For the past decade, it has been virtually impossible to attend a conference or panel discussion on United Nations reform without someone within the first five minutes making the point that the current lineup of permanent UN Security Council members is a hopelessly archaic snapshot of great powers in 1945 and desperately needs updating. I have long agreed, and even indulged in that talking point myself on numerous occasions. [Sidenote: A tip for students and interns looking for an easy way to get senior policy leaders to notice you and nod in agreement at cocktail receptions -- if there is ever a lull in the policy chatter, just clear your throat and solemnly make this point about U.N. reform. And if one of your friends who read this beats you to it in the conversation, other reliable stand-bys include saying "You know, I really think the US needs to think more strategically" and "I must say, our national security system is broken and really needs a comprehensive interagency reform, just like Goldwater-Nichols."  Of such points are blue-ribbon task forces and future conferences made...] 

But every now and then -- every four years to be precise -- something happens in world affairs that shows perhaps the current P-5 membership of the U.S., China, UK, Russia, and France isn't necessarily so obsolete after all. Yes, the Olympics. Looking at the medal tables from the just-concluded London Olympics, the top four medal winning countries also happen to be four permanent members of the UNSC: the U.S., China, UK, and Russia. And the fifth permanent UNSC member, France, is not far behind at all at eighth in the medal rankings.  Furthermore, the countries ranked fifth and sixth in the medal tables are Germany and Japan, both of whom have for years been making credible claims for permanent UNSC membership.  Nor is this year a fluke. The 2008 Beijing Olympics had the same four countries atop the medal tables, with France even closer in sixth place, while Germany and Japan were fifth and eleventh, respectively.  

What, if anything, do the Olympics tell us about measurements of national power? This is admittedly a question with a touch of frivolity -- perhaps all that the medal tables tell us is which countries are most devoted to sports. But as Victor Cha and other scholars have pointed out, sports have never been insulated from geopolitics. Even a cursory glance at past Olympics reveals this, whether Jesse Owens' one-man rebuttal of Hitler's racialism at the 1936 Berlin Games, the legendary "Blood in the Water" Hungary-USSR water polo match at the 1956 Olympics in the shadow of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the reciprocal boycotts staged by the United States and Soviet Union in 1980 and 1984, or even China's use of the 2008 games to assert its global power status. As even a realist like Steve Walt has confessed, the Olympics can tap into and fuel incipient nationalist sentiments among the otherwise unsentimental.

Here I thought it would be interesting to look at Olympic medal counts in comparison with more traditional metrics of national power, such as GDP and defense budgets. (GDP and military expenditures are both admittedly crude proxies for national power; for a more extensive exploration of how power might be measured, see my American Interest article on same.) In putting together the table below, I listed the top 10 countries in total medals won at the London Olympics, and below them for comparison added six other countries that are generally considered "rising powers" in global affairs: India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Turkey, and South Africa. I then listed each nation's global rank in total GDP (nominal) and in defense spending. This is just a whimsical first cut, of course, so any political scientists out there are quite welcome to apply some methodological rigor and see if there are any genuine findings to be had.

What does this tell us? Overall that wealth, military spending, and Olympic success seem to go together -- not too surprising. The national characteristics necessary to produce Olympic-level elite athletes seem to involve a blend of hard and soft power quotients. The most obvious hard power dimension is economic; nations with more wealth are able to devote more resources to supporting Olympic training and facilities. Population levels are certainly a factor, but in relation to overall wealth. In the domain of soft power, nations with functioning governance can effectively direct their resources for determined purposes, such as developing a system to encourage Olympic athletes. Some dimension of culture is another soft power quotient that may play a part, for the self-evident reason that cultures that value sports in general, and in many cases particular sports, are more likely to produce Olympic athletes. To take just one example, as a former water polo player I've always been fascinated by the tremendously disproportionate number of elite water polo teams who come from south-central Europe, principally Hungary and the former Yugoslavia. The fact that three out of the four final teams in water polo this year were Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro shows what a powerhouse the remnants of Yugoslavia remain. Or Jamaica in track and field, which despite its meager power measurements on traditional metrics (e.g. military, economy, governance) has produced the world's finest sprinting program. Or Romania in gymnastics, and so on. 

The other side of the coin is countries that are ascendant as economic and/or military powers but who still punch below their weight at the Olympics. From the table above, the three countries that stand out the most are India, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia -- all of which rank much higher in GDP and defense spending than in Olympic medal counts. This is understandable given that ascendant powers usually first focus on getting their fundamentals of economic growth, infrastructure, and defense on track before devoting national resources to sports sponsorship. Conversely, Olympic results are often a lagging indicator for declining powers. Nations such as Russia that are otherwise in relative economic and military decline still produce  Olympic successes, perhaps partly due to the inherited infrastructure and tradition of supporting elite Russian athletes.

Overall the American successes in London are perhaps another small but telling indicator that American decline is not yet upon us.  Now that the Olympics are over, here in Texas we are looking forward to the start of football season. As long as the United States still has football season come around every fall, I won't worry too much about American decline.  

As much of the world heads into August vacation season, we've canvassed our Shadow Government contributors to find out what they are reading (or plan to read) this month. Below are our book recommendations; in many cases our contributors added a few words of background as well. No surprise, many of the books are related to foreign policy, but with some creative twists here and there.

Mitchell Reiss:

I've just finished Christopher Buckley's new book, They Eat Puppies, Don't They? and Nate Fick's One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, which is the assigned book for Washington College first year students this coming academic year. (Nate is coming to campus later this year to meet with the students and discuss the book's themes of leadership and responsibility.) I am currently finishing Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, which won this year's George Washingtion Book Prize as the best book on the revolutionary era. And I hope to start next Rob Litwak's final installment of his foreign policy "trilogy," Outlier States: American Strategies to Change, Contain or Engage Regimes.

Paul Bonicelli:

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. Excellent review of the causes of poverty and lack of development because it focuses on the absolute requirement for democratic governance and the rule of law to secure property rights. However, it fudges the culture issue by assuming that institutions and culture are somehow different things, as though the latter does not produce the former.

On China, by Henry Kissinger. Because it's Kissinger.

Eminence: Cardinal Richelieu and the Rise of France, by Jean-Vincent Blanchard. Diplomats and policymakers can learn much from this genius who shaped modern European and world affairs to this day by being the first to insist that his state's interests were his North Star. Leaders of an exceptional nation-state like the US have interests beyond power, but they can't achieve them without understanding what Richelieu knew and how he operated for good and bad.

Conspirata: A Novel of Ancient Rome, by Robert Harris. Harris is a master at showing us who Cicero was: a statesman who loved the republic but was a consummate realist in all he did to restore the liberties of Rome (such as they were). He got his hands dirty, but he saved the republic for a few more years by, among other things, defeating the Cataline Conspiracy, the subject of this novel. Harris takes liberties in this work of fiction, but it is nonetheless instructive.

Dan Runde:

State of Disrepair, by Kori Schake (yes, that Kori Schake!)

Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson

Kori Schake:

Ranald S. Mackenzie on the Texas Frontier, by Ernest Wallace. A history of white settlement of the southwest and the role played in it by the soldier who finally figured out how to win the Indian wars.

Bright's Passage, by Josh Ritter. A lyrical novel about a World War I veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress, reminder of the toll that combat takes on the people who fight it for us, how important and difficult it is to stitch them back into society.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey, by Zachary Mason. A collection of short story excursions on themes from the Odyssey. Homer would be turning cartwheels to see his material used with such vigor and creativity.

Will Inboden:

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy. Why? Because I've never read it before. Impression thus far: it's very long. And very good.

The Reason for God, by Timothy Keller. An erudite and winsome defense of the intellectual plausibility of the Christian faith.

Postwar by Tony Judt. The word "magisterial" is woefully overused, but in the case of Judt's elegant history of Europe from World War II to the present, it is wholly merited.

Phil Levy:

Capital: A Novel, by John Lanchester. A well-written tale of London that I started on a recent trip there.

Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. Two very good authors try to disentangle history, politics, and economics.

Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel. The sequel to Wolf Hall! A distinctive writing style; not necessarily easy, but very rewarding.

Mike Singh:

George F. Kennan: An American Life, by John Lewis Gaddis. A great historian writing about one of the last century's most important diplomats.

At Home, by Bill Bryson. Bryson serves up a reminder about how advances in technology - including seemingly mundane ones - have repeatedly had a major and unforeseen impact on politics and international affairs. Plus beach reading is supposed to be entertaining, after all.

Dan Twining:

Why the West Rules (for Now), by Ian Morris. Meta-history at its best by an archaeologist who combines insights from history, geography, and sociology to explain why it was the West, not the East, that came to dominate the modern world. Like many students of the past, though, his predictions for the future are questionable. Read it for its rich historical insights rather than using it as a crystal ball.

Jews, God, & History (2nd edition), by Max Dimont. As a non-Jew, I discovered this book on my current trip to Israel. Excerpt: "Jewish history is too fascinating, too interesting, too incredible to remain the private property of Jews and scholars.... Jewish history cannot be told as the history of Jews only, because they have nearly always lived within the context of other civilizations. The destiny of the Jews has paralleled the destinies of those same civilizations, except in one important respect. Somehow the Jews managed to escape the cultural death of each of the civilizations within which they dwelled. Somehow the Jews managed to survive the death of one civilization and continue their cultural growth in another which was emerging at the time."

Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India, by Lawrence James. When I lived in New Delhi we shunned literature on Britain's Indian empire so as not to give our Indian friends the idea that we were colonial romanticists or Orientalists. However, the legacy of the Raj lives on in India's institutions and in its expanding foreign policy horizons, and it is difficult to understand modern India without an awareness of the nationalist and modernist currents that emerged from the colonial experience. To the extent that the modern world grew out of a British empire on which the sun never set, Britain's experience in India is central to the narrative of global history, and to understanding Asia's other big rising power.

The Irony of American History, by Reinhold Niebuhr. I recently rediscovered the joys of Niebuhr's philosophy when Shadow Government co-editor and German Marshall Fund fellow Will Inboden gave a presentation of his new paper on Niebuhr's relevance to our understanding of international politics today. During the early Cold War, Niebuhr's thinking on the intersection of human morality (including its darker undercurrents) with democracy, totalitarianism, and the international balance of power shaped the work of generations of scholars and practitioners. His rich understanding of the human condition and its expression in the instruments of state power are a welcome antidote for students of political science unconvinced by the austerity of structural realism and other modern theories of international relations.

Read on

Kofi Annan's bitter resignation yesterday from his hopeless assignment as the UN's Special Envoy for Syria merely confirms what has long been apparent: the Obama administration's Syria policy has failed. The policy seems to have thus far consisted of a combination of sternly-worded denunciations, persistent outsourcing of international legitimacy to Russia and China, and belated, unenthusiastic, and possibly ineffective provisions of non-lethal aid to some Syria rebels for communications and logistics. As Peter Feaver has observed, this is not just "leading from behind" but rather "following from behind." Meanwhile, the fact that Syria represents a confluence of strategic interests and moral imperatives has not prompted a proportionate response from a White House wary of action in an election year.

Into this void comes a compelling op-ed by Anne-Marie Slaughter in the Financial Times. Slaughter, an eminent Princeton professor who served as Obama's director of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department during the first two years of the administration, makes an impassioned call for meaningful action. Specifically she urges that the United States lead a coalition of nations in providing "heavy weapons (and possibly air cover)" to all Syrian opposition leaders who show their commitment to democratic principles.

Though now returned to the halcyon groves of academe, Slaughter remains one of the more influential foreign policy voices today. Recall her New York Times op-ed shortly after she left the State Department urging American intervention in Libya, which anticipated (and very likely influenced) the Obama administration's eventual decision to do just that.

Slaughter's latest op-ed takes seriously the many factors and risks that argue against intervention, including the possibilities of arms ending up in the hands of jihadists, or of exacerbating the conflict and increasing tensions with Russia and China, not to mention the potential unintended consequences of taking sides in a civil war. It also contains a head-snapping concession when Slaughter admits that "sending arms without U.N. approval would put the U.S. on the wrong side of international law." The fact that one of the most eloquent proponents of international law and multilateral organizations is now channeling her inner John Bolton shows how grave the situation in Syria has become. One would hope that this point will also chasten some of the sanctimonious voices who are so quick to denounce any perceived violations of international law. International law's many merits exist alongside ambiguities and cynical obstacles to actions that may be moral and strategic necessities.

Slaughter's article reminds us that statecraft is rarely the art of choosing good policies, but rather involves choosing the least bad policy among an undesirable set of flawed options. The downsides to supporting the Free Syrian Army are many, and at this point can be cited ad nauseum by any foreign policy expert and probably even the average man on the street.

But there are also the downsides of inaction, and I share Slaughter's worry that the White House has thus far not carefully assessed the costs of its own policy of restraint bordering on neglect. She cites several of these costs, most eloquently the opening words of her op-ed from the sister of a dead Syrian rebel soldier: "When we control Syria, we won't forget that you forgot about us." In other words, staying out now seriously diminishes American influence in whatever emerges as the new Syria. To this downside can be added that passivity also limits American influence in shaping now what the new Syria will look like; creates an opening for a greater role for jihadists and other malevolent elements; diminishes our ability to monitor and secure Syria's vast chemical weapons stockpiles; risks allowing the conflict to spill into neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq; removes one potent lever for cutting off Iran from its most important ally; and increases the perception in the region of American weakness. Most poignantly there is the humanitarian cost, the thousands of dead Syrians who perish each month while the State Department continues to "monitor the situation closely."

For these reasons I signed this letter organized by the redoubtable teams at the Foreign Policy Initiative and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, urging the White House to help create safe zones and provide arms to the rebels. Finding the best policy on Syria remains exceedingly difficult, but Kofi Annan's resignation and Anne-Marie Slaughter's op-ed together show that the White House's current policy has not been it.

American decline is in the news again. Now even the embarrassed Australians have joined the debate, with an awkward "clarification" of Foreign Minister Bob Carr's reported comments to Mitt Romney about how to reverse America's decline. Meanwhile yesterday President Obama's remarks to the Veterans of Foreign Wars conference continued what appears to be an election-year conversion to the anti-declinist view (more on this below) as he rejected accusations of decline and called the 21^st century another "American century." Governor Romney will likely present his own take in his VFW remarks today.

All of this came to mind as I recently read Jim Mann's engaging new book The Obamians profiling the Obama administration foreign policy team. Like Mann's other books, this one is generally thoughtful, balanced, and insightful. Yet what emerges from Mann's book is an unflattering (perhaps more unflattering than the author intends) reminder of just how many strategic mistakes the Obama administration made when it first took office. Taken at face value the book portrays the combination of hubris and naiveté that consumed the Obama team during their first year in particular. Most of their signature policy initiatives from that time became strategic failures: the embrace of China around a "G-2" partnership; the support for Medvedev as a pillar of the Russia "re-set"; the ideological commitment to unconditional negotiations with the Iranian regime that prevented support for the Green Movement or tightened sanctions during a more opportune window; the failed push for Israeli-Palestinian peace based on unprecedented pressure on Israel; the belief that the war in Afghanistan could be simultaneously escalated (with a troop increase) and ended (with a politically-driven drawdown date).

Beyond these specific mistakes, what also springs from the book is the overriding sense of how President Obama and his team internalized a belief in America's decline as they sought to frame American foreign policy. This animated their worldview and became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as they consciously chose to cede American leadership to other actors on the world stage and downplayed American influence and capabilities. It is one thing to understand and act on shifts in global power balances, such as the relative decline in the EU and the relative ascendance of China and India. But it is another thing altogether to deliberately position the United States as a declining power.

In Mann's description, part of the Obama team's belief in America's diminished power came from what they saw as fiscal resource constraints. He cites Obama administration officials lamenting that, unlike the supposedly ample budgets of the Clinton years, the U.S. now has very little money to devote to national security concerns, and thus can exercise less global influence than during the 1990s. That today's national security budgets face considerable pressures is true, but Mann's account and the Obamians' attitudes gloss over two important points. First, in comparison with the allegedly halcyon days of abundant resources during the Clinton administration, the Obama national security team actually has substantially more money -- roughly twice as much -- at its disposal. For example, the FY 2000 defense budget (during Clinton's last year) was $295 billion, whereas the FY 2011 budget is almost twice that at $549 billion -- which rises to over $700 billion when the Iraq and Afghanistan accounts are included. The percentage increase in the diplomacy and development budgets, known as the "Function 150 account", over the same time span is similar. The combined budget for the State Department and USAID in FY 2000 was around $23 billion, whereas the comparable FY 2011 budget was over $48 billion (the FY 2010 budget was even higher). The international affairs budget actually hit a 30-year low in 1997, in the midst of the Clinton presidency. In short, it is easy to view history through greenback-colored lenses and assume that previous eras had abundant resources -- and forgot that the 1990s were characterized by severe reductions to both the defense and international affairs budgets from the post-Cold War "peace dividend."

Second, Mann fails to probe a primary reason why the Obama national security team feels the fiscal pinch. National security is not a budget priority of this White House, especially in comparison with domestic entitlement programs. The only line in the federal budget that the Obama administration has targeted for specific reductions is Defense, while leaving relatively untouched the main drivers of the fiscal crisis and the largest portions of the federal budget: domestic entitlement programs. What the Mann book elides is that these budget realities reflect deliberate policy choices and priorities of the White House.

Recently this White House seems to have realized that they may have prematurely bought into the decline notion -- at the very least, they have realized that it is not helpful to Obama's reelection prospects for voters to believe the administration embraces decline -- and they responded with a time-honored Beltway gambit, touting an author making the opposite argument on the president's reading list. However, this election-year conversion follows three years of damage to America's global standing, and the bills for this erosion will come due in the coming years. (Curiously, Mann portrays Secretary Clinton as differing from Obama in still affirming American preeminence).

Finally, if the United States does face the real prospect of decline, should American leaders be resigned to this fate -- or should they resolve to resist it? The picture that emerges from the Mann book is of an Obama administration that chose the former path. American power and influence is diminishing, they seem to believe, and one task of statecraft is to manage this new reality.

Perhaps so. But I recently came across a quote from an American statesman from a previous generation that displays a fierce resolve against succumbing to decline. Bill Clements served as Deputy Secretary of Defense during the Nixon and Ford Administrations from 1973-77, and he famously admonished his staff: "Let us never send the president of the United States to the conference table as the head of the second-strongest nation in the world."

This resolve is all the more remarkable when considering the historical context. During the years of Clements' Pentagon service the United States faced the most sustained erosion of its global standing since becoming a world power. It had just lost its first war in Vietnam; seen its first president ever to resign from office; was enduring the triple economic whammy of oil price shocks from the OPEC embargo, inflation, and stagnant growth; and was witnessing its foe the Soviet Union make strategic advances around the world. American decline was not just a fear, it was a fact. Yet Clements did not resign himself to merely managing this decline, but urged his staff and colleagues to work to renew American power.

This should be remembered today. Some data points of decline may be unavoidable, but how we respond is a choice.

(For those interested in further commentary on the decline debate, check out the National Intelligence Council's blog on its upcoming Global Trends 2030 report, which this week considers various angles on the question of American decline).

Civil war in Syria and terrorism in Bulgaria are dominating headlines this week, but the ongoing deterioration of Mali is the type of simmering issue that is starting to claw its way on to the front pages. Among other things it is a vivid illustration of how the events of the "Arab Spring" are having profound ramifications in non-Arab countries; Ross Douthat's discussion of this is particularly insightful. An unintended consequence of the Libya war (which I supported at the time and still regard as on balance the right decision) has been the spillover of chaos, instability, and malevolent elements into neighboring countries such as Mali, which may be emerging as a new terrorist safe-haven.

As recently as one year ago Mali stood as an emerging African success story. An Islamic democracy that in 2007 hosted the global Community of Democracies ministerial meeting in its capital city of Bamako, Mali is now fractured with militant Islamists controlling half of its territory and an uneasy post-coup coalition of civilians and military controlling the other half. I worked with Malian leaders in the planning for the 2005 Community of Democracies ministerial in Santiago, and their pride in their nation's accomplishments was palpable, as was their enthusiasm in being an African Muslim democracy in an otherwise troubled region. Now that progress has dissipated. Their country is falling apart, and northern Mali may well be emerging as a new Al Qaeda base of operations, attracting jihadists of many nationalities, African and non-African.

Reports from the north, such as this New York Times story, bring chilling echoes of Afghanistan as it first fell under Taliban rule 15 years ago. Malian women and non-Islamist Muslims, especially Sufis, are being subject to horrific repression. One worrisome indicator is the jihadists' destruction of traditional Muslim burial grounds and other iconic sites, a sign of the vicious religious intolerance that militant Islamists show towards other Muslims, let alone believers in non-Islamic faiths. (I have an article in the forthcoming issue of Policy Review exploring the connection between religious freedom violations and potential security threats, a connection that is unfortunately under-appreciated by the policy community). This campaign of religious intolerance may be an early warning indicator of a looming security threat, particularly if northern Mali becomes a terrorist safe-haven and magnet for jihadists planning attacks on the West.

American policy options are extremely limited, and the current focus on encouraging the African Union to take the lead is probably the best of a bad set of choices. American leadership is needed more urgently in other areas, such as Syria. But at a minimum, American counterterrorism and religious-freedom policymakers should be watching Mali closely, and talking to each other. In the case of Mali, their concerns may be more aligned then they realize.

I've just returned from a week of fishing on a remote island in Alaska, happily distant from events in the rest of the world. It brings a welcome sense of perspective when one's biggest concern is where the salmon are running. In this case it was a great week, as both the kings and silvers were feeding in abundance, and the Inboden freezer will be well-stocked with fish for months. Meanwhile I'm now playing catch up on various happenings, and over the next few days will offer thoughts on some recent foreign policy and politics items.

First up is Congressman Adam Smith's recent Foreign Policy article. Smith, a Democrat and the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, wrote here at FP.com a few days ago larding praise on the Obama administration while lambasting the Romney campaign for its foreign policy support from former Bush administration officials (hmm, sounds like a lot of us here at Shadow Government including yours truly). On substance, Smith's piece is fundamentally unserious, and certainly will not help elevate his standing as a "wise man on foreign policy." (It is generally expected of a member of Congress who aspires to be seen as a leader on national security policy to write a "big think" piece for a serious outlet like FP -- a well-crafted article can mark a member as an up-and-comer, but a poorly crafted one can do more damage than silence).

On this count Smith's article disappoints. It reads as if it were written by Democratic National Committee staff circa 2005. Like many Democratic critiques from that era, this one lambastes the Iraq war, while conveniently neglecting to mention Smith's own past support for the war. Indeed, Smith, like many Democrats, has not yet figured out how to acknowledge that by their own scoring they were wrong on Iraq twice: wrong to support the war when things were going well, but also wrong to oppose the surge, which substantially helped reverse the trajectory when things were going poorly. They seek to damn all initial supporters of the Iraq war (except themselves) but are unwilling to extend the logic by damning all opponents of the surge.

But beyond its selective history on Iraq, at its core Smith's op-ed has a much bigger problem: the Obama administration has adopted almost wholesale the so-called "discredited doctrines and reckless policies" of the Bush-Cheney administration that Smith decries. This White House's biggest foreign policy successes have almost always come when following Bush administration policies (yes, this point has been made many times before, but it bears repeating as long as tendentious articles like Smith's are being written). Policies and doctrines such as the preemptive use of force, unilateral operations, counter-insurgency warfare, indefinite detention of terrorist suspects, military tribunals, drone strikes, multilateral coalitions to pressure North Korea and Iran on their nuclear programs, strong assertions of executive authority -- all of these were controversial when developed by the Bush administration. And all have been adopted, and in some cases expanded, by the Obama administration, particularly as it continues the war against al Qaeda.

If Smith's article represents the strongest line of attack that the Obama campaign has against Gov. Romney on foreign policy, it is the flimsiest of rubber swords.

In concluding his elegant book On China, Henry Kissinger describes an ongoing debate within Chinese leadership circles. Some of its ruling class believes China should maintain its "peaceful development" strategy in accordance with a rules-based international order, while others demand that China now adopt a more aggressive posture that directly challenges American primacy. I've just returned from a month in China and experienced some of this debate firsthand. Visits to several cities, and meetings and conversations with Chinese officials, scholars, foreign business leaders, American officials and, yes, taxi drivers produce an amalgam of impressions.

The best way to make sense of the current state of affairs in China is to think of not one but several "Chinas" -- each is real, but none by itself is the full reality. The following are six of the "Chinas" that exist today; the question is which of these will command the future.

Rising Power: Chinese leaders are obsessed with their nation's rise, and see it reclaiming its historic position as a dominant world power. Many Chinese strategists also believe the U.S. is in decline. But their opinion splits on what this means. Those who see the U.S. primarily as an adversary (see below) welcome America's declension, while those who see the U.S. more as a partner in China's rise worry about the consequences of a diminished U.S. Several Chinese thinkers expressed their frustration with what they see as erratic American policy under the Obama administration, which has veered from the "G-2" embrace of 2009 to the now perceived hostility of the "pivot." Some Chinese interlocutors also pointed out the same fact that troubles many Americans: A White House pursuing massive defense cuts cannot adequately resource a bolstered posture in Asia.

Security Threat: The debate within the U.S. over whether or not China poses a threat often misses the Chinese perspective: many (though certainly not all) Chinese strategists see America as their principle adversary. The People's Liberation Army is operationalizing this attitude in its development of weapons platforms designed to counter the U.S. As I pointed out in a discussion with some Chinese scholars and officials, the standard American talking point demanding more "transparency" from China about its military modernization and expansion may be diplomatically requisite, but it elides the real issue. The U.S. does not merely want "transparency" from China; we want China to stop developing weapons directly targeted against American force projection capabilities -- if it doesn't intend to become our adversary.

Economic Dynamo: While China's growth is slowing and some of its numbers may be contrived, its economic strength is real and its long-term trajectory still looks promising. Virtually all Chinese speak with tremendous pride about their nation's economic boom, which they have experienced firsthand in materially-improved lives. Many Chinese believe that their nation weathered the global economic crisis relatively unscathed, which in their minds vindicates their model and equips them to meet future challenges such as the transition from export reliance to domestic consumption. Massive infrastructure projects such as the many new airports and high speed rail may excessively dazzle some Western visitors, but this should not diminish the genuine accomplishment they represent. Nor have corruption, bureaucracy and stacked decks dissuaded many international investors from still hungering to grow their stakes in the China market.

Fragile Kleptocracy: My own Tom Friedman-esque moment of analysis-via-taxi-drivers came one evening when all of the Beijing taxi drivers in the central part of the city had turned off their meters and were charging rates five times the metered rate for a ride back to our hotel. After some customary evasions, one of them admitted that this was their version of a work slowdown. Strikes are illegal, but the frustrations of Beijing taxi drivers, whose rates haven't been increased in ten years amidst surging expenses despite many pleas to the government, boiled over into illicit protest. Such resentments are multiplied across the country, crossing industries and rural and urban lines, resulting in tens of thousands of protests annually. Then there is the Bo Xilai case, which continues to reverberate, especially as Bo's fate is negotiated amidst maneuverings for the upcoming Party Congress and leadership transition. The Bo case is only exceptional in that it became public. Otherwise it is all too familiar in China, where corruption is pervasive, governance is brittle and a senior Party post commonly also includes control of a favored industry or company.

Reforming Autocracy: Yes, China remains a repressive autocracy, but nevertheless ongoing reforms and liberalizations are taking place, many enabled by communications technology that the government cannot entirely suppress. A major news story during my visit was the heinous forced abortion on a Chinese woman seven months' pregnant in Shaanxi province. Social networks in China erupted with popular outrage, as heartbreaking photos of the mother next to her dead baby circulated widely, and an embarrassed Chinese government responded by suspending the local officials responsible. This is a woefully deficient punishment, and the manifestly unjust one-child policy remains in force, despite China's looming demographic nightmare. But even a few years ago this crime would have never been disclosed at all, let alone prompted public protest and an official response.

Insecure Bully: Some revealing yet head-scratching moments came when Chinese interlocutors expressed their consternation at the U.S. Embassy Beijing's Twitter feed reporting on air quality in Beijing, while in the next breath they defended China's provocations such as its anti-satellite missile test, bellicose territorial claims on the South China Sea and support for North Korea. These are not the actions of a confident, responsible stakeholder, but of an insecure bully, obsessing over its international image while engaging in obnoxious behavior that does much more damage to its image than any American report on human rights or environmental quality. This insecurity also prevents China from coming to terms with its own history. While the Cultural Revolution is widely lamented, the Tiananmen Square massacre (whose 23^rd anniversary passed with censorship even of the Shanghai Stock Exchange) cannot be mentioned, and Mao remains valorized. China's insecurities also help explain its foreign policies to shield the Syrian regime and Iranian nuclear program, and prop up the Kim dictatorship in North Korea -- all of these are short-sighted decisions, but short-term thinking is a hallmark of an insecure government obsessed with maintaining its hold on power.

Some of the "Chinas" above are positive, others are negative. Yet in understanding China all of these variations must be taken into account.The U.S. has a major stake in encouraging political reform and economic growth while discouraging the internal repression and truculent behavior towards its neighbors. Mistakes in China policy come from privileging one scenario over all the others -- for example the "China Fantasists" who believe the growing economy will inevitably lead to a democratic, peaceful China, or the offensive realists who focus on the Chinese military threat while ignoring the economic benefits the U.S. receives in the relationship, let alone China's internal fragilities.

This is also why China policy is such a challenge. Taken together, the multiple realities of China today defy any simple historical analogies about the management of rising powers, and demand an unprecedented wholeness of vision from the United States.

When it comes to partisan differences on foreign policy, one area that the conventional wisdom regards as a deep chasm is multilateralism. A crude set of stereotypes have taken hold: Republicans as reckless unilateralists, and Democrats as feckless multilateralists. But in actual practice the differences over multilateralism are often not as acute, as most policymakers from both parties would admit.  On this note, our readers might be interested in the results of a recent survey that my colleagues Josh Busby (also of the University of Texas-Austin) and Jon Monten (of the University of Oklahoma) and I put together. Assessing the views of experienced policy-makers in both parties, we found that while there are genuine partisan differences on multilateralism, there is also a surprising degree of agreement and bipartisan consensus. We wrote-up an analysis of our findings at the Foreign Affairs website, and a summary of the survey results can be found here. [In the spirit of bipartisanship, alert readers will also appreciate this collegial cross-linking between Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs. If this bonhomie keeps up, by week's end Peter Feaver will be writing nice things about the North Carolina basketball team].

In brief, our survey found that both parties see the value and the limitations in multilateralism. Furthermore, while both parties might often arrive at similar policy outcomes, they do so from different orientations. For example both parties believe multilateralism in practice generally increases the effectiveness of American foreign policy. Yet as we describe in the article, Republicans and Democrats use different balancing tests when considering a multilateral initiative and evaluating just how effective it might be. Republicans tend to emphasize the importance of sovereignty and freedom of action, while Democrats tend to emphasize the importance of legitimacy and interdependence. Thus Republicans weigh whether the multilateral opportunity protects American sovereignty and produces the desired policy results. They usually will agree to relinquishing a measure of sovereignty if a multilateral policy otherwise appears to be effective, but are likely to oppose a multilateral initiative that they perceive to erode sovereignty without delivering adequate policy benefits. In contrast, Democrats weigh whether the multilateral opportunity appears to address the vulnerabilities created by interdependence and is perceived as legitimate by other countries. These principles, Democrats believe, contribute to more desirable policy outcomes.

In trying to make sense of these findings, we considered various labels to summarize the dispositions of the parties (e.g. Republicans as "pragmatic multilateralists" and Democrats as "principled multilateralists," or the GOP as "a la carte multilateralists" and Dems as "prix fixe multilateralists"). Ultimately we settled on the categories "sovereignty-minded multilateralists" and "interdependence-oriented multilateralists," which hopefully make up in accuracy what they lack in pith and punch.

The survey is admittedly constrained in how much it captures party attitudes because we limited it to people who have served in meaningful policy-making positions (rather than pundits and party activists), and because the surveys depended on people believing it worthwhile to take the time to respond. So while our political scientist friends out there might find areas to quibble on methodology and selection effects, we still think that the surveys capture something meaningful. Especially because the responses reflect the beliefs of those who have actually made policy, and who may well occupy policy-making roles in the future.

The survey also helps illuminate not just where Republicans and Democrats might diverge on certain foreign policy questions, but why they do so. Understanding these reasons can be constructive on a number of fronts. It can lay a basis for bipartisan cooperation by helping each side understand the other's core concerns and priorities, and also help illuminate potential sticking points on particular issues. Understanding how Democrats and Republicans think about foreign policy can also help clarify the differences between the parties for other stakeholders, ranging from foreign governments trying to understand American foreign policy, to American voters weighing their choices this November.