Lecture 3: Thinking about the National Interest
The news:
Two years ago
Over four years
ago:
The foreign policy making process
We need to finish the list of foreign policy making players - and note the strength of the Pentagon> State Department's "Really Soft Power," i.e. not just exec branch plus congress but also public opinion, media, pressure groups, the most relevant being the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), also think tanks like the Washington Near East Policy Institute. Just for balance on the other side, let me add The Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee and The Palestinian Right to Return Coalition, though they are far less influential. And then there is the Council on the National Interest, representing a few retired US diplomats and others who would prefer a less pro Israeli foreign policy. There are many other NGOs advocating policies from various points of view - take a look! How avoid cacophony? The problem is consensus....what is the US national interest? Is there really a conflict between the rational pursuit of this interest and democracy? Who defines the national interest?
In search of a new consensus on US purposes, goals, and strategic objectives
Background:
- Cold War containment policy: George Kennan
- Truman Doctrine 1946 in response to threats to Iran, Turkey, Greece
- XXX, Foreign Affairs 1947
Post Cold War cognitive "maps" of the world (and our favorite real map of the region)
culture, not ec or ideology.
What is a civilization? = "the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have sort of that which distinguishes humans from other species"..... "Arabs, Chinese, Westerners are not part of any broader cultural entity. They constitute civilizations" (p 3=[24]) Another example is Anglophone Caribbean! The major ones are:
Interactions make for civilization consciousness, p 5 agreed! religious revival...Civilization is immutable, people can change eco or ideas but not cultural identity. Econ blocs R civs.. West's next confrontation will be with Islamic world, p 11 (citing Bernard Lewis and MJ Akbar) p14: "Islam has bloody borders." Note how Huntington could be used after Sept 11, 2001 - see Ervand Abrahamian's "The US media, Huntington and September 11," Third World Quarterly Vol 24, No 3, pp 529–544, 2003, suggesting the convenience of a "clash of civilization" for those who wish to avoid the Palestinian problem.
West-Rest or North-South???? or dem-auth??? (actually the islamization of modernity is a matter of domestic politics in some liberalizing Muslim states, and there seems to be no necesary incompatibility between this kind of islam and western liberalism: should we be confronting or accommodating with the "Islamists?" See Tony Blair in Foreign Affairs (Jan-Feb 2007): "This is not a clash between civilizations; it is a clash about civilization."
Alternative to Realism: the Liberal Vision of Immanuel Kant's Toward Perpetual Peace (1795).
- Porblems: human rights vs free trade...disintegrating states (ethnic nationalisms etc.)...the other side of the vision is transnational society taming the authoritarian states, but instead the anonymous intl businesses are just weakening states and trade > hum rights...free flow of drugs as well as money..and xenophobia vs migrant workers..2 major problems of illiberal nationalism and the cosmopolitan uncontrolled world economy may militate against Immanuel Kant's (1724-1804) vision of cooperating liberal states...
Globalization and inequality : Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, 1841: " The too great disproportionof conditions and fortunes could be sustained as long as it was hidden; but as soon as this disproportion has been generally noticed, the death blow has been dealt....what will you do with the human race, unemployed?" ...USA grabs those global capital flows to make up for its low savings (Robert Wade, Foreign Policy, winter 1998-9), p45...but did not get its way with Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), which a progressive Internet coalition (global civil society) stopped 1997-98 because it gave too much to the investors, too little to their hosts ( see Steve Kobrin, "The MAI and the Clash of Globalizations," Foreign Policy, Fall 1998, p101).
The politics of muddling through, most difficult in the Middle East where:
democracy within and among nations?
Where is your preferred vision of the world? - as a start toward -
let me repeat - doing
your own foreign policy making.
Main
page
Jan. 26, 2009
Department
of Government, College
of Liberal Arts, University
of Texas at Austin.
Questions, Comments, and
Suggestions to chenry@mail.utexas.edu
