Very clarifying as usual. A lot of people are gleeful about the apparent upcoming fall of western hegemony - the problem is that all vacuums will be filled eventually and I suspect a lot of people will get a nasty surprise when they find out what has filled this particular one. A key issue will be how various regional forms of 'hegemony' will be defined over time. In many ways, we've become so used to the western (US) form that by default China (or anyone else) will simply take on that mantle without clearly understanding the consequences.
I'm not so sure if one could say definitely that "future will not be like the past.". A lot of different things, even downright fantastical things, did happen in the past, after all. I suppose it would be more accurate to say "the future will not be like the past of our choice.".
I mean, Russians WERE in Hungary, in 1848-49, and in a context that would be recognizable to those who would witness the events of the latter half of 20th century. But the context of the Russian power over Central Europe in the 19th was notably different from the USSR during the Cold War: the legitimate governments of Austria and Prussia accepted Russian backing willingly and came in aftermath of Russia seemingly expending resources selflessly to fight for a noble principle against a warlike and nihilistic European ideology, after which it made no territorial gains in Europe. Or, in other words, Russia in the aftermath of Napoleonic Wars could be described as oddly similar to US after World War 2. A long list of historical analogies can be drawn about how the sequence of events between 1815 and 1856 are similar to those between 1945 and 202X, with many of the same names being repeated for bonus.
The point of the foregoing is not try to forced analogies between the future as unfolding and the past, of course, but how recognizable elements from the past keep showing up--just that they cast different actors in unexpected settings. I don't know if the future will NOT be like the past since humans remain humans and we would still be largely fighting over much the same things that we did in the past. But the pretexts, moral trappings, and power relationships among the actors will be different and these will be shocking to the powerful and comfortable of today. But will everyone be surprised? One of my favorite historical novels is "Wind and Waves" by Japanese novelist Yasushi Inoue. The setting is post Mongol invasion Korea and, as was the case during actual history, after making peace with Mongols, the Korean king volunteered to marry a daughter of Kublai Khan, which made things confusing to the Mongol generals--now, the Korean king was not (just) a subject ruler of a conquered kingdom, but a prince of the Mongol Empire who could actually order them around. Certainly a strange reassignment of roles and only in a few years' time, too
You're quite right of course, in the sense that it would be absurd to say that the future will be unlike any past there has ever been. What we can say is that our concepts of the future tend to be drawn disproportionately from elements of the past (often poorly understood) which we relate to because they inspire either fear or hope. It's also true that history has patterns, not for some mystical reason, but just because there are a limited number of ways of gaining, holding and maintaining power at different levels and managing political units peacefully. Therefore we would expect to see patterns repeated, albeit in different ways.
Well, doh... the West is demonstrating weakness and the future can be very different from the present -- that's kind of 'obvious'. The challenge - I guess - is to guess the bifurcation points and what the new phase will be like. At least in physics, this is hard and not hard, because the existence of all phases is already present there in the matter, and the phases just need to manifest themselves in the right conditions. Even after WWII, in the end of the day, with all the alleged randomness, Brazil went back home, the Soviet Union/Russian Empire expanded again, the countries that had more-than-less historically defined borders - UK, Spain, France - remained in their borders, the feeling on the part of white Europeans of being superior to the rest of people (i.e., European racism) remained, the rule by the national bourgeoisie (I use this word in a broad sense to mean individuals with the most property) with their ideology of liberalism and rights speak and insistence on organizing the world into nation-states led by a national bourgeoisie remained, and the ascent and dominance of English-speaking ethnicities over the rest of Europe and the world continued. If we were to take someone reasonably knowledgeable from ~1920 and transplant this individual to now, what would be the most surprising to this person? -- probably not that Germany had another war and lost, or that the Soviet Union expanded or that English was the dominant language or that electric cars still exist or that English suck and Germans excel at manufacturing or that the bourgeoisie manages the workers badly and deep dives into decadence, etc. Maybe the most surprising would be that the Soviet Union/Russian Empire dissolved internally and the bourgeoisie nation-states introduced what is called 'consumer society' and 'socialist policies' -- those things were probably somewhat random.
We normally believe that certain political systems offer inherent advantages over the rest of political systems, and by a political system we really mean both politics and economy and by certain political systems we naturally mean our political system. But what if political systems do not offer inherent overwhelming advantages in terms of prosperity, security and happiness to the state and the multitude and what if what also matters even more is the people populating the decision making roles in politics and economy. This is an update of the very well known ancient idea, which Aurelien clearly articulates in this piece -- good kings ensure good life for the subjects and expand their domains and bad kings allow the opposite. If we look at things this way, then may be what we are having in the West is a period of a 'bad king' -- of course we don't have kings, and we also have political and economic power in the same hands -- i.e., we have political economy -- so, then the present cadre of our politico-economic rulers (i.e., activist elite investors/private equity bosses/major CEOs/major banks -- what I call the national bourgeoisie above) are just bad at what they supposed to do. Because we are going through a period of a 'bad king', we feel like we are diminishing.
I don't see a revival of nationalism and regionalism, because a) I don't think nationalism and regionalism ever went away, it was the Chatham House idea to stop talking about planting the Union Jack on the furthest islands of the world and start talking about universal human values -- i.e., rights and values talk enclothes our aggression. British colonial years coincided with major changes in agriculture and huge population growth -- add to that primogeniture and sending the younger sons to make a fortune in the colonies was a convenient way to get rid of spare inheritors -- most of them died in the colonies in the first several years. Furthermore, we have promoted and supported nationalism all over the world -- Ukraine, Taiwan, Kurds, Yugoslavia, etc, etc -- and we want a break-up of Russia and China into small nation-states. Our conflicts with China, Russia and Persia are also ethnic conflicts. If anything, our diminishing will demonstrate that a nation-state led by an elite bourgeoisie may not be the most efficient politico-economic arrangement, and this may open the door to other forms of globalization and cosmopolitanism.
And b), I don't think we have invented globalization and internationalism. The West learned how to sail and sailed far but the penetration inland was superficial in most places (except most notably for North American and Australia). Before sailing, globalization had taken place over land. The West did not invent the trade in spices, silk, tea or slaves. It merely found new trading routes. With great improvements in over-land transportation, trade by sea may become less profitable. The future may see not merely globalization as in trade but agglomeration of massive Euro-Asian regions into huge integrated economic juggernauts that will make present economies look puny.
Thank you. I wish I could claim to be learned in political science: I've browsed Schmitt a little, and am a great fan of Weber, especially "Politics as a Vocation."
But mostly this writing comes from applied experience. When you've spent decades involved in politics (especially international politics) you see not only how the sausage is made, but the tendency for sausage-making recipes to endure between generations, the limited number of possible ingredients, and the inability to please everyone with the same flavours, among other things. This is an attempt to systematise my own experiences (and vicariously those of others) into a pragmatic explanation of how things are in the world and how they work. The original conceit is that of politics as analogous to engineering: show three separate engineers a poorly-constructed bridge and they'll conclude it will fall down.They can't necessarily say (and won't agree) when, but they are clear on the principle. Politics is remarkably similar.
Humanity has quite simply retained its super cognitive ability to decrypt the complex informational and sensorial information presented to it via the firehose, and then systematize it - without *requiring* the reading of many (or all) "Great Thinkers" of the past. You are succeeding at doing it here (and im only just beginning to read your other pieces - I am sure they are just as good). I do not mean to diminish "Standing on the shoulders of Giants" - there is a place and time for it, more typically in technology and hard sciences - but what happens when you get stuck on their shoulders and want off? Maybe standing on too many shoulders ends up convincing the thinker / writer that they *need* to write something much less pragmatic than a piece like you wrote here.
One problem is that simply reading how they formulated their premises and philosophies, can alter how we produce them in the present - the bias problem. If not innately aware of that bias, it *could* be like 'writing through a window'. I have a feeling the same phenomenon happens with modern scientific researchers (Btw, lately, I have been more focused on science than commenting on political theory, so I can tend to see things through that lens)
Here is an interesting essay I found the other day...
> Can the idiosyncratic stances of individual scientists do much to alter, or at least delay, the course of scientific advance? Perhaps for the sort of scientific revolutions that Planck, the pioneer of quantum mechanics, likely had in mind, but the proposition that established scientists are slower than novices in accepting paradigm-shifting ideas has received little empirical support whenever it has been put to the test (Hull, Tessner, and Diamond 1978; Gorham 1991; Levin, Stephan, and Walker 1995). Paradigm shifts are rare, however, and their very nature suggests that once they merge, it is exceedingly costly to resist or ignore them. In contrast, “normal” scientific advance, the regular work of scientists theorizing, observing, and experimenting within a settled paradigm or explanatory framework, may be more susceptible to political jousting. The absence of new self-evident and far-reaching truths means that scientists must compete in a crowded intellectual landscape, sometimes savagely, for the supremacy of their ideas (Bourdieu 1975).
This sentence kinda blew me away
> To our surprise, it is not competitors from within a subfield who assume the
mantle of leadership, but rather entrants from other fields who step in to fill the void
Thank you. What I've always aimed for, in writing and lecturing is a synthesis. In politics, there's no substitute for experience, and those who try to interpret politics without having been involved in it always miss something. On the other hand, you can listen to retired diplomats, politicians, military officers etc. for a long while, without feeling that what they say goes much beyond anecdote, and unsure in the end if you can draw any general conclusions. Much political life is extremely detailed, and crises today have almost infinite layers of complexity. So you can listen to someone talk for an hour about, let's say, their experiences in East Timor, and find it all very interesting, without necessarily being any wiser about the evolution and management of crises in general.
So you need two other things. One is an intellectually rigorous approach to your own experience: rather than saying, I was there, and I suppose all crises are like that, it's better to try to isolate points that seem to you universal, or at least common, and consider other things you've done or places you've been, as well as episodes in history, to see what you can conclude generally.
Second, there is a place for political science and IR thinking, as long as you don't make it a point of departure. A real example, is that anyone involved in practical politics knows that control of the debate can be key, and it you can get other parties to work on your text, or speak in your vocabulary, you're half the way there. This is a pragmatic judgement, but I find that talking about what(say) Marx and Gramsci had to say about such issues, or in a different context what Weber said about the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of ultimate ethical ends, helps to fasten these ideas in an intellectually rigorous form in students' minds That's the idea, anyway!
I very much admire what you have been doing here. Well thought out pieces like this are welcome.
I think that the "culture wars" of the last decade reflect much of what you discuss here and the differing attitudes about the future. In my personal experience, I find that the professional/managerial class clings to the "more of the same" vision of the future to a much greater extent than those folks who aren't of that sanctified class.
The working class and the poor tend not to have to many illusions about how the future will treat them. All they have is uncertainty, they realize that the world is changing and have no earthly clue of what they should do. I think that Trump and Brexit were significant in the sense that the working poor and those not of the PMC voted not so much "for" Trump or Brexit as "against" what was happening to them.
The PMC and it's hangers-on are the folks who are hoping for incremental change for the simple reason they have it good and want the gravy train to continue. Deplorables see that the world that the PMC fantasizes has no place for them.
Ultimately speaking, whether or not the US can be said to have an Empire is a matter of definitions and semantics. It does have an outsized influence in world affairs, but it appears that influence is being steadily eroded. That being said, I find your argument for nationalism and regionalism to be persuasive. One could perhaps say that one of the weaknesses of the so-called American Empire is that the regionalism in the heartland is starting to pick steam and by doing so, threatens the economic and military advantages of the current "empire".
Thank you. I agree about different attitudes to change among different classes. Those who have an investment in the current situation are usually those who want the least change, logically enough. This was noticeable during the Brexit controversy: those who saw themselves as having the most to lose from Brexit were the well-off, whose children might find it more difficult to get an exchange place at a university in Europe, or who themselves might lose the Romanian gardener they pay in cash. If you have no faith in the future anyway, you are more inclined to think it might be different.
Interesting question as to whether the US is an empire. Clearly it doesn't resemble the earlier models. At the same, what should we call it? The vast number of foreign military bases -- 800, 900? -- spanning the globe have served some purpose. These weren't "peace-keeping" troops (like UN Blue Helmets), a kind of global gendarmerie; more often than not they stirred up trouble rather than keeping the peace. Whatever we might want to call this arrangement, it did enforce a kind of neo-colonial system, one in which direct physical control was eschewed for indirect economic and financial control. The West didn't need to occupy Saudi Arabia, only ensure that its vast revenues were recycled through Western financial institutions and manage indirectly (at least up until a short time ago) who had access to the energy resources. Empire v2.0?
Not a huge fan of the man, but Trump did have a point: why *is* the US keeping NATO afloat?
The wider point I was making about the US is that its situation is so unusual and sui generis that I don't think any country could, even theoretically, take its place in the world. So assuming that China, for example, could be the "new US" is simply silly.
I think the military bases thing has been overdone and I have never seen a proper list. I suspect these are actually just places in the world where US forces are deployed: that would include, for example, every recruiting office in the US, and at least 200 Embassies and legations overseas, each of which has a Marine detachment to guard it. Then there are training teams, officers at foreign staff colleges and technical training colleges and many other things. One article I saw a couple of weeks ago waxed indignant about a US "military base" in Ghana, which turned out to be a transit desk at Accra airport for troops deploying to West Africa. To be taken with a large pitch of salt.
In my observation, the US military presence doesn't provide any domestic political leverage: often the reverse. In countries like Japan and Korea, the US presence, and the behaviour of US personnel, are major irritants in the bilateral relationship, and the populations see them as more of a threat than anything else. Same was true in Germany during the Cold War. As regards Saudi Arabia, the boot is actually on the other foot. The Saudi leadership knows that it cannot protect the country (or the regime) by itself, so it buys foreign equipment, and hosts foreign personnel, as a way of enmeshing other countries in its security. The theory is that Iran, for example, would be less likely to start a war if some of the first casualties were western military officers, whose countries might take a dim view of such an attack. In effect such people (and there are thousands) are hostages as much as anything else.
The US is an empire all right. We can see this every day. Just look what is happening in Germany in the context of the war in Ukraine. Would Germany cut Russian gas off over the Russian invasion of Ukraine had we not had a large garrison stationed there? (I would guess Germany would've been by now a major nuclear armed industrial powerhouse, had we just left them alone.) Or would Japan sign the Plaza Accord? The countries that we have major issues with somehow do not have our military garrison stationed there or rely on our military 'assistance'. There had been a discussion about having China sign a Plaza style accord with us, but then it turned out that we do not have a military base in China... not to say that we are not trying...
Is our empire unique -- sure it is. Every empire is unique or, what the Chinese say, has its own characteristics. We have annexed land from native americans like the Romans from the barbarians, appointed governors to our territories (Germany and Japan) also like the Romans and formed imperial leagues like the Athenians. We seem to function as a trifecta of financial, influence/intelligence and military operations. Dollar lending leads the way-- that's why all the worries about the dollar as the reserve currency. Countries need dollar reserve to protect themselves (a separate discussion if you want to hear). But now China has bags of dollars, and look what happened earlier this year in Pakistan and may be about to happen in Sri Lanka --- in Pakistan, China wrote a check in dollars and gave it to Pakistan and then Pakistan gave it to us just as we thought Pakistan is about to ask for the IMF -- all our efforts for nothing, we ended up with our useless dollars and China ended up with Pakistan... but not to worry not for long.. cue in influence/intelligence and military operations..
Is China an empire -- sure, it is. But it operates under a different logic, i.e., has its own characteristics. All this talk about no replacement for dollar as the reserve currency is pointless, because in the empire with the Chinese characteristics reserve currency is unnecessary. So, if and when China integrates the world around itself (and even us the US), and connects even the most distant parts through ultra high speed rail, the world will look much different from what it looks now -- that's all. For how it will look, we need to study the Chinese way of life...
Very clarifying as usual. A lot of people are gleeful about the apparent upcoming fall of western hegemony - the problem is that all vacuums will be filled eventually and I suspect a lot of people will get a nasty surprise when they find out what has filled this particular one. A key issue will be how various regional forms of 'hegemony' will be defined over time. In many ways, we've become so used to the western (US) form that by default China (or anyone else) will simply take on that mantle without clearly understanding the consequences.
I'm not so sure if one could say definitely that "future will not be like the past.". A lot of different things, even downright fantastical things, did happen in the past, after all. I suppose it would be more accurate to say "the future will not be like the past of our choice.".
I mean, Russians WERE in Hungary, in 1848-49, and in a context that would be recognizable to those who would witness the events of the latter half of 20th century. But the context of the Russian power over Central Europe in the 19th was notably different from the USSR during the Cold War: the legitimate governments of Austria and Prussia accepted Russian backing willingly and came in aftermath of Russia seemingly expending resources selflessly to fight for a noble principle against a warlike and nihilistic European ideology, after which it made no territorial gains in Europe. Or, in other words, Russia in the aftermath of Napoleonic Wars could be described as oddly similar to US after World War 2. A long list of historical analogies can be drawn about how the sequence of events between 1815 and 1856 are similar to those between 1945 and 202X, with many of the same names being repeated for bonus.
The point of the foregoing is not try to forced analogies between the future as unfolding and the past, of course, but how recognizable elements from the past keep showing up--just that they cast different actors in unexpected settings. I don't know if the future will NOT be like the past since humans remain humans and we would still be largely fighting over much the same things that we did in the past. But the pretexts, moral trappings, and power relationships among the actors will be different and these will be shocking to the powerful and comfortable of today. But will everyone be surprised? One of my favorite historical novels is "Wind and Waves" by Japanese novelist Yasushi Inoue. The setting is post Mongol invasion Korea and, as was the case during actual history, after making peace with Mongols, the Korean king volunteered to marry a daughter of Kublai Khan, which made things confusing to the Mongol generals--now, the Korean king was not (just) a subject ruler of a conquered kingdom, but a prince of the Mongol Empire who could actually order them around. Certainly a strange reassignment of roles and only in a few years' time, too
You're quite right of course, in the sense that it would be absurd to say that the future will be unlike any past there has ever been. What we can say is that our concepts of the future tend to be drawn disproportionately from elements of the past (often poorly understood) which we relate to because they inspire either fear or hope. It's also true that history has patterns, not for some mystical reason, but just because there are a limited number of ways of gaining, holding and maintaining power at different levels and managing political units peacefully. Therefore we would expect to see patterns repeated, albeit in different ways.
As someone famously said, we learn from history how to make new mistakes.....
Well, doh... the West is demonstrating weakness and the future can be very different from the present -- that's kind of 'obvious'. The challenge - I guess - is to guess the bifurcation points and what the new phase will be like. At least in physics, this is hard and not hard, because the existence of all phases is already present there in the matter, and the phases just need to manifest themselves in the right conditions. Even after WWII, in the end of the day, with all the alleged randomness, Brazil went back home, the Soviet Union/Russian Empire expanded again, the countries that had more-than-less historically defined borders - UK, Spain, France - remained in their borders, the feeling on the part of white Europeans of being superior to the rest of people (i.e., European racism) remained, the rule by the national bourgeoisie (I use this word in a broad sense to mean individuals with the most property) with their ideology of liberalism and rights speak and insistence on organizing the world into nation-states led by a national bourgeoisie remained, and the ascent and dominance of English-speaking ethnicities over the rest of Europe and the world continued. If we were to take someone reasonably knowledgeable from ~1920 and transplant this individual to now, what would be the most surprising to this person? -- probably not that Germany had another war and lost, or that the Soviet Union expanded or that English was the dominant language or that electric cars still exist or that English suck and Germans excel at manufacturing or that the bourgeoisie manages the workers badly and deep dives into decadence, etc. Maybe the most surprising would be that the Soviet Union/Russian Empire dissolved internally and the bourgeoisie nation-states introduced what is called 'consumer society' and 'socialist policies' -- those things were probably somewhat random.
We normally believe that certain political systems offer inherent advantages over the rest of political systems, and by a political system we really mean both politics and economy and by certain political systems we naturally mean our political system. But what if political systems do not offer inherent overwhelming advantages in terms of prosperity, security and happiness to the state and the multitude and what if what also matters even more is the people populating the decision making roles in politics and economy. This is an update of the very well known ancient idea, which Aurelien clearly articulates in this piece -- good kings ensure good life for the subjects and expand their domains and bad kings allow the opposite. If we look at things this way, then may be what we are having in the West is a period of a 'bad king' -- of course we don't have kings, and we also have political and economic power in the same hands -- i.e., we have political economy -- so, then the present cadre of our politico-economic rulers (i.e., activist elite investors/private equity bosses/major CEOs/major banks -- what I call the national bourgeoisie above) are just bad at what they supposed to do. Because we are going through a period of a 'bad king', we feel like we are diminishing.
I don't see a revival of nationalism and regionalism, because a) I don't think nationalism and regionalism ever went away, it was the Chatham House idea to stop talking about planting the Union Jack on the furthest islands of the world and start talking about universal human values -- i.e., rights and values talk enclothes our aggression. British colonial years coincided with major changes in agriculture and huge population growth -- add to that primogeniture and sending the younger sons to make a fortune in the colonies was a convenient way to get rid of spare inheritors -- most of them died in the colonies in the first several years. Furthermore, we have promoted and supported nationalism all over the world -- Ukraine, Taiwan, Kurds, Yugoslavia, etc, etc -- and we want a break-up of Russia and China into small nation-states. Our conflicts with China, Russia and Persia are also ethnic conflicts. If anything, our diminishing will demonstrate that a nation-state led by an elite bourgeoisie may not be the most efficient politico-economic arrangement, and this may open the door to other forms of globalization and cosmopolitanism.
And b), I don't think we have invented globalization and internationalism. The West learned how to sail and sailed far but the penetration inland was superficial in most places (except most notably for North American and Australia). Before sailing, globalization had taken place over land. The West did not invent the trade in spices, silk, tea or slaves. It merely found new trading routes. With great improvements in over-land transportation, trade by sea may become less profitable. The future may see not merely globalization as in trade but agglomeration of massive Euro-Asian regions into huge integrated economic juggernauts that will make present economies look puny.
A really fine analysis. Just wondering what key readings/thoughts/experiences have shaped your perspective?
Anything from Michael Mann, Carl Schmitt, Max Weber?
Thank you. I wish I could claim to be learned in political science: I've browsed Schmitt a little, and am a great fan of Weber, especially "Politics as a Vocation."
But mostly this writing comes from applied experience. When you've spent decades involved in politics (especially international politics) you see not only how the sausage is made, but the tendency for sausage-making recipes to endure between generations, the limited number of possible ingredients, and the inability to please everyone with the same flavours, among other things. This is an attempt to systematise my own experiences (and vicariously those of others) into a pragmatic explanation of how things are in the world and how they work. The original conceit is that of politics as analogous to engineering: show three separate engineers a poorly-constructed bridge and they'll conclude it will fall down.They can't necessarily say (and won't agree) when, but they are clear on the principle. Politics is remarkably similar.
Humanity has quite simply retained its super cognitive ability to decrypt the complex informational and sensorial information presented to it via the firehose, and then systematize it - without *requiring* the reading of many (or all) "Great Thinkers" of the past. You are succeeding at doing it here (and im only just beginning to read your other pieces - I am sure they are just as good). I do not mean to diminish "Standing on the shoulders of Giants" - there is a place and time for it, more typically in technology and hard sciences - but what happens when you get stuck on their shoulders and want off? Maybe standing on too many shoulders ends up convincing the thinker / writer that they *need* to write something much less pragmatic than a piece like you wrote here.
One problem is that simply reading how they formulated their premises and philosophies, can alter how we produce them in the present - the bias problem. If not innately aware of that bias, it *could* be like 'writing through a window'. I have a feeling the same phenomenon happens with modern scientific researchers (Btw, lately, I have been more focused on science than commenting on political theory, so I can tend to see things through that lens)
Here is an interesting essay I found the other day...
Pdf file
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20161574
> Can the idiosyncratic stances of individual scientists do much to alter, or at least delay, the course of scientific advance? Perhaps for the sort of scientific revolutions that Planck, the pioneer of quantum mechanics, likely had in mind, but the proposition that established scientists are slower than novices in accepting paradigm-shifting ideas has received little empirical support whenever it has been put to the test (Hull, Tessner, and Diamond 1978; Gorham 1991; Levin, Stephan, and Walker 1995). Paradigm shifts are rare, however, and their very nature suggests that once they merge, it is exceedingly costly to resist or ignore them. In contrast, “normal” scientific advance, the regular work of scientists theorizing, observing, and experimenting within a settled paradigm or explanatory framework, may be more susceptible to political jousting. The absence of new self-evident and far-reaching truths means that scientists must compete in a crowded intellectual landscape, sometimes savagely, for the supremacy of their ideas (Bourdieu 1975).
This sentence kinda blew me away
> To our surprise, it is not competitors from within a subfield who assume the
mantle of leadership, but rather entrants from other fields who step in to fill the void
created by a star’s absence.
Thank you. What I've always aimed for, in writing and lecturing is a synthesis. In politics, there's no substitute for experience, and those who try to interpret politics without having been involved in it always miss something. On the other hand, you can listen to retired diplomats, politicians, military officers etc. for a long while, without feeling that what they say goes much beyond anecdote, and unsure in the end if you can draw any general conclusions. Much political life is extremely detailed, and crises today have almost infinite layers of complexity. So you can listen to someone talk for an hour about, let's say, their experiences in East Timor, and find it all very interesting, without necessarily being any wiser about the evolution and management of crises in general.
So you need two other things. One is an intellectually rigorous approach to your own experience: rather than saying, I was there, and I suppose all crises are like that, it's better to try to isolate points that seem to you universal, or at least common, and consider other things you've done or places you've been, as well as episodes in history, to see what you can conclude generally.
Second, there is a place for political science and IR thinking, as long as you don't make it a point of departure. A real example, is that anyone involved in practical politics knows that control of the debate can be key, and it you can get other parties to work on your text, or speak in your vocabulary, you're half the way there. This is a pragmatic judgement, but I find that talking about what(say) Marx and Gramsci had to say about such issues, or in a different context what Weber said about the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of ultimate ethical ends, helps to fasten these ideas in an intellectually rigorous form in students' minds That's the idea, anyway!
Sir:
I very much admire what you have been doing here. Well thought out pieces like this are welcome.
I think that the "culture wars" of the last decade reflect much of what you discuss here and the differing attitudes about the future. In my personal experience, I find that the professional/managerial class clings to the "more of the same" vision of the future to a much greater extent than those folks who aren't of that sanctified class.
The working class and the poor tend not to have to many illusions about how the future will treat them. All they have is uncertainty, they realize that the world is changing and have no earthly clue of what they should do. I think that Trump and Brexit were significant in the sense that the working poor and those not of the PMC voted not so much "for" Trump or Brexit as "against" what was happening to them.
The PMC and it's hangers-on are the folks who are hoping for incremental change for the simple reason they have it good and want the gravy train to continue. Deplorables see that the world that the PMC fantasizes has no place for them.
Ultimately speaking, whether or not the US can be said to have an Empire is a matter of definitions and semantics. It does have an outsized influence in world affairs, but it appears that influence is being steadily eroded. That being said, I find your argument for nationalism and regionalism to be persuasive. One could perhaps say that one of the weaknesses of the so-called American Empire is that the regionalism in the heartland is starting to pick steam and by doing so, threatens the economic and military advantages of the current "empire".
Thank you. I agree about different attitudes to change among different classes. Those who have an investment in the current situation are usually those who want the least change, logically enough. This was noticeable during the Brexit controversy: those who saw themselves as having the most to lose from Brexit were the well-off, whose children might find it more difficult to get an exchange place at a university in Europe, or who themselves might lose the Romanian gardener they pay in cash. If you have no faith in the future anyway, you are more inclined to think it might be different.
Interesting question as to whether the US is an empire. Clearly it doesn't resemble the earlier models. At the same, what should we call it? The vast number of foreign military bases -- 800, 900? -- spanning the globe have served some purpose. These weren't "peace-keeping" troops (like UN Blue Helmets), a kind of global gendarmerie; more often than not they stirred up trouble rather than keeping the peace. Whatever we might want to call this arrangement, it did enforce a kind of neo-colonial system, one in which direct physical control was eschewed for indirect economic and financial control. The West didn't need to occupy Saudi Arabia, only ensure that its vast revenues were recycled through Western financial institutions and manage indirectly (at least up until a short time ago) who had access to the energy resources. Empire v2.0?
Not a huge fan of the man, but Trump did have a point: why *is* the US keeping NATO afloat?
The wider point I was making about the US is that its situation is so unusual and sui generis that I don't think any country could, even theoretically, take its place in the world. So assuming that China, for example, could be the "new US" is simply silly.
I think the military bases thing has been overdone and I have never seen a proper list. I suspect these are actually just places in the world where US forces are deployed: that would include, for example, every recruiting office in the US, and at least 200 Embassies and legations overseas, each of which has a Marine detachment to guard it. Then there are training teams, officers at foreign staff colleges and technical training colleges and many other things. One article I saw a couple of weeks ago waxed indignant about a US "military base" in Ghana, which turned out to be a transit desk at Accra airport for troops deploying to West Africa. To be taken with a large pitch of salt.
In my observation, the US military presence doesn't provide any domestic political leverage: often the reverse. In countries like Japan and Korea, the US presence, and the behaviour of US personnel, are major irritants in the bilateral relationship, and the populations see them as more of a threat than anything else. Same was true in Germany during the Cold War. As regards Saudi Arabia, the boot is actually on the other foot. The Saudi leadership knows that it cannot protect the country (or the regime) by itself, so it buys foreign equipment, and hosts foreign personnel, as a way of enmeshing other countries in its security. The theory is that Iran, for example, would be less likely to start a war if some of the first casualties were western military officers, whose countries might take a dim view of such an attack. In effect such people (and there are thousands) are hostages as much as anything else.
The US is an empire all right. We can see this every day. Just look what is happening in Germany in the context of the war in Ukraine. Would Germany cut Russian gas off over the Russian invasion of Ukraine had we not had a large garrison stationed there? (I would guess Germany would've been by now a major nuclear armed industrial powerhouse, had we just left them alone.) Or would Japan sign the Plaza Accord? The countries that we have major issues with somehow do not have our military garrison stationed there or rely on our military 'assistance'. There had been a discussion about having China sign a Plaza style accord with us, but then it turned out that we do not have a military base in China... not to say that we are not trying...
Is our empire unique -- sure it is. Every empire is unique or, what the Chinese say, has its own characteristics. We have annexed land from native americans like the Romans from the barbarians, appointed governors to our territories (Germany and Japan) also like the Romans and formed imperial leagues like the Athenians. We seem to function as a trifecta of financial, influence/intelligence and military operations. Dollar lending leads the way-- that's why all the worries about the dollar as the reserve currency. Countries need dollar reserve to protect themselves (a separate discussion if you want to hear). But now China has bags of dollars, and look what happened earlier this year in Pakistan and may be about to happen in Sri Lanka --- in Pakistan, China wrote a check in dollars and gave it to Pakistan and then Pakistan gave it to us just as we thought Pakistan is about to ask for the IMF -- all our efforts for nothing, we ended up with our useless dollars and China ended up with Pakistan... but not to worry not for long.. cue in influence/intelligence and military operations..
Is China an empire -- sure, it is. But it operates under a different logic, i.e., has its own characteristics. All this talk about no replacement for dollar as the reserve currency is pointless, because in the empire with the Chinese characteristics reserve currency is unnecessary. So, if and when China integrates the world around itself (and even us the US), and connects even the most distant parts through ultra high speed rail, the world will look much different from what it looks now -- that's all. For how it will look, we need to study the Chinese way of life...
https://therevdavidrgraham.substack.com/p/interview-with-potus-douglas-macarthur