E-Mail This Article to a Friend The kimchi factor Politics, culture, and why things are more complicated than we may think BY PETER KADZIS

UNLESS YOU LIVE in Korea, kimchi is an acquired taste. It’s as Korean as, well, kimchi. It’s the national dish: chili-soaked cabbage laced with garlic and ginger. Nothing could be so simple, yet so complex. A local staple exotic on the tables of other nationalities.

Marvin Zonis, an emeritus professor who’s still active at the notoriously hard-nosed University of Chicago, serves up this culinary and cultural metaphor in the title of his latest book, The Kimchi Matters: Global Business and Local Politics in a Crisis-Driven World (Dimensions, 2003), co-authored with Dan Lefkovitz and Sam Wilkin.

Don’t be confused by the word business in the book’s title. This is not "Zen and the Art of International Capitalist Exploitation." In spirit, it is an almost 19th-century work of what was once called political economics, whose best-known living practitioner — in English, at least — is John Kenneth Galbraith of Cambridge.

Zonis cut his teeth as a public intellectual in the early days of Nightline. When Ted Koppel launched his ABC television news show, it had a simple mission, now greatly expanded: to make sense of the Iranian-hostage situation. Back in 1979, Americans knew as much about Iran as they now know about, well, Afghanistan. Enter Zonis. He had the advantage, too rare among American academics, of actually having lived and traveled not only in the country, but in the region of which he was a student.

I met Zonis several months ago and interviewed him by telephone in anticipation of a reading he will give from Kimchi Matters on March 29 at the Harvard Coop. Perhaps the simplest way to sum up this wise and wide-ranging book is to quote another Cantabrigian, the late Tip O’Neill: "All politics are local."

Q: Your book suggests that the world is a more complicated place than many Americans may think, that there are unintended consequences to our actions, and unrecognized — or unappreciated — cultural factors that influence international affairs. Could you explain why so much of the world seems so at odds with official US policies?

A: It is true that much of the world is at odds with our policy. We saw it most recently in the Spanish election. But we also saw it in a public-opinion poll that the Pew Research Center recently took in nine countries: Russia, UK, France, Germany, and Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco, Turkey, United States. Pretty much a majority of the population in every country except for the UK and the US were opposed to the policies of the US, and that opposition covered a wide range of issues. It was shocking to find that in Jordan, Morocco, and Pakistan a majority of the respondents looked favorably upon Osama bin Laden. So you can’t get a much stronger rejection of American policy than that.

Q: Why such negative unanimity?

A: Since the advent of the Bush administration, American foreign policy has been unilateral. As a result, the rest of the world reached the conclusion that the United States was acting in its own interests without any concern for the rest of the world. There are also some more complicated underlying reasons, the principal one being the collapse of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the common enemy for most of the world — with the exception of the Soviet Bloc — disappeared. It was the common enemy of the Soviets that made those nations hang together with the United States even if they didn’t like US policy, because they understood that the United States was the principal protector of all countries against the Soviet Communist menace. When the menace disappeared, the consensus began to fall apart. I have to say that the Clinton administration, for all its faults, was very careful to try to maintain multilateralism even in the face of the reality that the United States was, as the French call it, the sole hyperpower.

Q: Can you cite an example?

A: When Richard Holbrook negotiated the Bosnia accord, it was called the Dayton Accord because he negotiated in Dayton, Ohio. But the United States arranged — and this was at Holbrook’s urging — to sign the peace treaty in France. So now the peace treaty is actually called the Treaty of Paris, and the French were hosting the meeting, and they felt very important about all that. So the Clinton administration was very careful to do that. Of course, the Bush administration came in and announced that it wasn’t interested in that sort of thing and demonstrated that it wasn’t.

Q: Richard Clarke’s new book suggests — or at least I think so — that the Bush administration in particular and the Republicans in general were just so rabidly anti-Clinton that they felt it important to either ignore whatever legacy he had in foreign affairs or just roll it back. The important thing was to define themselves as being totally different.

A: They certainly were opposed to everything that Clinton did, and I think that’s important. It is also important to remember the national commission on anti-terrorism chaired by Gary Hart for the Democrats and Warren Rudman for the Republicans. That group did a two- or three-year study on terrorism, and they didn’t report to Clinton. I’m not sure whether they hadn’t finished the report or whether it was aimed for the next administration, but they delivered their findings in person to President Bush the week of his inauguration. The conclusion was clear: the principal threat to American national security was Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. And the president, I am told from sources in the White House, put this report on the bottom shelf and said he really wasn’t interested. So it may have been resistance to ... a hatred of Clinton ... that was certainly important and I think it was also the fact that [Bush] was focused on Iraq, and I think he was focused on regime change in Iraq from the beginning of his presidency.

Q: Let’s go to Iraq. What can we expect to happen and what could we do to try to favorably influence the outcome there?

A: I think it’s pretty clear what we could do, but I know we’re not going to do it. I think that the central problem of Iraq is security, and the central reason there is so little security is because the United States is desperately undermanned in Iraq and that the fundamental reason for that, from what I can see, is that Rumsfeld and Bush had an entirely inappropriate strategy for Iraq. They knew it wouldn’t take a whole lot of troops to overthrow the Iraqi armed forces, and it didn’t. But what they weren’t planning for was the collapse of the Iraqi state once Saddam and the top Baath leaders were removed. Given that the state and almost all of the institutions collapsed, we needed a hell of a lot more troops to control the country, which Rumsfeld and the president, in their total refusal to recognize any errors that they’ve ever made, have continued to insist that they don’t need more troops. And the result of that is we haven’t been able to ensure security. More troops are the answer, but we’re not going to do that. I think what they’re going to do is continue to go on, take casualties, push the responsibility for the future of Iraq onto the Iraqis as of June 30th, as the president’s promised. And there’s going to be a very hard time ahead as we see from the refusal of Ayatollah Sistani, the leading Shiite cleric in Iraq, to recognize the new constitution which has already been signed. So when the leading Shiite cleric refuses to accept the governing rules which everybody else accepted, you’re pretty sure it’s not going to be smooth after June 30th. But the hand-over is going to allow the president to claim that we’ve more or less fulfilled our responsibilities.