Hint: it’s north of South Korea
The Times reports that Americans who know where North Korea is on a map are more likely to favor diplomacy over military responses. Makes sense. If you don’t know where North Korea is on a map you probably don’t know much of anything, and if you don’t know much of anything, violence can seem like a good solution to problems and also an awesome afternoon out.
An experiment led by Kyle Dropp of Morning Consult from April 27-29, conducted at the request of The New York Times, shows that respondents who could correctly identify North Korea tended to view diplomatic and nonmilitary strategies more favorably than those who could not. These strategies included imposing further economic sanctions, increasing pressure on China to influence North Korea and conducting cyberattacks against military targets in North Korea.
They also viewed direct military engagement – in particular, sending ground troops – much less favorably than those who failed to locate North Korea.
If you know where it is you might have some idea of how bad it would be to send troops there.
Geographic knowledge itself may contribute to an increased appreciation of the complexity of geopolitical events. This finding is consistent with – though not identical to – a similar experiment Mr. Dropp, Joshua D. Kertzer and Thomas Zeitzoff conducted in 2014. They asked Americans to identify Ukraine on a map and asked them whether they supported military intervention. The farther a respondent’s guess was from Ukraine, the researchers found, the more likely he or she was to favor military intervention.
Then again there is such a thing as rational ignorance.
In “Why Geography Matters,” Harm de Blij wrote that geography is “a superb antidote to isolationism and provincialism,” and argued that “the American public is the geographically most illiterate society of consequence on the planet, at a time when United States power can affect countries and peoples around the world.”
This spatial illiteracy, geographers say, can leave citizens without a framework to think about foreign policy questions more substantively. “The paucity of geographical knowledge means there is no check on misleading public representations about international matters,” said Alec Murphy, a professor of geography at the University of Oregon.
While Americans could be better at geography, they cannot be expected to follow every twist and turn of foreign policy. “People don’t invest in policy information, but that’s rational,” said Elizabeth Saunders, a political science professor at George Washington University who studies foreign policy and international relations. Instead of exhaustively researching foreign policy options for a host of nations, Americans are “rationally ignorant,” effectively outsourcing their foreign policy views to elites and the news media.
That system breaks down when you have a complete fool and ignoramus running the show.
This reminds me of the time people were asked in a poll whether they supported bombing the (fictional) city of Agrabah… unsurprisingly, the ‘yes’ vote aligned mostly with R voters rather than D.
Geographic knowledge itself may contribute to an increased appreciation of the complexity of geopolitical events. This finding is consistent with – though not identical to – a similar experiment Mr. Dropp, Joshua D. Kertzer and Thomas Zeitzoff conducted in 2014. They asked Americans to identify Ukraine on a map and asked them whether they supported military intervention. The farther a respondent’s guess was from Ukraine, the researchers found, the more likely he or she was to favor military intervention.
I disagree with this finding, I think it has things the wrong way around. Rather than geopolitical knowledge being a consequence of geographical knowledge, I would say instead that both geographic and geopolitical knowledge both are the consequence of an enquiring, active mind that wants to know about those things. Which can be generalised as: knowledge is the product of curiosity, ignorance is the product of incuriosity.
And the latter is closely associated with the Republican vote.
Durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr… that second paragraph was supposed to be enclosed in a double quote.
A complete fool and ignoramus who stokes and benefits from anti-elite sentiment. (My most recent Twittventure involved a woman who said both that she cared about America and not the world, and that Trump was the “leader of the Free World” and protecting it from Socialists. Go figure.)
I actually think that military intervention might be the best eventual solution, but am also someone who knows that the human cost would be as bad or worse than it was in the 40s. Ultimately there is no good solution to this problem; it’s certainly not going away any time soon.
(I also don’t know where North Korea is exactly, but finding in on a map shouldn’t be a huge exercise; find Japan and look for a peninsula to the west across the sea from it)
On a slight tangent, this reminds me of a poll from a few years ago of American graduates which discovered that 9 out of 10 of them thought Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.
If memory serves it was quoted by either Steven Fry or Sandi Totsvig on QI.
The lesson the Kims took from the ‘Axis of Evil’ era was that Saddam Hussein (who bluffed about having nukes) and Qaddafi (who formally negotiated his nuclear ambitions away) were both toppled and killed, their countries thrown into chaos and their families and legacies expunged to the root. Meanwhile Iran, with its nuclear ambitions unabated even while surrounded by American forces, was left at peace.
We had an opportunity, with Obama’s negotiation with Iran, to show the Kims a different example. To show them that Qaddafi’s demise was at his own hands, from the treatment of his people and not from his negotiations over nuclear weapons; to show them that it was possible to de-escalate from nuclear ambition without undergoing a revolution that ends in the deaths of the ruling family and the devastation of the country. That was at the core of ‘strategic patience’; not (just) to let the regime ossify under its own moribund econo-political ideology, but to show it a better path.
But the American electorate squandered that opportunity. Not only will Iran very likely resume its nuclear programme in earnest, the Kims will keep researching warhead and ICBM technology until they can put a nuke into orbit. At that point, there will be no other options but for the US and its allies to turn the Korean peninsula into a wasteland, likely involving South Korea and at least part of Japan. It will be worse by several orders of magnitude than the original war, and the window to avert this course of events is almost certainly closing rapidly, if it hasn’t closed already.
Seth @6,
I’m sorry, but that’s naïve. Qaddafi was a dictator but his demise evolved from civil war, not autocracy. There are no people on earth more oppressed by its tyrannical ruler (save perhaps the Sudanese or the people of Zimbabwe… but they are largely out of sight and mind) than the North Koreans. The “Juche” regime is utterly Orwellian. It was thought for a long while that it was the last remnant of hard-core Communism, but, in fact, there’s really nothing “left” about the North Korean dictatorship. It’s certainly not the proletariat that rules in Pyongyang. In fact, if anything, the North Korean model is fascism.
http://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/an-inspiring-vision-of-the-future.html
And worse, since even the fascists were amenable to some sort of negotiation. This is not the case with the regime in Pyongyang. Successive American administrations – Democrat and Republican alike – tried. Successive South Korean governments tried. So have the Chinese. And the Japanese have a special aversion to nuclear weapons. In fact the North Korean regime might collapse – in murderous chaos (with millions of refugees streaming into China and neighbouring countries) that would make Syria look like Shangri-La – were it not for the Chinese desire to have quiet on its border. But even the Chinese now seem to be losing patience, and that spells trouble.
http://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/ridiculous-demands.html
Or our only hope?
http://freekorea.us/2017/07/07/stop-talking-about-bombing-north-korea-talk-about-the-revolution-it-desperately-needs/
@Holms:
Yeah, I thought something similar. When a place becomes part of a conflict, inquiring minds want to know more about that place, including where it is. Its location helps put news reports in context which might lead to a better understanding of what’s going on and the potential consequences of various actions.
Not-enquiring minds are unlikely to find out any of this stuff and believe the news sources that support the opinions they’ve already formed.
To be fair, I haven’t read the Times story in full or any of the linked sources. Maybe that’s what they say too.
Seth:
Likely involving Russia and China both of which have land borders with North Korea. Possibly leading to nuclear strikes on the East Coast of the US. Possibly escalating to something much worse. This is insanity!
Then you have that pesky distinction between the Republic of China and People’s Republic of China. Both the current administration and the one preceding Obama’s had trouble with that. You expect the man in the street to miss the occasional fine distinction but presidentially?
Helene, there’s what happened, there’s how the Kims interpreted it with respect to their nuclear ambitions, and there’s how they *should* have interpreted it. We can (mildly) disagree on the actual course of events in Libya, but the Kims’ lesson drawn from it, and the lessons we’d have liked it to draw, are pretty unambiguous.
Bernard: It’s insane, yes. It’s also insane to gamble on the Kims, who venerate two dead men as still-existing political leaders and keep twenty million people in virtual starvation in the open-air prison colony they call a country, to keep from justifying a nuclear first strike on their enemies.
There are no good options, especially now.
Seth @11,
The notion that the Kims can be persuaded to follow “a better path” is, well (I hate to use the word again), naïve. As I indicated in my earlier comment, the “better path” option was offered again and again. By everyone from Washington to Beijing. It hasn’t worked because the “Juche” regime is not amenable to anything that might lead to real reform. They’ll go along with small projects that can swell the regime’s coffers, but “reform” is utterly out of the question. It would mean the end of the Kims and when you’re dealing with men who operate the most murderous slave labour camps on the planet and have no compunction in executing their own kin to retain control, simple appeals to justice and democracy will find no reception. I find it telling that the “Juche” regime has now emerged as a model for far-right racists. http://thediplomat.com/2017/07/alt-reich-north-korea-and-the-far-right/
Helene, in this instance, “a better path” is anything that might have kept the regime from pursuing, and then acquiring, nuclear weapons. That might have involved convincing them that engagement (as in Libya and Iran) did not threaten their domestic rule, that it was other factors (not engagement with the West) that led to Qaddafi’s downfall; not as an attempt to reform the leaders and turn them democratic, but to keep them from getting nuclear weapons.
I don’t pretend the Kims could ever been reasoned with when it comes to human rights. But it is, to use your term, naive to think we could not have deterred them from getting nukes, and then to keep them from getting a warhead on a world-spanning ICBM. The only hope of that latter, more limited goal was in showing them through Iran’s example that negotiating is possible without threatening the stability of the regime.
That’s very, very unlikely to happen, now.