New CDS and then what?

 As I travel from one conference (Humboldt) to another (ERGOMAS), I have some time to think about the belated decision to name Lt. General Jennie Carignan as the next Chief of the Defence Staff, the CHOD as they say (chief of defence) in Canada.  The CDS in Canada has far, far more power relative to their military than the Chairman does in the US for a number of reasons, including many that will eventually be sketched out in our edited volume on Canadian civil-military relations:

• unlike the US Chairman, the CDS has command of the entire military, so Carignan will be able to order all of her subordinates to do what she wants.  Getting them to follow through?  That is a bit more complicated.
• the Minister of Defence traditionally has a light hand except in a crisis.  Indeed, a recent MinDef didn't think it was his job to oversee the CDS.  The current one is a former cop, so I assumed he would largely stay out of things and I haven't heard much to dissuade me.
• there is no parliamentary oversight over the CDS since the parliamentarians don't think that is their job.
• The Department of National Defence thinks its job is to support the military, not oversee it.  

There have been reforms that have reduced some of the CDS's power as promotion of generals and admirals is now much more vetted than in the past by the Minister and by DND.  Still, the CDS has far more influence than a deputy minister at another agency (yes, the military is a government agency, just one with a bigger budget, unlimited liability, and guns), and can and does speak out more. 

To be honest, I was rooting for Carignan to get the job because, well, she was the only candidate that I had interacted with.  Carignan had been on our second podcast although it was Stéfanie von Hlatky who did the interviewing. I did meet her at that time as she had just returned from commanding Canadian ops in Iraq and was speaking at the Kingston Consortium on International Security.  I then bumped into her at various events in Ottawa.  Once she became Chief of Professional Conduct and Culture (more on that below), I had the chance to have a long conversation with her as her former staffer was our Visiting Defence Fellow.  So, I respect her and wish her well.  Of course, I used to respect Jon Vance as I had met him several times and was impressed until... I wasn't.  

Carignan was reportedly headed to be Chief of the Army before the GOFO crisis of 2021 (where generals and admirals were disgraced due to past abuses of power) and then she was charged with setting up a new command with the responsibility for addressing the culture crisis that facilitated so much abuse of power over the years.  It was and is an incredibly tough job, where there is much resistance, no obvious path forward, and no simple metrics for success.  And while she set up this command, she had to cooperate with a competing effort--the review by retired Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour--AND she had to deal with a new Minister of Defence who had her own ideas for this stuff.  Throughout, Carignan consulted widely (including my sharp friends), built a very good team quickly, and had to contend with stepping on the turf of pretty much every other general and admiral in the CAF.  The jury is still out on whether CPCC has been successful--again, metrics are hard in this area.  But that it didn't fail despite all the pressure is something.  Anyhow, there are at least three things here that matter most about that experience

• Carignan has experience setting up an organization from scratch.
• Carignan is deeply wedded to culture change and knows the file very, very well.  Given all that I have written and what we (a team of scholars) have found about the impact of discrimination scandals on trust in the military, support for defence spending, and support for recruitment, I am glad to see the next CDS committed to such stuff. 
• Because CPCC reaches into every part of the military, I think she has a better background than someone who had served as the head of one service--that a chief of the army might not know as much about the strengths and weaknesses and ways of the Air Force or the Navy.  

Of course, a big question is whether this is a matter of "add woman and stir" approach to fixing the military or looking like one is doing something.  Is she being set up to fail?  Well, I wondered about the same stuff when Anita Anand was appointed Minister of Defence.  In retrospect, she didn't have enough support from the government--neither in budget or in experienced staff for her office--but she was allowed to lead and make a difference.  I wish she had served longer in that spot.  Will Carignan be the same?  Be given the authority to make the decisions?  Probably.  Will she have the budget to do so?  Maybe not.  Will the Minister both support her and oversee her?  Yes and no.  

I am sure her gender mattered in this decision as did her background as a Francophone.  This is a good look for the Liberal government.  That does not mean she isn't qualified.  Carignan is quite qualified--she had operational command, she served very well in a challenging three star position, and she has a well-rounded background.  

Sure, I am rooting for Carignan to be successful.  The Canadian military is in a hard place--underbudgeted, overcommitted, deep in a personnel crisis (something like 15% short of targets), emerging from a series of scandals that involved a multitude of senior officers, a backlash to culture change that is being fed by retired generals who benefited from the permissive environment of the past and by the Conservative Party that seeks to politicize the military with accusations that it is too woke, and more.  Carignan may not be set up to fail, but she will have an incredibly tough job.

As July 1st is near, I am reminded of how new immigrants can be very patriotic, so, yes, I root for Canada to succeed.  As a civil-military relations scholar, I root for better oversight.  I think Carignan will have a better attitude towards civilian control of the CAF, compared those that got the CAF into the mess that required the setting up of the culture and conduct command.  Maybe we can have both a better military and a better controlled military?  I don't think these things are contradictions, but there are those out there who do.  So, let's keep an eye on Carignan, what she tries to do, and who resists. 

DND Extravaganza: Simulations and Unfortunate Realities

 Twas a funky week in Ottawa.  It ended with kids dancing around a maypole in the backyard of the Swedish Ambassador's residence.  But that's not what this post is about.  My Thursday and Friday led me to two different Department of National Defence HQ's for very different albeit CDSN-related purposes.

On Thursday, I met a couple of folks from Valens, an American-based simulation firm, David and Matt, at the entrance to the downtown DND HQ, as they had a grant to do an environmental/climate change simulation.  My role was perhaps translator from American to Canadian and back and forth (disclosure: a rare example of my getting paid as a consultant).   The simulation was of three towns in northern Ontario vying for a new investment by a firm while facing big decisions about the future of the local nuclear power plant and then threat of forest fires.  The Department of National Defence was involved in a couple of ways--whether/how to build a new base while also facing demands for domestic emergency ops.  The four teams really got into it, and the Valens people did a terrific job of handling the moves while making the game engaging and educational.  The light was pretty bright so my pics aren't great, but here's an example of how they reported the various moves:

I bumped into a couple of former NPSIA students including one who took my zoom class during the height of the pandemic.  Glad to see these folks employed and pretty happy with where they are.  

I followed up that session with the CDSN HQ's annual lunch where I gush about how wonderful the team is.  And I mean it.  The team here in Ottawa is small but mighty.  Melissa, who joined me at the start of this adventure, has done such a great job of not just doing the comms stuff (her original role), but managing the rest of the team and engaging our partners and contributors.  Sherry, who handles our accounting/reimbursing stuff as well as our event planning, joined us about a year and a half ago, and my stress level has plummeted.  These two communicate so well together that I really don't put much time into managing the team--a big change from the first few years of CDSN-ing.  Racheal has been our RA for several years now, and will be moving to fieldwork next winter.  She has done a great job of preparing us for the podcasts and for putting together most of our reports.  Morad couldn't make it, but he has been helpful in our reports. Ayshia was been a terrific RA for us and is now moving onto medical school.  Jakob couldn't make it, but his RA work was also great.  A key part of CDSN-ing is working with students, channeling their enthusiasm (some might accuse us of vampirism), connecting them to our network, and maybe providing a bit of professionalization along the way.

On Friday, Melissa and I headed over to the other DND headquarters out in Carling.  It feels like a combo of airport (wide hallways) and university campus (with geese as the primary threat).  We first met our new Visiting Defence Fellow Colonel Nick Roby.  We didn't get a chance to fete our outgoing VDF Brigadier General Marie-Christine Harvey, who did such a great job of co-hosting our French podcast: Conseils de Sécurité. 

We scheduled this meeting because we were already going to be at this HQ for a presentation of research that JC Boucher, Charlotte Duval-Lantoine, Lynne Gouliquer, and I have done on whether scandals about discrimination in the Canadian military affect public trust in the CAF, support for defence spending, and support for friends and family to join the military.  We find, not surprisingly, that, yes, bad news about the military weakens trust, undermines support for defence spending, and discourages recruitment.  This was our second of three presentations to the military: first to the command responsible for culture change, second this week to the military personnel analysis group, and next month to the public affairs folks.  As these folks at DGMPRA are mostly social scientists, they had very good questions to ask about our methods and findings and possible extensions.  We are nearly finished with revising the paper and hope to submit it soon to a civ-mil journal near you.

And to finish off the week, I went to the Nordic Midsommer event at the Swedish Ambassador's residence.  It was the most kid-friendly event at any embassy that I can recall with games, dancing around the maypole to silly songs, and, yes, ice cream and cake.  I bumped into some folks (including one of the former NPSIA students I had met the day before) that I knew and met some new folks (I still suck at big events like these where I am surrounded by strangers).  The sad news is that the Norwegian ambassador died last week.  The Swedish ambassador invoked her spirit and encouraged us to enjoy the festivities as that is what she would have wanted.  So:

Workshopping Canadian Civil-Military Relations

We were able to use the
patio on roof of the Richcraft
building for our lunches.
Here we have Maya Eichler,
Lynne Gouliquer, Vincent Rigby,
Michael Fejes,* and Peter Kasurak

This week, in a joint CDSN-CDAI effort, we held an edited volume workshop on Canadian Civil-Military Relations.  Our aim is to provide a better understanding of the mess that is Canadian civil-military relations.  There really has not been that much work done on the topic although there are plenty of academics studying Canadian defence.  Given that the Canadian military is the largest consumer of discretionary money in the Canadian federal budget, that it is a huge employer, that it consistently makes the news for operations at home (domestic emergencies) and abroad (mostly NATO these days), that the 2% stuff dominates discussions of Canada's foreign policy, and given, yes, that the military has largely been autonomous, perhaps the closest to the model defined by Huntington (yuck) more than 60 years ago, there should be more work in this area.  

Why not?  There is the Canadian penalty: academic work that has Canada as its primary case won't get cited that much.  One could argue that Canadian civil-military relations is not that interesting because Canada's military is at no risk of overthrowing the government and is essentially a strategy consumer when it is sent abroad, always as part of a larger effort run by someone else.  Yet, it is really interesting because of something that came up during our conversations: can we title the volume "Crisis in Canadian Civil-Military Relations" when the crisis is enduring, unending, permanent? 

Melissa Jennings, the CDSN COO,
and Charlotte Duval-Lantoine

One of the classic problems in this field of civ-mil relations is: what counts as a crisis?  Since we are talking stable democracies, it is not whether a coup is possible or imminent.  It is more about the severity of the civilians not doing their job of overseeing the military and/or the military not doing what the civilians want.  In the Canadian case, as our volume will eventually argue (it takes a while for academic publishing...), both sides of the civilian-military relationship in Canada are falling short.  

Some evidence of that:

• A former head of the military [Chief of Defence Staff or CDS] pled to obstruction of justice--and the justice he was obstructing involved a multi-decade affair with a subordinate at a time where he was supposed to be reducing sexual misconduct in the CAF.
• His replacement was suspending due to a credible accusation of sexual assault.  The military investigation (many reviews of military justice found the system to be quite flawed) did not go anywhere since the investigators claimed too many potential witnesses were to drunk at the time to testify later about it.  So, in the big, big, BIG, violation of civil-military relations, that aforementioned officer wrote a letter to all of the generals and admirals in the CAF saying he was exonerated (he wasn't) and he was coming back.  Nope, that was not his call to make. So, that letter did more to get him fired quickly than his original alleged offense.
• The Minister of Defence at this time said it was not just job to track what was going on with the CDS because that would be politicizing things.  So, yeah, the Minister had one job really and then said it was not his job.
• The Prime Minister kept around this Minister of Defense despite him having lost all credibility and despite the PM claiming to be a feminist because the minister was good at raising money for the party.  
• Oh, and that aforementioned effort to address sexual misconduct was after multiple reviews which produced many, many recommendations and precious little implementation.  The Arbour report nicely documents how little tracking there had been of the recommendations.

The volume will show that none of this is really that new.  One of my pet peeves in the conversations was the references to civilian control as "interventions" suggesting that they were episodic at best, rather than a continuous management of the armed forces.  In between "interventions" the military was left to its own devices, which often thwarted civilian intent.  So, yeah, I am comfy with the notion of permanent crisis.  

The idea of the workshop was to have a group of sharp folks present their draft chapters and then get a heap of feedback from the group.  The aim was both to improve each paper and draw connections among them.  It was a great group including both senior and junior academics, former and active military officers, former government officials from DND and other government agencies, historians and political scientists.  Our goal is to complete the volume this summer and submit it to a press so that it gets out hopefully in 2025.

 Some of the things I learned or are starting to think about:

• How much of the expertise outside of the military is still ... military? That is, how many defence historians, for instance, had significant military careers?  One of the few consistent scholars of Canadian civil-military relations, Doug Bland, served for many years inside the CAF.  His work tends to take more seriously the challenges of civilian control of the armed forces, so I wouldn't put him into the protector category. 
  
• That I had wildly overestimated the accountability that the Somalia Affair had produced.  My stance had been that Canada had far more accountability as multiple senior folks (Ministers, CDS's) did not last long during the crisis and the relevant unit was disbanded, while Abu Ghraib didn't make much of a difference to the top of the chain of command in the US. That the officer who had led been in charge of the unit that ultimately got disbanded was promoted on his last day in service to brigadier general, which meant not just a higher pension but a lot of back pay.  Quite a signal of impunity that sent.  Quite a middle finger aimed at the civilians.  I suddenly realized the "Decade of Darkness" was not really the shame that the Somalia affair brought on the CAF, but the brief effort by civilians to actually oversee the CAF. 
  
• That there is a Foreign Affairs and Defence Adviser in addition to a National Security and Intelligence Adviser. I knew about the latter but not the former.  Says a bit about my ignorance but it also says something about how there is a person in the privy council office whose job it is to coordinate defence stuff and that position has not made much of a dent in any coverage of Canadian defence stuff over the past dozen years or so.  
• That my least favorite retired general is apparently spending much time cozying up to the leader of the Conservative Party.  While I have been critical of Trudeau and his replacement of Anita Anand with a former police chief, I am guessing that a new government would be far worse for civilian control of the military. 
   

Anyhow, two days of "I love my job" as I really enjoyed learning from these folks even when or especially when they tell me I am wrong.  I love learning and that often means learning that my previous assumptions or understandings or inferences are off target.  The hard part is ahead of us: giving comments to each contributor, revising our own chapters, getting the revisions back, writing a proposal for the press, and hopefully getting this thing done.  I do think this volume will make an important contribution, as Canadian civil-military relations is, indeed, in crisis, and we need to think more about what has gone wrong for so many decades.  Whether the politicians will follow through on our recommendations is a big question and is very much a part of the problem.

 

 

* Mike completed his dissertation under my supervision, so in a few days, I get to hood him.  Hopefully, I will not mess it up, as last year, my student was far, far taller than me, and that presented a wee bit of a challenge.

How to Break the International Rules-Based Order?

 A few days ago, at a RAS-NSA conference on the Strategic Implications of the 2024 US election, one of the questions was whether Russia defeating Ukraine would break the international rules-based order, or what I used to know as the liberal international order.  My answer focused not on Russia but Gaza.  Let me explain:

Aggression by revisionist great powers, such as Russia, has a lesser impact than the responses to it.  The League of Nations was not killed by Japan's aggression in the early 1930s, but by the lack of a response by the organization and its members.  Iraq's invasion of Kuwait actually strengthened the international rules-based order because most of the planet with a few key exceptions joined the effort to reverse this aggression.  These days, those who were most responsible for designing the post-World War II set of rules are responding pretty well to Russia's aggression.  Not perfectly, not consistently, but the sanctions have required extensive efforts and sacrifices to work around.  Rather than selling Ukraine out as UK/France did for Czechoslovakia in 1938, these countries and others are arming and assisting Ukraine.  Again, not as much as they should but far more.  So, the verdict here is either mixed or in favor of the rules--that the aggressor is paying a significant price.  

The point here is that rules get violated whenever they exist--the question is whether there are consequences.

It is also the cases where countries that were never really part of the rules violate them, it matters less. It matters far more when the countries that are supposed to be espousing and defending the rules don't.

And this is where Gaza comes in.  Just as the US invasion of Iraq (but not Afghanistan) challenged the international rules-based order, the US (and Western) support for Israel's continued war crimes in Gaza do more damage to the rules.  The continued arming of the more powerful actor in a very disproportionate, indiscriminate (unless the attacks on kids, aid workers, professors, medical personnel, etc are deliberate) war and the reaction to the various international humanitarian tribunals undermines the rules-based order.

Sure, the US has long violated some of the rules while promoting them, such as Nixon-Kissinger support for genocide when the Bengals seceded from Pakistan, but the juxtaposition of Ukraine and Gaza has been quite galling to those who see the US, the UK, and others as hypocrites.  The US did not sign onto the International Criminal Court because it did not want its troops under its jurisdiction [one of my last tasks in the Pentagon in 2002 was on memos and cables trying to get exceptions to ICC written into agreements with countries hosting US troops, like Bosnia at the time].  But the US did sign onto most of the post-World War II law-making against genocide and against war crimes.

Similarly, US steps to treat international laws on asylum as a loophole needing to be closed will ultimately hurt not just those seeking asylum but American efforts to buttress the rules based international order  [What unifies some of this, of course, is racism and Islamophobia].

So, it may suck that American hypocrisy has greater consequences than revisionist states violating norms, but this is not new.  The autocrats understand this and seek to impose hypocrisy costs on the liberal states as Kelly Greenhill persuasively argued.  It does behoove American leaders and their allies to think about the larger games.  I argued from my desk in the Pentagon that writing exceptions to ICC in the summer of 2002 would be harmful to any effort to get allies to help the US with the forthcoming invasion of Iraq, and I wasn't wrong about that.

Multilateralism on a Razor's Edge

Fun coincidence, as I was asked to speak at a conference on the Strategic Implications of the 2024 US election the same day that Trump got convicted of ... 34 felonies.  Oh my.

Anyhow, the folks at RAS-NSA, a Canadian defence research network asked me to speak about what the future of US relations with Canada and the world might be next year.

Here is what I said:

I have good news and bad news:

The good news is that if Biden wins, US foreign policy will mostly stay the same, the US will remain committed to NATO and NORAD and will only badger Canada a bit about 2% and such

 The bad news is that if Trump wins, it will be catastrophic.

 Ok, the good news is that Biden is more likely to win.

 Let me explain the Trump future scenario:

For those who are younger and don’t remember Trump’s term that well, and for those wishful thinking bubble was not sufficient pop by Trump’s near wars with NK/Iran and his complete failure to manage the covid crisis, let’s remember

a)     Trump largely appointed arsonists to most government agencies who were much more knowledgeable and determined than expected although not as much at DoD until the end of his term.  Tillerson was an exception, Pompeo was not.

b)     When those folks got disgraced sufficiently or pissed off Trump enough, he replaced them with worse people.  And it always got worse, never better. 

c)     Trump replaced a racist Attorney General who still more or less believed in the DoJ as an independent actor with Bill Barr who used his position to protect Trump from Mueller and all the rest.

a.      Except for the document case and the Jan 6^th stuff, most of Trump’s crimes were public but DoJ didn’t do anything about it under Barr.

b.     Trump replaced a wildly incompetent Tillerson with Pompeo, a Christian nationalist.

e)     Trump delegated all responsibility to the running of the wars to the military, so they naturally escalated everywhere.  He did get the US partially out of Syria by betraying the Kurds and he did start the process to get out of Afghanistan by selling out to the Taliban

a.      He tried to use the US army against protestors, which ultimately caused a rift with his second SecDef and his Chairman, which led to him trying to find replacements after the election.

Ok, why will it be worse?

a)     The so-called adults in the room who were actually pretty right wing are no longer there.  The names being mentioned as potential DoD/CIA/State/NSC are truly horrific people

b)     Trump’s primary motives are resentment and profit.  He resents Trudeau and Canada greatly for taking credit for managing him and for making jokes about him at NATO meetings and for being … Canadian.  We were not sufficiently deferential.

c)     He views all deals he did not make as exploitative since he projects from his own attitude about deals—that he should always be ripping off his partners.  So, he will want to kill NATO and NORAD. 

 What does this mean for Canada?

1. What worked last time won’t work this time
1. Canada will not have allies among Republicans in Congress—today’s GOP is different from the last one
2. Trump will do stuff through extra-institutional pathways where governors and Congress will matter far less.
3. 2024 may be the last meaningful election for quite some time so the usual electoral incentives may no longer apply
2. Things might not be that better for Canada with Poilievre.  How does Trump get along with Ted Cruz?
1. On other hand, the resentment level will be re-set.

People told me that they appreciated my bluntness.  It is either my weakness or my superpower.  Anyhow, let's enjoy this moment of justice as it may not last.   Especially with a Supreme Court with at least two pro-insurrectionists and a Chief Justice abetting them.

 

 

 

Missed My Last Mother's Day

This special dinner was one of the first
gatherings after my father died, and I
remember that we all toasted my mother
for what she gave us and did for us.  We
were pretty determined to let her kno

 My father died just before Father's Day six years ago.  He knew he was dying, and every time he thought he had a few days left, he called to, well, repeat the same lecture as his hearing (and personality) limited conversations.  My mother died yesterday, just a few days after one of the only mother's days we didn't connect.  She had been in a rehab facility after a hospital stay, and I was in Germany, preparing to come back.  I had meant to call her when I got back, but I ended up pushing it to Saturday afternoon.  It was too late.  I had been determined over the past few years to tell her how I felt about her, how much I loved her, how much she shaped me, how much I owed her, so I am not so fussed about missing the chance for one last call.  She was 92, and the last few years and especially the last few months were progressively more difficult for her so this was not a surprise.  

My mother was simply the least self-centered person, most other-centered person I have ever met.  While she was a great cook, whenever there was a more burnt piece or a smaller piece, she saved those for herself.  I can't remember a time where her preferences overrode anyone else's.  She, for instance, did not enjoy the Barbie movie last summer, but she gamely went while most of her brood (her siblings, and much of the next gen) were in town for our summer vacation.  She would have preferred Oppenheimer.

My mother was an awesome grandmother,
and her legacy is this group of sharp, funny,
fierce, left-wing women.

Speaking of nuclear war, my mother is the one that got me interested in politics and history and international relations.  I don't have memories of specific conversations, but I do remember talking to her about this stuff. And one of my very first political memories is of watching her celebrate Nixon's resignation.  She was a fierce liberal, always wanting government to do right by those who were less fortunate.  While she had an appreciation for Jack Kennedy's looks, she was an FDR woman through and through.  She could talk New Deal as long as you wanted.  I got my sense of justice and outrage from her (and from my daughter).  While she never got to see a woman be president, she did get to see the most FDR-ish president in her last few years.

 

A pre-Steve pic of the family

My mother went back to work when I was in 3rd grade or so, working for the Naval Aviation Supply Office near Philly. That was fun for me as she told me about the cool planes that she would order parts for, ones that would make the news like the Harrier and the P-3. She would visit Hawaii and Guam as part of her job to connect with those on the other side of the supply chain.  Only now have I realized we never talked about what those meetings were about. Her first job, pre-kids, was in advertising in the 1950s in New York.  Which made her very uninterested in watching Mad Men. 

My mother shared her empathy with us, so that we cared about what happened to others.  It really was a defining characteristic.  I now I am being repetitive about her "other-ness" but it sticks out. A second defining characteristic was that she didn't want to be her mother-in-law--she wanted to be a far more supportive, loving one.  In that, she wildly succeeded.  She was so good to my wife and so sweet to my daughter.  She subsidized my daughter's private school in Montreal so that we could move there and understand my daughter's teachers.  She also gave us money to invest for my daughter's education so that she could go to any school she wanted.  I am pretty sure that the various relatives of ours who came out had no fear that she would ostracize them.  Maybe if they came out as a Trumper, but LGBTQ?  No worries there.

One could confuse her going along with everyone else as passivity, but not when one of her children needed her.  Then the momma bear would come out.  When we moved to Maryland, I was about five years old, ready to go to kindergarten.  They had me take an ethnically biased IQ test that I failed--for instance, the picture I picked as the best breakfast was not the bowl with steam coming from it but the round thing with a whole in it--a bagel.  Nope, it was a donut.  My mom went in and yelled at them.  I guess I got placed in a normal kindergarten track as a result. She also helped us push our father into getting us Candy who was the sweetest poodle.

Last summer, we played some gin
and some scrabble with her.  At 91,
she was still quite on top of her game
even as her NYT crossword puzzling
suffered a bit.

My mother was very smart, very curious, and very aware not just of her family but of the larger things.  Her politics, as mentioned above, were liberal in the most positive of ways.  She gave money to liberal politicians, she gave much time and effort to mental health organizations, and she gave her insights to us.  I am most grateful that her brilliance only dimmed at the very end, the last few months, as hospital visits made a dent.  Her memory was still so very clear, and I only wish she was more aggressive in sharing her stories.  She would tell them, but mostly when pushed, and I regret not being so good at getting more out of her.

 

 

My mother loved to travel and she loved fine dining.  My father and her got to visit almost every place in the world that they wanted.  She would have liked to keep traveling, but that got progressively more difficult.  My father's death put a big dent into the eating out as she grew up never eating out alone.  And then the pandemic struck, limiting our ability to visit.  Each of her four kids would take her out for dinner when we visited so that she could enjoy this one thing she could still do.  But for a couple of the last years of her life, she was pretty much trapped at home.  When I did visit recently, we would explore the streaming stuff, and we had a mixed record of finding stuff that she liked.  "It's ok" was about as negative a thing she would say.  She did find Breaking Bad to be engaging when I introduced it to her.

That she had no one to eat with except when we visited meant that she could not menace the sidewalks of Philadelphia with her scooter.  She was always an excellent driver--she taught most of us (all?) how to drive as she had far more patience than my father--and had an excellent memory of which sidewalks were intact and which ones were not.  I got much exercise trying to keep up with her as she scooted, even crossing against lights if there were no traffic (which is another thing I got from her). 

 

 

I got to learn which sites in Philly
were scooter-compatible including
this park by the Delaware River. 

We got in the habit of zooming twice a week when we were all locked down during the pandemic.  Given that we didn't have that much to talk about, given that none of us were doing anything interesting and we got tired of talking about politics, we started playing various games.  I found a Chuck Klosterman card set that would ask people about very strange hypothetical scenarios, and then we'd find out how each of us would behave.  It was most illuminating what my mother would and would not do for herself and for the greater good.

Which gets me to the last thing I wanted to mention here.  My mother had the sneakiest sense of humor.  She would mostly listen--either in these zooms or when we got together--but she had the sharpest zingers (never mean ones, well, not at us anyway).  More than once we laughed really hard and could barely breathe.  So, she was game to wear a tiara for her 90th birthday party.  She could be silly even as she was not a fan of silly tv/movies (see the Barbie reference above)

 

 

 

 My mother was very much the matriarch who held our family together.  We could have split apart, but her kindness, her patience, her tenacity, her sweetness, and her love kept us together.  For that and for everything else, I will be forever grateful.  I wish her last few years were not so frustrating and solitary, but she knew she was loved, that her kids and her grandkids appreciated her and were doing well with their lives. 

I couldn't find my digital stash of older pics that are mostly pictures of pictures my father took.  Will post more of those when I figure out which folder they are in.

An Amazing Three Months: Auf Wiedersehen, Berlin

 This winter/spring was the first time I lived abroad for three months--Japan was six weeks broken up into two parts in 2016 and 2017 and London was seven weeks back in 1987.  I have had a great time and have learned a lot, and while I am eager to go home to my much bigger kitchen (Mrs. Spew is with her mother right now), I am also looking forward to coming back next winter.  The Humboldt Award brings foreign academics to Germany for six or more months.  So, I have completed half of that time, and as I have to return home for a variety of family stuff (a wedding most importantly), I will do the second half next winter.  

Any academic will say that they didn't get enough done, and I definitely did not get enough done, but what did I do?

• I helped my co-authors revise the book on parliamentary oversight and submit it.
• I interviewed enough German experts, MoD officials (past and present), and military officers (retired and active) to have enough to draft a rough case for the MoD/militaries book.  I have more interviews to do, and will do those next year hopefully.  I haven't really cracked the case yet, but hopefully things will fall together as I write the case study.
  
• I went to Finland to do that case study for the same project and talked to pretty much everyone I needed.  I transcribed all of my notes, but have not yet written the case study--one of those things I wish I had gotten done.  But upon returning to Berlin, my wife arrived for two weeks of great tourism by car, plane, boat, train, tram, and bus (do busses to and from the planes at airports that don't park their planes at the terminal count?) followed by my sister and her boyfriend and then by Melissa, the CDSN's COO, and her daughter.  My last week in Berlin involved one conference, one presentation, and much packing.
  
• I wrote up more of the South Korean case study from October for the same project, but didn't finish it because, damn, this book is hard.
• I received much feedback on the MoD/militaries book with multiple presentations at Hertie, a presentation at Central European University in Vienna, and a talk to a class in Potsdam. 
• I have done much networking to develop more European partners for the next CDSN grant application and to develop more ways for us to work together to make the partnership more meaningful.
  
• I had opportunities to learn how the Europeans are seeing things these days, especially at a Hertie conference on whether each country is experiencing its own zeintenwende (watershed/turning point in its world view after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine) or not.
• I also learned the whole "the Germans have a word for everything" gag is very true but also played out.
  
• I learned much about comparative authoritarianism at a workshop organized by Hertie folks.
• Speaking of Hertie, I had some chats with some of the students here about their work as folks here are working on NATO and on other stuff I have studied at some point.  I am crashing a dissertation defense today as the student used some of the data from my long languishing diaspora project with Erin Jenne that Kathleen Cunningham and Connor Kopchick resurrected.
  S

• I saw a lot of Berlin, first by myself and then with the aforementioned waves of visitors towards the end.
  
• I saw much more of Germany than I had seen before: Bamberg, Dresden, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Erfurt, and more of Potsdam than before.
• I saw much more of Austria than I had seen before: Vienna (my first time) and the Austrian Alps (Zurs and Lech and the train ride to and from the Bodansee).
• I saw more of northern Italy than I had seen before: Venice, Milan, and Como.
  
• I learned much about the German politics of EU parliamentary campaign via interesting campaign signs (see my this post).
  
• I found out that people use the gym in so many different ways.  There was a largely unstaffed fitness center near me, and I went nearly daily, trying to recover from the combo ski trip/amusement park trip.  I was amazed at how every person has a very different exercise regiment.  I was mostly treadmilling and doing various knee stretches/exercises.  My first time in a 21st century gym essentially, and I was almost always the oldest, most out of shape person there.   Oh, and the kids really do have a lot of tattooes.
  

So, nope, didn't do much, I guess 😉

To dig up one of the oldest tropes here, what did I find to be the most surprising, troubling, enchanting, and humbling from my time in Berlin and Europe? 

• I guess I have been the most surprised by how much English I heard, not just by me, as I wandered through Berlin.  Apparently, East Berlin has many foreign folks, including North Americans, so it is increasingly a bilingual city.  That and the graffiti of East Berlin.
• I am most troubled that Germany is so hamstrung by past decisions and laws that it may not make the changes it needs to make to thrive.  Just the other night, I heard folks complaining about the governing coalition being frozen by the wide ideological divide between Liberal Democrats (think libertarians), Greens, and Social Democrats.  Good for the Steve and Dave book of yore, not so good for dealing with Russia, climate change, or China.
  
• 
  I am most enchanted by, yes, the good weather of Berlin (it rained a lot my first few weeks but has been mostly sunny since) that allowed me to explore lots and lots of neighborhoods, finding great gelato places and Indonesian food and absolutely terrific doner kebabs from the many, many Türkische places.  
• 
  I am most humbled by how sharp the people at Hertie and at the Canadian embassy and the various other folks I have bumped into.  Berlin is chock full of really smart, incisive, multilingual, experienced people.  I again feel like a recently unfrozen caveman when hanging around with these folks.  I have learned a lot, and, yeah, I got into this business because I have an insatiable curiosity, so woot!  I am also humbled by how crappy I skied on mixed snow in Zurs.
  

Was this my best sabbatical?  I could say it is too soon (IT IS TOO SOON!!) as my sabbatical does not end until July 1st.  However, most of the next 1.5 months will be doing catch up on paperwork and CDSN-ing, family stuff (that aforementioned wedding, the first of the next generation of Saidemans and perhaps the first millennial wedding I will be attending), and then conferencing.  So, probably not too soon.  I have had three sabbaticals and one leave (the Pentagon experience), so, as is my tendency, a few rankings:

Best food:

1. Toyko in 2016-17
2. 
   Germany this year (mostly the non-German food I ate), as I learned what the Hokey Pokey is really all about (ice cream).
   
3. The sabbatical at home plus travel of 2006-2007
4. The Pentagon year.  Most of the rankings here are of relatively good stuff, but that year was not good for my diet and was not tasty either.
   

Biggest career impact

1. Pentagon year and it is not close as it helped get me the jobs at McGill and Carleton and re-directed my research from the IR of ethnic conflict to alliances and then civil-military relations.
2. Tokyo--I had never done any research on Asia before that sabbatical.  I am not an Indo-Pacific expert, but I have a far better idea of what the big questions are out there, and that has influenced my teaching, and the Tokyo work did lead to the question I am exploring this year in Europe.
3. Sabbatical at home as it gave me a chance to catch up and shift to civ-mil
4. This one--I am nearing the end of my career, so it is hard to move it that far from the current path.
   

 Most productive in terms of academic research/output:

1. It might be this one--two case studies, revising the book (we made a lot of progress last summer and then this winter), getting feedback.  
2. the sabbatical at home--I finished the Steve and Bill book on irredentism if I remember correctly and shifted to a new research agenda
3. Tokyo: I got that case study done, but the survey took years to complete and we haven't published anything from it yet.  I thought I had a partnership that was going to produce a lot of work, but it fizzled.
4. Pentagon: I got one week of fieldwork done, and it fostered a heap of questions, but I was too busy desk officer-ing to do much academic stuff.

Favorite

1. Pentagon.  I learned so much about so many things at a pivotal time in US foreign policy and international relations from the nexus of US defense policy.  Did I mention it helped get me out of Lubbock?
2. Tokyo.  Watching Shogun this winter reminded me of how wonderfully addictive Japan is--I went from never going there to visiting at least six times--so many times that I am losing track.  Which competes with how many times I have been to Germany.
3. This one.  It has been a terrific three months in Germany.  My sabbatical this year also includes the South Korea trip, which was also pretty cool.  
4. My first one in 2006-2007.  It wasn't bad, it just wasn't as special.  I barely remember what I did that year.  I will always remember my times in the Pentagon, in Japan, and, here.  
   

I will soon start counting down until the next one, and I have a cool idea, but we shall see if I can make it happen.  It will be my last one, so I hope I can make it count.

As I keep saying, I am very lucky.  The Humboldt Award was a great break, giving me the chance to hang out with the sharp and generous folks at Hertie.  I haven't baked in three months and desperately miss my kitchen (facebook is reminding me of the renovation that took place this time last year).  So, I am ready to go home, but I will soon be eager to come back.  My plans for my next Eurotrip?  More Germany, more Nordic case studies (Sweden and Norway), the Italian Alps, and probably Greece.

 I will write another post about what I have learned over the course of the past few months.