Professor of Political Science, Pusan National University - 부산대학교 정치외교학과 교수; BBC Dad; Cleveland native
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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.
And militarizing otherwise peaceful
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May 6, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This aren’t-the-Russians-bad-asses? stuff has repeatedly been debunked again and again.
The military requires talented people with skills, like any other organization. Their sexuality isn’t really relevant.
Military aren’t robots. If they smile for a goofy selfie,it’s a wild
America’s military edge relies heavily on tech and over-the-horizon strike which requires trained people looking screens, not buffed-out weightlifters.
Military tolerance of
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May 6, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The blithe, assured tone Douthat routinely uses in discussing academia is just infuriating
He’s got no idea what’s he talking about. Progressive ideology & our ‘meritocratic class anxiety’ are not in fact our dominant concerns. That’s what you think if
1 nytimes.com/2023/05/05/opi…
you get your ‘knowledge’ about academia from Substack, Rod Dreher, Michael Lind, and that sorta stuff
By far, the most important thing is research and the exhausting, highly competitive struggle to get into well-ranked outlets. But since MAGA thinks we regurgitate ideology &
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Apr 26, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This Douthat column gives Carlson way more credit than he deserves. The guy trafficked in white nationalist themes bc they held viewers. Douthat’s own paper was the entity which established that. And Carlson’s anti-vaxxism was practically nihilism.There
1 nytimes.com/2023/04/25/opi…
was no obvious reason for the right to turn against vaccines. Pre-covid anti-vaxxism was the province of the new age left, and Trump, in the one genuine accomplishment of his administration, pushed through Op Warp-speed
Yet Carlson, out of seeming nihilistic, contrarian glee,
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Apr 22, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
🧵
This doesn't mean non-blues didn't have interesting things to say or good reasons to be anonymous. But bc social media is awash in content, even the most rudimentary sorting mechanism quickly became very useful
And old Twitter provided 2 great filtering mechanisms: banning
the worst, & blue-checking claimed expertise & institutions, particularly public ones.
Just these 2 simple steps made Twitter FAR better than Facebook, much less Truth Social. You could curate better and screen out the idiots & fakers. That's why you would see tweets used in
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Apr 21, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The clumsiness of Xi’s turn to ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy is remarkable. China is getting into these sorts of scrapes w/ almost every player in its neighborhood.
Peaceful rise was working pretty well, esp with the US stumbling w/ the war on terror, the Great Recession, electing
I wonder if Xi figures his time to press China’s advantage is now - a window of opportunity before demographic, ecological, and financial caps start pulling down growth rates. China will get old before it gets rich, and that’s going to be super expensive as China ages
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