Welcome to Dumb IR Summer!

We apparently have to talk about the geopolitics of Barbie.

Dammit but Barbie looks hot in that photo by Sandra Gabriel on Unsplash

On our Space the Nation podcast, Ana Marie Cox and I like to do Hot Sci-Fi Summer every year around this time — i.e., choosing stuff to talk about that is loud, noisy, fun, and generally unburdened by complexity. Think Predator. Or Highlander. Or the Riddick trilogy, which we’ll be talking about in the next month.

We do Hot Sci-Fi Summer because, well, it’s hot out, and that does not mix well with deep thoughts. Apparently, “research suggests heat stress can muddle our thinking, making simple math a little harder to do,” according to NPR’s Alison Aubrey. Another medical website says, “brains don’t function as well in very hot weather. Studies of students and of office workers have shown that we just don’t think as clearly in very high temperatures. Both productivity and performance are affected by heat.”

My point is that during the summer months the hard-working staff here Drezner’s World will be spending more time than usual talking about the simpler, more amusing aspects of international relations. Sure, there is also a lot of complicated IR going on right now, and that will be covered in the coming days and months. But the ratio of deep posts to fun posts might shift a little bit between now and Labor Day.

With that explainer out of the way, let’s talk about Barbie the movie! Here’s the main trailer:

So this looks like a pretty fun movie! Great cast, interesting director, fun bubblegum vibe, intriguing postmodern premise, and so forth. And yet, the film is running into an Indo-Pacific geopolitical buzzsaw.

According to Axios’ Ivana Suric, “Vietnamese officials banned screenings of the forthcoming film this week because it shows a map with disputed Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea, per state media…. The map in question shows the U-shaped, ‘nine-dash line’ that reflects China's unilateral and disputed claims to swaths of the South China Sea.” The New York Times’ Mike Ives provides some further context:

The head of the Vietnam Cinema Department, an agency in the one-party state, said on Monday that the Warner Bros. film would not be released domestically because of a scene that includes the so-called nine-dash line — a map that appears on official Chinese documents and encircles most of the South China Sea.

The official, Vi Kien Thanh, did not say which scene Vietnam hadn’t liked. Several commentators wondered if he meant the one showing Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, standing in front of a crudely drawn world map….

China occupied Vietnam for a millennium and invaded it as recently as 1979. And under Xi Jinping, China’s powerful leader, Beijing has built military outposts on contested islands in the South China Sea. It also rejected an international tribunal’s landmark 2016 ruling that sided with the Philippines by saying that China’s expansive claim to sovereignty over the sea had no legal basis….

A few prominent Vietnamese observers said in interviews this week that their government’s “Barbie” ban was consistent with earlier efforts to protect Vietnamese sovereignty in the sea, and partly a reflection of the Communist Party’s sensitivity to domestic criticism of its China policy.

The “Barbie” ban was also successful, they added, because it got the international news media talking again about Vietnam’s territorial grievances.

Oh, it’s not just the international news media talking about Barbie. It’s also the United States Congress, as Politico’s Daniella Diaz reports:

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who leads a select House panel aimed at countering the influence of China, said the map “illustrates the pressure that Hollywood is under to please CCP censors.”

“While it may just be a Barbie map in a Barbie world, the fact that a cartoonish, crayon-scribbled map seems to go out of its way to depict the PRC’s unlawful territorial claims illustrates the pressure that Hollywood is under to please CCP censors,” Gallagher said in a statement to POLITICO. “I hope Warner Brothers clarifies that the map was not intended to endorse any territorial claims and was in fact, the work of a formerly plastic anthropomorphic doll.”

Warner Bros., in its own statement to POLITICO, said there were no geopolitics intended in “Barbie.”

“The map in Barbie Land is a child-like crayon drawing,” a spokesperson for the Warner Bros. Film Group said. “The doodles depict Barbie’s make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the ‘real world.’ It was not intended to make any type of statement.”

So who is right? The map in question was in the trailer for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. Here’s a still of it, take a closer look:

So… yeah…. this is all extremely stupid. As the Times story acknowledges:

The nine-dash line in that scene appears to lie very far from Asia.

If that is the offending map, “I really can’t see what the fuss is about,” said Bill Hayton, the author of books on Vietnam and the South China Sea.

“The map in the film appears to bear no relation to a real map of the world,” Mr. Hayton added. “This looks like Vietnam’s censors trying to demonstrate their patriotism and usefulness to the regime.”

Let me go a bit further than Hayton. It’s a nonsense map. There are squiggles and arrows and hashtags and dotted lines all over the damn place. To the extent that the map is supposed to depict the Pacific Rim, the dotted line is nowhere close to where the actual nine-dash line is.¹ No one is going to be looking at the line, because everyone will instead be staring at Margot Robbie. Because she’s Margot Robbie.

I get the concerns that Vietnam and the Philippines have about kerfuffles like this. And let’s stipulate that: a) China likes to throw its market size around to intimidate multinational corporations like airlines and tech firms into doing what they want; and b) Hollywood has been particularly craven in deferring to China’s wishes about myriad core interests and cultural sensitivities.

But sometimes a nonsense map in a summer blockbuster is just a nonsense map in a summer blockbuster. Warner’s denial of any intent denudes the map of any legitimation that any authorities in Beijing might try to claim. This kind of dispute is what happens when it’s too hot for anyone to think. This is a classic Dumb IR Summer controversy, and everyone needs to calm the hell down. I pray to God that there are no more news cycles devoted to this silliness.

1. Japan would have a more legitimate beef.