Should the rest of us take international relations scholars seriously?

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber draws attention to a a survey of international relations scholars. Farrell makes one statement that I am pretty confident is correct.

I suspect that much or most of the public attention it gets will be paid to the answers to Question 74: Do you agree or disagree with the statement, “The ‘Israel lobby’ has too much influence on U.S. foreign policy.”
He puts the answers in a nice little table which I reproduce below.

2006 US 2006 Canada
Strongly Agree 28% 31%
Somewhat agree 38% 36%
Neither agree nor disagree 14% 12%
Somewhat disagree 11% 13%
Strongly disagree 9% 9%
His interpretation, though, strikes me as wrong.

Which suggests either that (a) some two thirds of US and Canadian IR faculty members are conscious or unconscious anti-semites on the definition of anti-semitism that some people are trying to push, or (b) there’s grounds for a serious public debate about the US-Israel relationship.
It strikes me instead that a great deal of the poll, not just question 74, demonstrates that the general public should not pay much attention to polls of international relations scholars as a guide to policy.
I worry less that IR scholars have policy views that are driven by anti-semitism so much as by utterly predictable, mindlessly left-wing politics. The left wing part is easy. Question 37 asks whether their political ideology is very liberal, liberal, slightly liberal, middle of the road, slightly conservative, conservative, or very conservative. Liberal and very liberal make up the majority in the US, and 69% in Canada. (The poll itself is tediously left. We get quotation marks around “war on terror”, but not around “foreign aid”.) But other answers made me wonder about the mindless part. Question 55 asks what real world events affected their research, and the most common answer is 9-11. But lethal terrorism from the Middle East was hardly new on 9-11, so even if it focused the rest of us, you would think that IR scholars would have already noticed, for example, the attack on the USS Cole, or the first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center. Or do they adjust their research to the trendy?

Asked to rank in question 59 six possible measures of success in Iraq, it is comforting that 33% (29% in Canada) picked preventing sectarian violence as first and 24% (32% in Canada) picked free and fair elections as first. But 19% (23% in Canada) picked international support for the war first, and 39% (45% in Canada) picked this as first or second. Not, mind you, as important to the success of the war, but important as a measure of success. Are they really that worried about hurting the feelings of the Saddam supporting French and Russian governments, or are they worried about getting invited to the next good dinner party in Paris?

Curiously, in questions 66 and 67, only 8% (6% in Canada) support an attack against North Korea if it continues developing nuclear weapons, but that jumps to 53% (50% in Canada) if the Security Council approves. Questions 68 and 69 show the same result for Iran. Support for invading Iran if it continues to develop nuclear weapons jumps from 9% without Security Council approval (7% in Canada) to 48% with it (41% in Canada). The poll offers for no explanation for the fetish for the largely irrelevant Security Council. Is there something about IR scholars wanting to keep Putin happy?

Question 74 asks about the “Israel lobby” (their quotation marks). It says something about the ideological blinders of the IR crowd that the question was not asked about the Saudi lobby. Or the Irish lobby, for that matter. The US government long allowed the IRA to raise funds in the US, damaging relations with a valuable ally to appease the “auld sod” bigots in Boston. Question 79 asks whether the foreign aid budget should be increased, with 69% saying it should be increased substantially (64% in Canada) and an additional 20% calling for marginal increases ((25% in Canada). No thoughts on how to spend the money. No question about government to government aid transfers, or about different kinds of projects or recipient governments. (Did anyone favoring increased aid really believe that aid to the government of Zimbabwe would be used for anything other than shoring up the army?) The only other foreign aid question is about control: is it more effective going through US agencies such as USAID, or through multi-lateral agencies such as the World Bank. At this point, it was no surprise at all that 42% favored mult-lateral, only 16% favoring bilateral, and only 19% expressing any doubts about the effectiveness of foreign aid. (Peter Bauer remarked that “foreign aid” was conclusion disguising itself as a description.)

But my favorite bit comes in question 81, which asks which of seven wars the US has been involved in were just. The highest comes for WWII, at 98%, with Iraq and Vietnam coming in at 13%. No big surprise there, but Korea comes in at 80%. Korea: 80%; Vietnam, 13%. Both were Asian countries where a country was resisting a communist invasion. What is the difference, except that Vietnam is the focus of the trash-America left? There may have been differences in how the wars were fought, although if these IR scholars are all bothered about human rights issues, why did 98% of them describe as just a war that involved the bombings of civilian centers in Dresden and Tokyo?

So when question 58 asks whether they were opposed to the invasion of Iraq, the 78% of American and 86% of Canadian IR scholars who said they were opposed do not impress me all that much. It just tells me that those are the views of the left. It is not clear at all where the scholar part comes in.