Ilan Goldenberg writes that one reason academic realists have become marginalized in policy debates is that politicians think a policy of restraint isn’t politically feasible:

These days the realist perspective is all but non-existent in Washington. A large part of that has to do with the fact that their ideas are so politically unpopular that they are simply dismissed out of hand as unrealistic. Many realists have come to the conclusion that as an unfettered unipolar power the United States will inevitably overextend itself and scare others into aligning against it, and thus over time weaken itself. The best prescription for this is retrenchment that includes dramatic reductions in military spending and the reduction of our presence around the world – very politically unpopular ideas.

These two formulations are slightly different, and I think it’s important to distinguish between them. The public doesn’t tend to have detailed views on foreign policy issues, but it’s generally sympathetic to the idea of more restrained foreign policy. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs does a regular biannual survey of the American public, and the 2008 edition found “that a strong majority of Americans (63%)
want the United States to play an active part in world affairs” but also that “as Chicago Council polls have found in the past, Americans do not want to play the role of world policeman, with 77 percent believing the United States is playing this role more than it should be.”

There can, however, be other kinds of political impediments besides public opinion. The congressional politics of a restrained defense budget are terrible, because the main projects are deliberately located in the districts of the key committee members. The incentives of the news media tend toward amplifying hysteria and overreactions when specific incidents emerge. Presidents tend to be biased toward foreign policy activism because they can play a more unrestrained hand in that field than they can on their domestic issues. And virtually all the key interest groups working on national security policy do so in order to advocate a forward-leaning posture.

And beyond all this, elite opinion in the United States is much more gung-ho about foreign involvements of various kinds than is the public at large. So there’s a lot going on besides popularity. And foreign policy is hardly the only issue on which that’s the case. Big-time politicians have pretty good reasons for not making single-payer health care the core of their domestic policy agenda, but those reasons aren’t really about what’s “popular,” they’re about what’s possible in a constrained system.

Lurking in the background of yesterday’s interesting Robert Farley post on North Korea is a point that I really think doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves, the fact that in some ways the real nightmare scenario is a North Korean collapse rather than a North Korean attack. West Germany pursuing reunification with East Germany with a great deal of enthusiasm, and it turned out to be a pretty enormous economic catastrophe. It caused a lot of dislocations in the West German economy, inspired the government to try extensive fiscal stimulus that didn’t really work, etc.

And yet East Germany was in much better shape than North Korea is. East Germany was, by most measures, the wealthiest and most successful of the Communist countries. There’s also a substantial time difference. The end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall was 45 years. That was 20 years ago, meaning that if North Korea collapses in the next few years the DPRK regime will have lasted about 50 percent longer than East Germany. North Korea’s population is bigger relative to South Korea’s than East Germany was to West Germany, and North Koreans have been much more brainwashed and cut off from outside information. The upshot is that a North Korean collapse could put a nearly intolerable burden on the South if they tried to reintegrate the countries. And there are no real plans in place for international assistance, and no real way for South Korean politicians to disavow the claim to represent the entire peninsula.

I don’t have any novel solutions to this problem, but it’s important to keep in mind as part of the background to how these various North Korea crises are dealt with.

As I said yesterday, it strikes me as odd that the designated high-speed rail corridors system involves two different corridors that are partially in Texas, but doesn’t include a Dallas-Houston line. I thought I would look into Dallas-Houston transportation a bit more. Kayak showed 20 flights per day from Houston to DFW airport plus another ten from Houston to Love Field. According to Google Maps it’s a 3 hour 40 minute drive. And the distance is almost exactly the same as the distance from Washington, DC to New York. In other words, the city-pair is at a distance where we know that rail can be competitive even if it’s not true HSR. And based on the 30 daily flights between the two cities, there seems to be ample demand.

At any rate, with Rick Perry talking about secession from the United States in order to shore up his flank amidst a primary campaign, I doubt we’ll be seeing Texas get behind any far-sighted initiatives any time soon. But this would be a good idea for the state to pursue.

I said something last weekend about how it was a shame that Newark, New Jersey has a more impressive skline than does our nation’s capital and that Washington ought to revisit its extremely stringent restrictions on the allowed height of downtown office buildings. This prompted a reply about how it’s nice that the DC streets get a lot of sunlight. I was going to fire back that New York is hardly full of Morlocks and it’s not like there are a ton of people taking leisurely strolls through Downtown DC anyway (it’s mostly people working, it’s an office district) but the whole argument about aesthetics really misses the mark.

The first thing I would like for defenders of the status quo situation in DC to do is not to offer some things about the status quo that they like, but to try to grapple a bit with the concrete, practical costs of the status quo. There are issues, of course, about building size restrictions in residential neighborhoods, but let’s just talk for now about the main office district.

If you were allowed to build taller buildings in DC, then a higher proportion of the metro area’s office jobs would be located in the District. In addition to the white collar professionals working in those offices, an expanded quantity of offices in DC would create additional low-skilled jobs located in the District that would be easier for low-skilled District residents to obtain. That would lead to somewhat lower levels of unemployment in the city’s poor neighborhoods. That would mean that people would need fewer social services and would pay more in taxes. It would also, at the margin, decrease the level of crime in the city. The additional white collar jobs would mean that more professionals were spending their days in the city (through some combination of more suburbanites commuting to the District and fewer Districters reverse-commuting to the suburbs) which would mean higher levels of spending at downtown retail establishments. Again, that’s more tax revenue (via sales tax) and also more low-skill jobs. And, of course, the land downtown would be more valuable if you could build taller buildings on it, which would lead to higher tax revenues without the need to raise tax rates.

Long story short, along a whole number of dimensions the DC government would have considerably more revenue at its disposal and a somewhat lower level of demand for services. This would allow for both somewhat lower tax rates for DC residents, and for more generous provision of key city services—more cops, better-paved roads and sidewalks.

On top of that, the tendency would be toward less “job sprawl” and therefore less total mileage driven, meaning that taller buildings would be good for the environment. And this environmental benefit would be part of an overall improvement in the economic efficiency of resource-allocation throughout the metro area. It’d be something you can do for the environment that would also boost growth, in other words, rather than hinder it. When you add it up, it seems to me not that there are no positive attributes to the current policy—the view from my building’s roof is very nice in a way that would probably be ruined over the long term if they started building skyscrapers downtown—but that we’re paying a dramatically higher price than people realize in exchange for a relatively trivial aesthetic advantage.