Israel or whatever. No, it does not. All the data so far suggest that T won bc of the economy (inflation) &, less so, culture (wokeism)
1. I expected Harris to win👇primarily bc of women voters. Dobbs has been helping Democrats consistently for 2 years, & I saw no reason why that would change now. Worse, Trump & Vance doubled-down on their general sexism & female contempt in
the last few months. I am quite surprised this didn’t fuel a huge women-vote backlash. I think most of the other points in my previous thread are correct tho
2. Which gets me to the big puzzle for me in the election: T’s excellent performance w/ women, including winning white
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Nov 5 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
🧵Final Thread on the Election
1. Prediction: Harris will win bc of an enormous gender gap due to Dobbs & the generalized air of misogyny around the late Trump campaign
2. The failure of US elite institutions to keep T out of politics has been shocking & systemic: the press,
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Congressional Republicans, the courts, the biz community, conservatives on SCOTUS. America is far more vulnerable to an Orbanist, semi-authoritarian takeover than we thought.
3. That elite failure reflects our staggering public failure. It is shocking that so many Americans
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Jul 24 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
There’s so much wrong here:
1. The likelihood that autocrat Kim Jong-Un misses Trump is basically zero. Gimme a break. That’s just T’s needy ego.
2. T made a hash of denuclearization talks w/ Kim. He didn’t read or prepare. He just got off the plane expecting his tough-guy-
on-the-make schtick would bowl Kim over or wow him into concessions. Instead, Kim played T for credibility-enhancing photo-ops & to foment US-S Korean tensions over how to deal with/ NK.
3. There’s absolutely nothing to suggest T’s approach to NK would be different a second
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Apr 14 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Good thread, nicely illustrating how de-linked the GOP evangelical base is from the rest of America.
They wanna go after abortion, IVF, birth control, gay marriage, and the rest. GOP leaders know this is electoral suicide, but they don’t know how to get around it. If Biden is
smart, he’ll make personal family & sexual freedom the center of his campaign.
Evangelicals may overwhelm the GOP internally, but the rest of the country thinks they’re weird & creepy
This is the result of social isolation: churches which provide a whole separated lifestyle,
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Mar 10 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
BBC Dad content
Today is the 7th anniversary of the BBC Dad blooper.
So here it is again, with some recent family pictures in the thread below.
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These are from Marion's birthday party today, and James and I hiking this morning
Feb 20 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
This thread makes a point political science emphasizes a lot - and which I tell my students constantly:
Competent democratic government is actually really boring. A lot of it is unappealing trade-offs, wonks diving deep into detail the public won’t track, maintenance instead
of flashy new initiatives politicians can put their name on, compromise between parties which leaves no one happy, incremental, unexciting improvements only visible over the medium-term, and so on.
This is not entertaining or engaging, & doesn’t make for exciting journalism.
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Jan 18 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
🧵No, there won't be a War with N Korea
Yes, NK's rhetoric seems more belligerent lately. Yes, this Kim seems to enjoy making scary threats more than his father did. Yes, the US is distracted by Ukraine & Gaza. But
1. N Korea is the Boy who Cried Wolf
1 reuters.com/world/asia-pac…
NK constantly talks like this. I made this point back in 2013👇when Kim told foreigners to leave SK bc war was imminent (jerk). Perhaps Kim means it this time. That is possible,of course. But it's impossible to reliably infer that f/ NK rhetoric anymore
Latent capacity is not capability. Khrushchev said we will bury you, and Mao thought he could fight a nuclear war bc of China’s huge population.This is not how conflict works
Sacks says stuff like this all the time. I’ve no idea why he’s taken seriously as a geopolitical thinker
1. We are highly unlikely to fight all three at the same time. Sacks is ginning up an extreme scenario to scare people
2. The U.S. would not fight alone. We have a huge alliance network, and those states are wealthy and capable too
3. Our goals against all three are limited…
Oct 10, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
In fact, Biden’s dealt with these crises pretty well.
In Ukraine, he’s helped that fledging democracy fight off increasingly overt fascist imperialism. On Israel, he’s robustly supported Israeli security while discouraging Netanyahu’s legal coup, and has encouraged Israelis
and Palestinians toward the negotiated solution which is the only durable way out of the cycle of violence they’re locked in.
Yeah, it’s choppy and messy, but that’s how the sausage gets made and it could easily be a lot worse.
Were Trump were POTUS, Russia would be on the
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Sep 27, 2023 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
🧵So most of this on Ukraine is wrong:
1. Yes, Iraq was a terrible decision, but that was 20 years ago by a different administration with very different ideological beliefs (neoconservatism). Just bc that choice was awful, does not mean US engagement/assistance elsewhere is
now automatically an error. Indeed, Republicans used to reject exactly this logic, calling it the Vietnam Syndrome.
2. Yes, 1930s analogies are far too common in US foreign policy. However, Putin is pretty close to a fascist now, and he has engaged in serial imperialism.
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Sep 15, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Trump is NOT a deal-maker. How many more times do we have to say this?
In the most important negotiation of his presidency and career - with Kim Jong-Un over N Korean nukes - Trump massively failed
He did not prepare. He just flew over and winged it. He literally got off the
and walked into the room thinking his Manhattan-socialite-on-the-make schtick wd bowl Kim over like some hapless NYC reporter.
From the press conferences, you could tell immediately that Trump didn’t know the issues - knew no Korean history, didn’t know or care about the US
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Aug 18, 2023 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
🧵on 🇺🇸🇯🇵🇰🇷 Trilateralism
It is more fragile than you think.
There is a lot of commentary about today’s Camp David summit being driven by China and North Korea. And that is obviously true.
But there is a SK domestic politics story – the conservative
1 washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/…
presidential victory last year - which is not getting the attention it should and is a far greater achilles heel to trilateralism than US commentary is noting
The regional structural pressures driving Japan and SK together have been around a long time, but this summit did not
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Jul 21, 2023 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
🧵
I’ve never understood why ‘realism’ applied to the Ukraine war means cutting off UKR to get back ‘stability’ - which in practice means a Russian victory.
Realism ALSO explains why UKR is resisting and why nearby states, who’ve also experienced RU imperialism, are keen to
RU is only ‘entitled,’ per realism, to a sphere of influence if it’s a great power, if it’s got the power to hold that sphere in thrall. There’s no writ. Realist privileges are power-based
But RU can’t do it. It’s weak. Yeah, it’s large and has nukes. But that’s not
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Jul 2, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
This guy is constantly wrong. I can’t believe Twitter promotes him so much:
- The offensive is 3 weeks old, against massive Russia no less. The Ukrainians are pretty obviously concentrating on Russian logistics, command & networks. Give them a chance
progressing as fast as it might bc of missing weapons, voices like Sacks are the reason for that. You can’t underequip them and then complain they’re not making progress
- It’s not a forever war for the US, but for Russia. Russia is stuck in a quagmire, not us. It’s bizarre,
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Jul 2, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Just once, I’d like leading Republicans to defend the basic integrity of their opponents against Trump’s ad hominems and harsh personal insults.
Not their politics or their role, but at least their personal dignity and right not to be harassed.
one knew who Jack Smith was. But now he’s becoming a hate-figure like Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden.
We know how this works. Soon he and his family will threatened. They’ll need security. Right-wing media will tell us he’s possibly a socialist bc he dated a woman in college
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Jun 27, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
🧵
Russian nuclear escalation has not happened despite 16 months of this sort of talk.
Yet Ukraine aid opponents keep piously recycling it anyway
It sure looks like they share Putin’s goal of using nuclear threats to scare off Western aid to Ukraine
It’s been explained repeatedly why Russian nuclear escalation is very unlikely, but here you again:
1. Strategic nuclear use against Ukraine would isolate Russia for a generation or more. Its allies and partners, p. China, would abandon
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May 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Any expat can tell you this is correct about negative foreign perceptions of Trump.
We expats spent the 4 years of Trump’s presidency desperately trying to explain him to foreign colleagues variously shocked, disgusted, or laughing over his behavior.
back home realize just how time and effort overseas American professionals put into holding US relationships together by telling our host country interlocutors that this would pass, that Trump slipped in thru the Electoral College, that much of the US diplomatic, military,
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May 8, 2023 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
This thread is getting a lot of exposure but it’s the same post-shooting talking points you’ve always heard. Here’s why it’s wrong, again:
A. It inverts the onus of political responsibility
US gun control advocates recommend policies which limit gun violence in the rest of
the world. Those countries don’t complain about lost freedoms or demand to buy assault weapons. If the US right is going to reject those obvious solutions, then it is up to it to suggest alternatives which will work while not being absurdly intrusive, expensive, or impractical
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May 7, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
‘fortification of soft targets’
So are we securing Sadr City or the local shopping mall? This is the kind of thing you say when you’re fighting an insurgency
We’re supposed to militarize our daily lives bc a minority won’t admit what works in every other country
That’s madness
Also, securing soft targets doesn’t work outside the most visible, high-profile targets like power plants or airports. The resources to put dozens of cops in every open air venue, mall, amusement park, school, and so on just aren’t there.
