Suchergebnisse

`The Indonesian Parliament has approved the 2016 budget, which was prepared entirely by President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo's administration.2 Concern about declining growth since the end of the commodity boom in 2011 has prompted the government to increase public spending in order to maintain growth in the coming year. The new budget sets its economic growth target at 5.3 percent in 2016, up from 4.7 percent in 2015, which was the lowest level in a decade. Given that exports and investments are expected to remain subdued due to the weak global economy, public sector spending is expected to be the main driver of growth in the short term. Jokowi has commenced the construction of several key infrastructure projects, such as the building of roads, ports, dams, and power plants, across the archipelago. Moreover, to attract investments into the country, the government has introduced a series of economic packages aimed at cutting down the costs of doing business and at improving the business climate. Amidst continued global uncertainties and the weakened domestic economy, 2016 will be a challenging year for Indonesia. Last year, public spending failed to act as a growth catalyst. This year, however, the expectation that the public sector will deliver the needed boost to the economy is higher. This essay critically examines Indonesia's 2016 budget, and specifically discusses key components and new trends that are notable in it, as well as the key challenges faced by the Jokowi's administration in achieving its development targets.

The 2016 Budget for Malaysia was tabled on 23 October, 2015. It has drawn much interest as it is the first budget under the 11th Malaysia Plan (2016-2020), which is the last medium-term plan in the nation's journey to 'high income' status as laid out in its Vision 2020. Themed 'Prospering the Rakyat', the 2016 Budget continues to be guided by the 'people economy', a concept coined in the previous budget. This budget's allocation for 2016 amounts to RM 265 billion, with 81 per cent for operating expenditure and 19 per cent for development expenditure. The Budget has five priorities, the first three of which are economic – strengthening economic resilience, enhancing productivity, and empowering human capital. The fourth and fifth are more social, and are for advancing the bumiputera agenda and easing the cost of living for the Rakyat. The priorities, their proportion of the total budget allocation, and key strategic initiatives are set out in Table 1.

Daniel Deudney on Mixed Ontology, Planetary Geopolitics, and Republican Greenpeace



This is the second in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich 






World politics increasingly abrasions with the limits of state-centric thinking, faced as the world is with a set of issues that affect not only us collectively as mankind, but also the planet itself. While much of IR theorizing seems to shirk such realizations, the work of Daniel Deudney has consistently engaged with the complex problems engendered by the entanglements of nuclear weapons, the planetary environment, space exploration, and the kind of political associations that might help us to grapple with our fragile condition as humanity-in-the world. In this elaborate Talk, Deudney—amongst others—lays out his understanding of the fundamental forces that drive both planetary political progress and problems; discusses the kind of ontological position needed to appreciate these problems; and argues for the merits of a republican greenpeace model to political organization.





Print version of this Talk (pdf)







What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?



The study of politics is the study of human politics and the human situation has been—and is being—radically altered by changes in the human relationships with the natural and material worlds. In my view, this means IR and related intellectual disciplines should focus on better understanding the emergence of the 'global' and the 'planetary,' their implications for the overall human world and its innumerable sub-worlds, and their relations with the realization of basic human needs. The global and the planetary certainly don't comprise all of the human situation, but the fact that the human situation has become global and planetary touches every other facet of the human situation, sometimes in fundamental ways. The simple story is that the human world is now 'global and planetary' due to the explosive transformation over the last several centuries of science-based technology occurring within the geophysical and biophysical features of planet Earth. The natural Earth and its relationship with humans have been massively altered by the vast amplifications in dispersed human agency produced by the emergence and spread of machine-based civilization. The overall result of these changes has been the emergence of a global- and planetary-scale material and social reality that is in some ways similar, but in other important ways radically different, from earlier times. Practices and structures inherited from the pre-global human worlds have not adequately been adjusted to take the new human planetary situation into account and their persistence casts a long and partially dark shadow over the human prospect.



A global and planetary focus is also justified—urgently—by the fact that the overall human prospect on this planet, and the fate of much additional life on this planet, is increasingly dependent on the development and employment of new social arrangements for interacting with these novel configurations of material and natural possibilities and limits. Human agency is now situated, and is making vastly fateful choices—for better or worse—in a sprawling, vastly complex aggregation of human-machine-nature assemblies which is our world. The 'fate of the earth' now partly hinges on human choices, and helping to make sure these choices are appropriate ones should be the paramount objective of political scientific and theoretical efforts. However, no one discipline or approach is sufficient to grapple successfully with this topic. All disciplines are necessary. But there are good reasons to believe that 'IR' and related disciplines have a particularly important possible practical role to play. (I am also among those who prefer 'global studies' as a label for the enterprise of answering questions that cut across and significantly subsume both the 'international' and the 'domestic.')



My approach to grappling with this topic is situated—like the work of now vast numbers of other IR theorists and researchers of many disciplines—in the study of 'globalization.' The now widely held starting point for this intellectual effort is the realization that globalization has been the dominant pattern or phenomenon, the story of stories, over at least the last five centuries. Globalization has been occurring in military, ecological, cultural, and economic affairs. And I emphasize—like many, but not all, analysts of globalization—that the processes of globalization are essentially dependent on new machines, apparatuses, and technologies which humans have fabricated and deployed. Our world is global because of the astounding capabilities of machine civilization. This startling transformation of human choice by technological advance is centrally about politics because it is centrally about changes in power. Part of this power story has been about changes in the scope and forms of domination. Globalization has been, to state the point mildly, 'uneven,' marked by amplifications of violence and domination and predation on larger and wider scales. Another part of the story of the power transformation has been the creation of a world marked by high degrees of interdependence, interaction, speed, and complexity. These processes of globalization and the transformation of machine capabilities are not stopping or slowing down but are accelerating. Thus, I argue that 'bounding power'—the growth, at times by breathtaking leaps, of human capabilities to do things—is now a fundamental feature of the human world, and understanding its implications should, in my view, be a central activity for IR scholars.



In addressing the topic of machine civilization and its globalization on Earth, my thinking has been centered first around the developing of 'geopolitical' lines argument to construct a theory of 'planetary geopolitics'. 'Geopolitics' is the study of geography, ecology, technology, and the earth, and space and place, and their interaction with politics. The starting point for geopolitical analysis is accurate mapping. Not too many IR scholars think of themselves as doing 'geography' in any form. In part this results from of the unfortunate segregation of 'geography' into a separate academic discipline, very little of which is concerned with politics. Many also mistake the overall project of 'geopolitics' with the ideas, and egregious mistakes and political limitations, of many self-described 'geopoliticans' who are typically arch-realists, strong nationalists, and imperialists. Everyone pays general lip service to the importance of technology, but little interaction occurs between IR and 'technology studies' and most IR scholars are happy to treat such matters as 'technical' or non-political in character. Despite this general theoretical neglect, many geographic and technological factors routinely pop into arguments in political science and political theory, and play important roles in them.



Thinking about the global and planetary through the lens of a fuller geopolitics is appealing to me because it is the human relationship with the material world and the Earth that has been changed with the human world's globalization. Furthermore, much of the actual agendas of movements for peace, arms control, and sustainability are essentially about alternative ways of ordering the material world and our relations with it. Given this, I find an approach that thinks systematically about the relations between patterns of materiality and different political forms is particularly well-suited to provide insights of practical value for these efforts.



The other key focus of my research has been around extending a variety of broadly 'republican' political insights for a cluster of contemporary practical projects for peace, arms control, and environmental stewardship ('greenpeace'). Even more than 'geopolitics,' 'republicanism' is a term with too many associations and meanings. By republics I mean political associations based on popular sovereignty and marked by mutual limitations, that is, by 'bounding power'—the restraint of power, particularly violent power—in the interests of the people generally. Assuming that security from the application of violence to bodies is a primary (but not sole) task of political association, how do republican political arrangements achieve this end? I argue that the character and scope of power restraint arrangements that actually serve the fundamental security interests of its popular sovereign varies in significant ways in different material contexts.



Republicanism is first and foremost a domestic form, centered upon the successive spatial expansion of domestic-like realms, and the pursuit of a constant political project of maximally feasible ordered freedom in changed spatial and material circumstances. I find thinking about our global and planetary human situation from the perspective of republicanism appealing because the human global and planetary situation has traits—most notably high levels of interdependence, interaction, practical speed, and complexity—that make it resemble our historical experience of 'domestic' and 'municipal' realms. Thinking with a geopolitically grounded republicanism offers insights about global governance very different from the insights generated within the political conceptual universe of hierarchical, imperial, and state-centered political forms. Thus planetary geopolitics and republicanism offers a perspective on what it means to 'Think Globally and Act Locally.' If we think of, or rather recognize, the planet as our locality, and then act as if the Earth is our locality, then we are likely to end up doing various approximations of the best-practice republican forms that we have successfully developed in our historically smaller domestic localities.





How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?



Like anybody else, the formative events in my intellectual development have been shaped by the thick particularities of time and place. 'The boy is the father of the man,' as it is said. The first and most direction-setting stage in the formation of my 'green peace' research interests was when I was in 'grade school,' roughly the years from age 6-13. During these years my family lived in an extraordinary place, St Simons Island, a largely undeveloped barrier island off the coast of southern Georgia. This was an extremely cool place to be a kid. It had extensive beaches, and marshes, as well as amazing trees of gargantuan proportions. My friends and I spent much time exploring, fishing, camping out, climbing trees, and building tree houses. Many of these nature-immersion activities were spontaneous, others were in Boy Scouts. This extraordinary natural environment and the attachments I formed to it, shaped my strong tendency to see the fates of humans and nature as inescapably intertwined. But the Boy Scouts also instilled me with a sense of 'virtue ethics'. A line from the Boy Scout Handbook captures this well: 'Take a walk around your neighborhood. Make a list of what is right and wrong about it. Make a plan to fix what is not right.' This is a demotic version of Weber's political 'ethic of responsibility.' This is very different from the ethics of self-realization and self-expression that have recently gained such ground in America and elsewhere. It is now very 'politically incorrect' to think favorably of the Boy Scouts, but I believe that if the Scouting experience was universally accessible, the world would be a much improved place.



My kid-in-nature life may sound very Tom Sawyer, but it was also very Tom Swift. My friends and I spent much of our waking time reading about the technological future, and imaginatively play-acting in future worlds. This imaginative world was richly fertilized by science fiction comic books, television shows, movies, and books. Me and my friends—juvenile technological futurists and techno-nerds in a decidedly anti-intellectual culture—were avid readers of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein, and each new issue of Analog was eagerly awaited. While we knew we were Americans, my friends and I had strong inclinations to think of ourselves most essentially as 'earthlings.' We fervently discussed extraterrestrial life and UFOs, and we eagerly awaited the day, soon to occur, we were sure, in which we made 'first contact.' We wanted to become, if not astronauts, then designers and builders of spaceships. We built tree houses, but we filled them with discarded electronics and they became starships. We rode bicycles, but we lugged about attaché cases filled with toy ray guns, transistor radios, firecrackers, and homemade incendiary devices. We built and fired off rockets, painstaking assembled plastic kit models of famous airplanes and ships, and then we would blow them apart with our explosives. The future belonged to technology, and we fancied ourselves its avant garde.



Yet the prospect of nuclear Armageddon seemed very real. We did 'duck and cover' drills at school, and sat for two terrifying weeks through the Cuban Missile Crisis. My friends and I had copies of the Atomic Energy Commission manuals on 'nuclear effects,' complete with a slide-rule like gadget that enabled us to calculate just what would happen if near-by military bases were obliterated by nuclear explosions. Few doubted that we were, in the words of a pop song, 'on the eve of destruction.' These years were also the dawning of 'the space age' in which humans were finally leaving the Earth and starting what promised to be an epic trek, utterly transformative in its effects, to the stars. My father worked for a number of these years for a large aerospace military-industrial firm, then working for NASA to build the very large rockets needed to launch men and machines to the moon and back. My friends and I debated fantastical topics, such as the pros and cons of emigrating to Mars, and how rapidly a crisis-driven exodus from the earth could be organized.



Two events that later occurred in the area where I spent my childhood served as culminating catalytic events for my greenpeace thinking. First, some years after my family moved away, the industrial facility to mix rocket fuel that had been built by the company my father worked for, and that he had helped put into operation, was struck by an extremely violent 'industrial accident,' which reduced, in one titanic flash, multi-story concrete and steel buildings filled with specialized heavy industrial machinery (and everyone in them) into a grey powdery gravel ash, no piece of which was larger than a fist. Second, during the late 1970s, the US Navy acquired a large tract of largely undeveloped marsh and land behind another barrier island (Cumberland), an area 10-15 miles from where I had lived, a place where I had camped, fished, and hunted deer. The Navy dredged and filled what was one of the most biologically fertile temperate zone estuaries on the planet. There they built the east coast base for the new fleet of Trident nuclear ballistic missile submarines, the single most potent violence machine ever built, thus turning what was for me the wildest part of my wild-encircled childhood home into one of the largest nuclear weapons complexes on earth. These events catalyzed for me the realization that there was a great struggle going on, for the Earth and for the future, and I knew firmly which side I was on.



My approach to thinking about problems was also strongly shaped by high school debate, where I learned the importance of 'looking at questions from both sides,' and from this stems my tendency to look at questions as debates between competing answers, and to focus on decisively engaging, defeating, and replacing the strongest and most influential opposing positions. As an undergraduate at Yale College, I started doing Political Theory. I am sure that I was a very vexing student in some ways, because (the debater again) I asked Marxist questions to my liberal and conservative professors, and liberal and conservative ones to my Marxist professors. Late in my sophomore year, I had my epiphany, my direction-defining moment, that my vocation would be an attempt to do the political theory of the global and the technological. Since then, the only decisions have been ones of priority and execution within this project.



Wanting to learn something about cutting-edge global and technological and issues, I next went to Washington D.C. for seven years. I worked on Capitol Hill for three and a half years as a policy aide, working on energy and conservation and renewable energy and nuclear power. I spent the other three and a half years as a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, a small environmental and global issues think tank that was founded and headed by Lester Brown, a well-known and far-sighted globalist. I co-authored a book about renewable energy and transitions to global sustainability and wrote a study on space and space weapons. At the time I published Whole Earth Security: a Geopolitics of Peace (1983), in which my basic notions of planetary geopolitics and republicanism were first laid out. During these seven years in Washington, I also was a part-time student, earning a Master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy at George Washington University.



In all, these Washington experiences have been extremely valuable for my thinking. Many political scientists view public service as a low or corrupting activity, but this is, I think, very wrong-headed. The reason that the democratic world works as well as it does is because of the distributive social intelligence. But social intelligence is neither as distributed nor as intelligent as it needs to be to deal with many pressing problems. My experience as a Congressional aide taught me that most of the problems that confront my democracy are rooted in various limits and corruptions of the people. I have come to have little patience with those who say, for example, rising inequality is inherent in capital C capitalism, when the more proximate explanation is that the Reagan Republican Party was so successful in gutting the progressive tax system previously in place in the United States. Similarly, I see little value in claims, to take a very contemporary example, that 'the NSA is out of control' when this agency is doing more or less what the elected officials, responding to public pressures to provide 'national security' loudly demanded. In democracies, the people are ultimately responsible.



As I was immersed in the world of arms control and environmental activism I was impressed by the truth of Keynes's oft quoted line, about the great practical influence of the ideas of some long-dead 'academic scribbler.' This is true in varying degrees in every issue area, but in some much more than others. This reinforced my sense that great potential practical consequence of successfully innovating in the various conceptual frameworks that underpinned so many important activities. For nuclear weapons, it became clear to me that the problem was rooted in the statist and realist frames that people so automatically brought to a security question of this magnitude.



Despite the many appeals of a career in DC politics and policy, this was all for me an extended research field-trip, and so I left Washington to do a PhD—a move that mystified many of my NGO and activist friends, and seemed like utter folly to my political friends. At Princeton University, I concentrated on IR, Political Theory, and Military History and Politics, taking courses with Robert Gilpin, Richard Falk, Barry Posen, Sheldon Wolin and others. In my dissertation—entitled Global Orders: Geopolitical and Materialist Theories of the Global-Industrial Era, 1890-1945—I explored IR and related thinking about the impacts of the industrial revolution as a debate between different world order alternatives, and made arguments about the superiority of liberalist, internationalist, and globalist arguments—most notably from H.G. Wells and John Dewey—to the strong realist and imperialist ideas most commonly associated with the geopolitical writers of this period.



I also continued engaging in activist policy affiliated to the Program on Nuclear Policy Alternatives at the Center for Energy andEnvironmental Studies (CEES), which was then headed by Frank von Hippel, a physicist turned 'public interest scientist', and a towering figure in the global nuclear arms control movement. I was a Post Doc at CEES during the Gorbachev era and I went on several amazing and eye-opening trips to the Soviet Union. Continuing my space activism, I was able to organize workshops in Moscow and Washington on large-scale space cooperation, gathering together many of the key space players on both sides. While Princeton was fabulously stimulating intellectually, it was also a stressful pressure-cooker, and I maintained my sanity by making short trips, two of three weekends, over six years, to Manhattan, where I spent the days working in the main reading room of the New York Public Library and the nights partying and relaxing in a world completely detached from academic life.



When it comes to my intellectual development in terms of reading theory, the positive project I wanted to pursue was partially defined by approaches I came to reject. Perhaps most centrally, I came to reject an approach that was very intellectually powerful, even intoxicating, and which retains great sway over many, that of metaphysical politics. The politics of the metaphysicians played a central role in my coming to reject the politics of metaphysics. The fact that some metaphysical ideas and the some of the deep thinkers who advanced them, such as Heidegger, and many Marxists, were so intimately connected with really disastrous politics seemed a really damning fact for me, particularly given that these thinkers insisted so strongly on the link between their metaphysics and their politics. I was initially drawn to Nietzsche's writing (what twenty-year old isn't) but his model of the philosopher founder or law-giver—that is, of a spiritually gifted but alienated guy (and it always is a guy) with a particularly strong but frustrated 'will to power' going into the wilderness, having a deep spiritual revelation, and then returning to the mundane corrupt world with new 'tablets of value,' along with a plan to take over and run things right—seemed more comic than politically relevant, unless the prophet is armed, in which case it becomes a frightful menace. The concluding scene in Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (sometimes translated as The Glass Bead Game) summarized by overall view of the 'high theory' project. After years of intense training by the greatest teachers the most spiritually and intellectually gifted youths finally graduate. To celebrate, they go to lake, dive in, and, having not learned how to swim, drown.



I was more attracted to Aristotle, Hume, Montesquieu, Dewey and other political theorists with less lofty and comprehensive views of what theory might accomplish; weary of actions; based on dogmatic or totalistic thinking; an eye to the messy and compromised world; with a political commitment to liberty and the interests of the many; a preference for peace over war; an aversion to despotism and empire; and an affinity for tolerance and plurality. I also liked some of those thinkers because of their emphasis on material contexts. Montesquieu seeks to analyze the interaction of material contexts and republican political forms; Madison and his contemporaries attempt to extend the spatial scope of republican political association by recombining in novel ways various earlier power restraint arrangements. I was tremendously influenced by Dewey, studying intensively his slender volume The Public and its Problems (1927)—which I think is the most important book in twentieth century political thought. By the 'public' Dewey means essentially a stakeholder group, and his main point is that the material transformations produced by the industrial revolution has created new publics, and that the political task is to conceptualize and realize forms of community and government appropriate to solving the problems that confront these new publics.



One can say my overall project became to apply and extend their concepts to the contemporary planetary situation. Concomitantly reading IR literature on nuclear weapons, I was struck by fact that the central role that material realities played in these arguments was very ad hoc, and that many of the leading arguments on nuclear politics were very unconvincing. It was clear that while Waltz (Theory Talk #40) had brilliantly developed some key ideas about anarchy made by Hobbes and Rousseau, he had also left something really important out. These sorts of deficiencies led me to develop the arguments contained in Bounding Power. I think it is highly unlikely that I would have had these doubts, or come to make the arguments I made without having worked in political theory and in policy.



I read many works that greatly influenced my thinking in this area, among them works by Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology, James Lovelock's Gaia, Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents (read a related article here, pdf), Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth and The Abolition, William Ophul's Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity... I was particularly stuck by a line in Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (pdf), that we live in a 'spaceship' like closed highly interconnected system, but lack an 'operating manual' to guide intelligently our actions. It was also during this period that I read key works by H.G. Wells, most notably his book, Anticipations, and his essay The Idea of a League of Nations, both of which greatly influenced my thinking.



This aside, the greatest contribution to my thinking has come from conversations sustained over many years with some really extraordinary individuals. To mention those that I have been arguing with, and learning from, for at least ten years, there is John O'Looney, Wesley Warren, Bob Gooding-Williams, Alyn McAuly, Henry Nau, Richard Falk, Michael Doyle (Theory Talk #1), Richard Mathew, Paul Wapner, Bron Taylor, Ron Deibert, John Ikenberry, Bill Wohlforth, Frank von Hippel, Ethan Nadelmann, Fritz Kratochwil, Barry Buzan (Theory Talk #35), Ole Waever, John Agnew (Theory Talk #4), Barry Posen, Alex Wendt (Theory Talk #3), James der Derian, David Hendrickson, Nadivah Greenberg, Tim Luke, Campbell Craig, Bill Connolly, Steven David, Jane Bennett, Daniel Levine (TheoryTalk #58), and Jairus Grove. My only regret is that I have not spoken even more with them, and with the much larger number of people I have learned from on a less sustained basis along the way.

                                    



What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?



I have thought a great deal about what sort of answers to this question can be generally valuable. For me, the most important insight is that success in intellectual life and academia is determined by more or less the same combination of factors that determines success more generally. This list is obvious: character, talent, perseverance and hard work, good judgment, good 'people skills,' and luck. Not everyone has a talent to do this kind of work, but the number of people who do have the talent to do this kind of work is much larger than the number of people who are successful in doing it. I think in academia as elsewhere, the people most likely to really succeed are those whose attitude toward the activity is vocational. A vocation is something one is called to do by an inner voice that one cannot resist. People with vocations never really work in one sense, because they are doing something that they would be doing even if they were not paid or required. Of course, in another sense people with vocations never stop working, being so consumed with their path that everything else matters very little. People with jobs and professions largely stop working when they when the lottery, but people with vocations are empowered to work more and better. When your vocation overlaps with your job, you should wake up and say 'wow, I cannot believe I am being paid to do this!' Rather obviously, the great danger in the life paths of people with vocations is imbalance and burn-out. To avoid these perils it is beneficial to sustain strong personal relationships, know when and how to 'take off' effectively, and sustain the ability to see things as an unfolding comedy and to laugh.



Academic life also involves living and working in a profession. Compared to the oppressions that so many thinkers and researchers have historically suffered from, contemporary professional academic life is a utopia. But academic life has several aspects unfortunate aspects, and coping successfully with them is vital. Academic life is full of 'odd balls' and the loose structure of universities and organization, combined with the tenure system, licenses an often florid display of dubious behavior. A fair number of academics have really primitive and incompetent social skills. Others are thin skinned-ego maniacs. Some are pompous hypocrites. Some are ruthlessly self-aggrandizing and underhanded. Some are relentless shirkers and free-riders. Also, academic life is, particularly relative to the costs of obtaining the years of education necessary to obtain it, not very well paid. Corruptions of clique, ideological factionalism, and nepotism occur. If not kept in proper perspective, and approached in appropriate ways, academic department life can become stupidly consuming of time, energy, and most dangerously, intellectual attention. The basic step for healthy departmental life is to approach it as a professional role.



The other big dimension of academic life is teaching. Teaching is one of the two 'deliverables' that academic organizations provide in return for the vast resources they consume. Shirking on teaching is a dereliction of responsibility, but also is the foregoing of a great opportunity. Teaching is actually one of the most assuredly consequential things academics do. The key to great teaching is, I think, very simple: inspire and convey enthusiasm. Once inspired, students learn. Once students take questions as their own, they become avid seekers of answers. Teachers of things political also have a responsibility to remain even-handed in what they teach, to make sure that they do not teach just or mainly their views, to make sure that the best and strongest versions of opposing sides are heard. Teaching seeks to produce informed and critically thinking students, not converts. Beyond the key roles of inspiration and even-handedness, the rest is the standard package of tasks relevant in any professional role: good preparation, good organization, hard work, and clarity of presentation.





Your main book, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (2007), is a mix of intellectual history, political theory and IR theory, and is targeted largely at realism. How does a reading and interpretation of a large number of old books tell us something new about realism, and the contemporary global?



Bounding Power attempts to dispel some very large claims made by realists about their self-proclaimed 'tradition,' a lineage of thought in which they place many of the leading Western thinkers about political order, such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and the 'global geopoliticans' from the years around the beginning of the twentieth century. In the book I argue that the actual main axis of western thinking about political order (and its absence) is largely the work of 'republican' thinkers from the small number of 'republics', and that many of the key ideas that realists call realist and liberals call liberal are actually fragments of a larger, more encompassing set of arguments that were primarily in the idioms of republicanism. This entails dispelling the widely held view that the liberal and proto-liberal republican thought and practice are marked by 'idealism'—and therefore both inferior in their grasp of the problem of security-from violence and valuable only when confined to the 'domestic.' I demonstrate that this line of republican security thinkers had a robust set of claims both about material contextual factors, about the 'geopolitics of freedom', and a fuller understanding of security-from-violence. The book shows how perhaps the most important insights of this earlier cluster of arguments has oddly been dropped by both realists (particularly neorealists) and liberal international theorists. And, finally, it is an attempt to provide an understanding that posits the project of exiting anarchy on a global scale as something essentially unprecedented, and as something that the best of our inherited theory leaves us unable to say much about.



The main argument is contained in my formulation of what I think are the actual the two main sets of issues of Western structural-materialist security theory, two problematiques formulated in republican and naturalist-materialist conceptual vocabularies. The first problematique concerns the relationship between material context, the scope of tolerable anarchy, and necessary-for-security government. The second problematic concerns the relative security-viability of two main different forms of government—hierarchical and republican.



This formulation of the first problematic concerning anarchy differs from the main line of contemporary Realist argument in that it poses the question as one about the spatial scope of tolerable anarchy. The primary variable in my reconstruction of the material-contextual component of these arguments is what I term violence interdependence (absent, weak, strong, and intense). The main substantive claim of Western structural-materialist security theory is that situations of anarchy combined with intense violence interdependence are incompatible with security and require substantive government. Situations of strong and weak violence interdependence constitute a tolerable (if at times 'nasty and brutish') second ('state-of-war') anarchy not requiring substantive government. Early formulations of 'state of nature' arguments, explicitly or implicitly hinge upon this material contextual variable, and the overall narrative structure of the development of republican security theory and practice has concerned natural geographic variations and technologically caused changes in the material context, and thus the scope of security tolerable/intolerable anarchy and needed substantive government. This argument was present in early realist versions of anarchy arguments, but has been dropped by neorealists. Conversely, contemporary liberal international theorists analyze interdependence, but have little to say about violence. The result is that the realists talk about violence and security, and the liberals talk about interdependence not relating to violence, producing the great lacuna of contemporary theory: analysis of violence interdependence.



The second main problematique, concerning the relative security viability of hierarchical and republican forms, has also largely been lost sight of, in large measure by the realist insistence that governments are by definition hierarchical, and the liberal avoidance of system structural theory in favor of process, ideational, and economic variables. (For neoliberals, cooperation is seen as (possibly) occurring in anarchy, without altering or replacing anarchy.) The main claim here is that republican and proto-liberal theorists have a more complete grasp of the security political problem than realists because of their realization that both the extremes of hierarchy and anarchy are incompatible with security. In order to register this lost component of structural theory I refer to republican forms at both the unit and the system-level as being characterized by an ordering principle which I refer to as negarchy. Such political arrangements are characterized by the simultaneous negation of both hierarchy and anarchy. The vocabulary of political structures should thus be conceived as a triad-triangle of anarchy, hierarchy, and negarchy, rather than a spectrum stretching from pure anarchy to pure hierarchy. Using this framework, Bounding Power traces various formulations of the key arguments of security republicans from the Greeks through the nuclear era as arguments about the simultaneous avoidance of hierarchy and anarchy on expanding spatial scales driven by variations and changes in the material context. If we recognize the main axis of our thinking in this way, we can stand on a view of our past that is remarkable in its potential relevance to thinking and dealing with the contemporary 'global village' like a human situation.





Nuclear weapons play a key role in the argument of Bounding Power about the present, as well as elsewhere in your work. But are nuclear weapons are still important as hey were during the Cold War to understand global politics?



Since their arrival on the world scene in the middle years of the twentieth century, there has been pretty much universal agreement that nuclear weapons are in some fundamental way 'revolutionary' in their implications for security-from-violence and world politics. The fact that the Cold War is over does not alter, and even stems from, this fact. Despite this wide agreement on the importance of nuclear weapons, theorists, policy makers, and popular arms control/disarmament movements have fundamental disagreements about which political forms are compatible with the avoidance of nuclear war. I have attempted to provide a somewhat new answer to this 'nuclear-political question', and to explain why strong forms of interstate arms control are necessary for security in the nuclear age. I argue that achieving the necessary levels of arms control entails somehow exiting interstate anarchy—not toward a world government as a world state, but toward a world order that is a type of compound republican union (marked by, to put it in terms of above discussion, a nearly completely negarchical structure).



This argument attempts to close what I term the 'arms control gap', the discrepancy between the value arms control is assigned by academic theorists of nuclear weapons and their importance in the actual provision of security in the nuclear era. During the Cold War, thinking among IR theorists about nuclear weapons tended to fall into three broad schools—war strategists, deterrence statists, and arms controllers. Where the first two only seem to differ about the amount of nuclear weapons necessary for states seeking security (the first think many, the second less), the third advocates that states do what they have very rarely done before the nuclear age, reciprocal restraints on arms.



But this Cold War triad of arguments is significantly incomplete as a list of the important schools of thought about the nuclear-political question. There are four additional schools, and a combination of their arguments constitutes, I argue, a superior answer to the nuclear-political question. First are the nuclear one worlders, a view that flourished during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and held that the simple answer to the nuclear political question is to establish a world government, as some sort of state. Second are the populist anti-nuclearists, who indict state apparatuses of acting contrary to the global public's security interests. Third are the deep arms controllers, such as Jonathan Schell, who argue that nuclear weapons need to be abolished. Fourth are the theorists of omniviolence, who theorize situations produced by the leakage of nuclear weapons into the hands of non-state actors who cannot be readily deterred from using nuclear weapons. What all of these schools have in common is that they open up the state and make arguments about how various forms of political freedom—and the institutions that make it possible—are at issue in answering the nuclear-political question.

                                                                                                                

Yet one key feature all seven schools share is that they all make arguments about how particular combinations and configurations of material realities provide the basis for thinking that their answer to the nuclear-political question is correct. Unfortunately, their understandings of how material factors shape, or should shape, actual political arrangements is very ad hoc. Yet the material factors—starting with sheer physical destructiveness—are so pivotal that they merit a more central role in theories of nuclear power. I think we need to have a model that allows us to grasp how variations in material contexts condition the functionality of 'modes of protection', that is, distinct and recurring security practices (and their attendant political structures).



For instance, one mode of protection—what I term the real-state mode of protection—attempts to achieve security through the concentration, mobilization, and employment of violence capability. This is the overall, universal, context-independent strategy of realists. Bringing into view material factors, I argue, shows that this mode of protection is functional not universally but specifically—and only—in material contexts that are marked by violence-poverty and slowness. This mode of protection is dysfunctional in nuclear material contexts marked by violence abundance and high violence velocities. In contrast, a republican federal mode of protection is a bundle of practices that aim for the demobilization and deceleration of violence capacity, and that the practices associated with this mode of protection are security functional in the nuclear material context.



What emerges from such an approach to ideas about the relation between nuclear power and security from violence is that the epistemological foundations for any of the major positions about nuclear weapons are actually much weaker than we should be comfortable with. People often say the two most important questions about the nuclear age are: what is the probability that nuclear weapons will be used? And then, what will happen when they are used? The sobering truth is that we really do not have good grounds for confidently answering either of those two questions. But every choice made about nuclear weapons depends on risk calculations that depend on how we answer these questions.





You have also written extensively on space, a topic that has not recently attracted much attention from many IR scholars. How does your thinking on this relate to your overall thinking about the global and planetary situation?

                                                                                                          

The first human steps into outer space during the middle years of the twentieth century have been among the most spectacular and potentially consequential events in the globalization of machine civilization on Earth. Over the course of what many call 'the space age,' thinking about space activities, space futures, and the consequences of space activities has been dominated by an elaborately developed body of 'space expansionist' thought that makes ambitious and captivating claims about both the feasibility and the desirability of human expansion into outer space. Such views of space permeate popular culture, and at times appear to be quite influential in actual space policy. Space expansionists hold that outer space is a limitless frontier and that humans should make concerted efforts to explore and colonize and extend their military activities into space. They claim the pursuit of their ambitious projects will have many positive, even transformative, effects upon the human situation on Earth, by escaping global closure, protecting the earth's habitability, preserving political plurality, and enhancing species survival. Claims about the Earth, its historical patterns and its contemporary problems, permeate space expansionist thinking.



While the feasibility, both technological and economic, of space expansionist projects has been extensively assessed, arguments for their desirability have not been accorded anything approaching a systematic assessment. In part, such arguments about the desirability of space expansion are difficult to assess because they incorporate claims that are very diverse in character, including claims about the Earth (past, present, and future), about the ways in which material contexts made up of space 'geography' and technologies produce or heavily favor particular political outcomes, and about basic worldview assumptions regarding nature, science, technology, and life.



By breaking these space expansionist arguments down into their parts, and systematically assessing their plausibility, a very different picture of the space prospect emerges. I think there are strong reasons to think that the consequences of the human pursuit of space expansion have been, and could be, very undesirable, even catastrophic. The actual militarization of that core space technology ('the rocket') and the construction of a planetary-scope 'delivery' and support system for nuclear war-fighting has been the most important consequence of actual space activities, but these developments have been curiously been left out of accounts of the space age and assessments of its impacts. Similarly, much of actually existing 'nuclear arms control' has centered on restraining and dismantling space weapons, not nuclear weapons. Thus the most consequential space activity—the acceleration of nuclear delivery capabilities—has been curiously rendered almost invisible in accounts of space and assessments of its impacts. This is an 'unknown known' of the 'space age'. Looking ahead, the creation of large orbital infrastructures will either presuppose or produce world government, potentially of a very hierarchical sort.  There are also good reasons to think that space colonies are more likely to be micro-totalitarian than free. And extensive human movement off the planet could in a variety of ways increase the vulnerability of life on Earth, and even jeopardize the survival of the human species.



Finally, I think much of space expansionist (and popular) thinking about space and the consequences of humans space activities has been marked by basic errors in practical geography. Most notably, there is the widespread failure to realize that the expansion of human activities into Earth's orbital space has enhanced global closure, because the effective distances in Earth's space make it very small. And because of the formidable natural barriers to human space activity, space is a planetary 'lid, not a 'frontier'. So one can say that the most important practical discovery of the 'space age' has been an improved understanding of the Earth. These lines of thinking, I find, would suggest the outlines of a more modest and Earth-centered space program, appropriate for the current Earth age. Overall, the fact that we can't readily expand into space is part of why we are in a new 'earth age' rather than a 'space age'.





You've argued against making the environment into a national security issue twenty years ago. Do the same now, considering that making the environment a bigger priority by making it into a national security issue might be the only way to prevent total environmental destruction?



When I started writing about the relationships between environment and security twenty years ago, not a great deal of work had been done on this topic. But several leading environmental thinkers were making the case that framing environmental issues as security issues, or what came to be called 'securitizing the environment', was not only a good strategy to get action on environmental problems, but also was useful analytically to think about these two domains. Unlike the subsequent criticisms of 'environmental security' made by Realists and scholars of conventional 'security studies', my criticism starts with the environmentalist premise that environmental deterioration is a paramount problem for contemporary humanity as a whole.



Those who want to 'securitize the environment' are attempting to do what William James a century ago proposed as a general strategy for social problem solving. Can we find, in James' language, 'a moral equivalent of war?' (Note the unfortunately acronym: MEOW). War and the threat of war, James observed, often lead to rapid and extensive mobilizations of effort. Can we somehow transfer these vast social energies to deal with other sets of problems? This is an enduring hope, particularly in the United States, where we have a 'war on drugs', a 'war on cancer', and a 'war on poverty'. But doing this for the environment, by 'securitizing the environment,' is unlikely to be very successful. And I fear that bringing 'security' orientations, institutions, and mindsets into environmental problem-solving will also bring in statist, nationalist, and militarist approaches. This will make environmental problem-solving more difficult, not easier, and have many baneful side-effects.



Another key point I think is important, is that the environment—and the various values and ends associated with habitat and the protection of habitat—are actually much more powerful and encompassing than those of security and violence. Instead of 'securitizing the environment' it is more promising is to 'environmentalize security'. Not many people think about the linkages between the environment and security-from-violence in this way, but I think there is a major case of it 'hiding in plain sight' in the trajectory of how the state-system and nuclear weapons have interacted.



When nuclear weapons were invented and first used in the 1940s, scientists were ignorant about many aspects of their effects. As scientists learned about these effects, and as this knowledge became public, many people started thinking and acting in different ways about nuclear choices. The fact that a ground burst of a nuclear weapon would produce substantial radioactive 'fall-out' was not appreciated until the first hydrogen bomb tests in the early 1950s. It was only then that scientists started to study what happened to radioactive materials dispersed widely in the environment. Evidence began to accumulate that some radioactive isotopes would be 'bio-focused', or concentrated by biological process. Public interest scientists began effectively publicizing this information, and mothers were alerted to the fact that their children's teeth were become radioactive. This new scientific knowledge about the environmental effects of nuclear explosions, and the public mobilizations it produced, played a key role in the first substantial nuclear arms control treaty, the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in the ocean, and in space. Thus, the old ways of providing security were circumscribed by new knowledge and new stakeholders of environmental health effects. The environment was not securitized, security was partially environmentalized.



Thus, while some accounts by arms control theorists emphasize the importance of 'social learning' in altering US-Soviet relations, an important part of this learning was not about the nature of social and political interactions, but about the environmental consequences of nuclear weapons. The learning that was most important in motivating so many actors (both within states and in mass publics) to seek changes in politics was 'natural learning,' or more specifically learning about the interaction of natural and technological systems.



An even more consequential case of the environmentalization of security occurred in the 1970's and 1980's. A key text here is Jonathan Schell's book, The Fate of the Earth. Schell's book, combining very high-quality journalism with first rate political theoretical reflections, lays out in measured terms the new discoveries of ecologists and atmospheric scientists about the broader planetary consequences of an extensive nuclear war. Not only would hundreds of millions of people be immediately killed and much of the planet's built infrastructure destroyed, but the planet earth's natural systems would be so altered that the extinction of complex life forms, among them homo sapiens, might result. The detonation of numerous nuclear weapons and the resultant burning of cities would probably dramatically alter the earth's atmosphere, depleting the ozone layer that protects life from lethal solar radiations, and filling the atmosphere with sufficient dust to cause a 'nuclear winter.' At stake in nuclear war, scientists had learned, was not just the fate of nations, but of the earth as a life support system. Conventional accounts of the nuclear age and of the end of the Cold War are loath to admit it, but it I believe it is clear that spreading awareness of these new natural-technological possibilities played a significant role in ending the Cold War and the central role that nuclear arms control occupies in the settlement of the Cold War. Again, traditional ways of achieving security-from-violence were altered by new knowledges about their environmental consequences—security practices and arrangements were partly environmentalized.



Even more radically, I think we can also turn this into a positive project. As I wrote two decades ago, environmental restoration would probably generate political externalities that would dampen tendencies towards violence. In other words, if we address the problem of the environment, then we will be drawn to do various things that will make various types of violent conflict less likely.





Your work is permeated by references to 'material factors'. This makes it different from branches of contemporary IR—like constructivism or postmodernism—which seem to be underpinned by a profound commitment to focus solely one side of the Cartesian divide. What is your take on the pervasiveness and implications of this 'social bias'?



Postmodernism and constructivism are really the most extreme manifestations of a broad trend over the last two centuries toward what I refer to as 'social-social science' and the decline—but hardly the end—of 'natural-social science'. Much of western thought prior to this turn was 'naturalist' and thus tended to downplay both human agency and ideas. At the beginning of the nineteenth century—partly because of the influence of German idealism, partly because of the great liberationist projects that promised to give better consequence to the activities and aspirations of the larger body of human populations (previously sunk in various forms of seemingly natural bondages), and partly because of the great expansion of human choice brought about by the science-based technologies of the Industrial Revolution—there was a widespread tendency to move towards 'social-social science,' the project of attempting to explain the human world solely by reference to the human world, to explain social outcomes with reference to social causes. While this was the dominant tendency, and a vastly productive one in many ways, it existed alongside and in interaction with what is really a modernized version of the earlier 'natural-social science.' Much of my work has sought to 'bring back in' and extend these 'natural-social' lines of argument—found in figures such as Dewey and H.G. Wells—into our thinking about the planetary situation.



In many parts of both European and American IR and related areas, Postmodern and constructivist theories have significantly contributed to IR theorists by enhancing our appreciation of ideas, language, and identities in politics. As a response to the limits and blindnesses of certain types of rationalist, structuralist, and functional theories, this renewed interest in the ideational is an important advance. Unfortunately, both postmodernism and constructivism have been marked by a strong tendency to go too far in their emphasis of the ideational. Postmodernism and constructivism have also helped make theorists much more conscious of the implicit—and often severely limiting—ontological assumptions that underlay, inform, and bound their investigations. This is also a major contribution to the study of world politics in all its aspects.



Unfortunately, this turn to ontology has also had intellectually limiting effects by going too far, in the search for a pure or nearly pure social ontology. With the growth in these two approaches, there has indeed been a decided decline in theorizing about the material. But elsewhere in the diverse world of theorizing about IR and the global, theorizing about the material never came anything close to disappearing or being eclipsed. For anyone thinking about the relationships between politics and nuclear weapons, space, and the environment, theorizing about the material has remained at the center, and it would be difficult to even conceive of how theorizing about the material could largely disappear. The recent 're-discovery of the material' associated with various self-styled 'new materialists' is a welcome, if belated, re-discovery for postmodernists and constructivists. For most of the rest of us, the material had never been largely dropped out.



A very visible example of the ways in which the decline in appropriate attention to the material, an excessive turn to the ideational, and the quest for a nearly pure social ontology, can lead theorizing astray is the core argument in Alexander Wendt's main book, Social Theory of International Politics, one of the widely recognized landmarks of constructivist IR theory. The first part of the book advances a very carefully wrought and sophisticated argument for a nearly pure ideational social ontology. The material is explicitly displaced into a residue or rump of unimportance. But then, to the reader's surprise, the material, in the form of 'common fate' produced by nuclear weapons, and climate change, reappears and is deployed to play a really crucial role in understanding contemporary change in world politics. 



My solution is to employ a mixed ontology. By this I mean that I think several ontologically incommensurate and very different realities are inescapable parts the human world. These 'unlikes' are inescapable parts of any argument, and must somehow be combined. There are a vast number of ways in which they can be combined, and on close examination, virtually all arguments in the social sciences are actually employing some version of a mixed ontology, however implicitly and under-acknowledged.



But not all combinations are equally useful in addressing all questions. In my version of mixed ontology—which I call 'practical naturalism'—human social agency is understood to be occurring 'between two natures': on the one hand the largely fixed nature of humans, and on the other the changing nature composed of the material world, a shifting amalgam of actual non-human material nature of geography and ecology, along with human artifacts and infrastructures. Within this frame, I posit as rooted in human biological nature, a set of 'natural needs,' most notably for security-from-violence and habitat services. Then I pose questions of functionality, by which I mean: which combinations of material practices, political structures, ideas and identities are needed to achieve these ends in different material contexts? Answering this question requires the formulation of various 'historical materialist' propositions, which in turn entails the systematic formulation of typologies and variation in both the practices, structures and ideas, and in material contexts. These arguments are not centered on explaining what has or what will happen. Instead they are practical in the sense that they are attempting to answer the question of 'what is to be done' given the fixed ends and given changing material contexts. I think this is what advocates of arms control and environmental sustainability are actually doing when they claim that one set of material practices and their attendant political structures, identities and ideas must be replaced with another if basic human needs are to going to continue to be meet in the contemporary planetary material situation created by the globalization of machine civilization on earth.

                                  

Since this set of arguments is framed within a mixed ontology, ideas and identities are a vital part of the research agenda. Much of the energy of postmodern and many varieties of critical theory have focused on 'deconstructing' various identities and ideas. This critical activity has produced and continues to produce many insights of theorizing about politics. But I think there is an un-tapped potential for theorists who are interested in ideas and identities, and who want their work to make a positive contribution to practical problem-solving in the contemporary planetary human situation in what might be termed a 'constructive constructivism'. This concerns a large practical theory agenda—and an urgent one at that, given the rapid increase in planetary problems—revolving around the task of figuring out which ideas and identities are appropriate for the planetary world, and in figuring out how they can be rapidly disseminated. Furthermore, thinking about how to achieve consciousness change of this sort is not something ancillary to the greenpeace project but vital to it. My thinking on how this should and might be done centers the construction of a new social narrative, centered not on humanity but on the earth.





Is it easy to plug your mixed ontology and interests beyond the narrow confines of IR or even the walls of the ivory tower into processes of collective knowledge proliferation in IR—a discipline increasingly characterized by compartimentalization and specialization?



The great plurality of approaches in IR today is indispensible and a welcome change. The professionalization of IR and the organization of intellectual life has some corruptions and pitfalls that are best avoided. The explosion of 'isms' and of different perspectives has been valuable and necessary in many ways, but it has also helped to foster and empower sectarian tendencies that confound the advance of knowledge. Some of the adherents of some sects and isms boast openly of establishing 'citation cartels' to favor themselves and their friends. Some theorists also have an unfortunate tendency to assume that because they have adopted a label that what they actually do is the actually the realization of the label. Thus we have 'realists' with limited grasp on realities, 'critical theorists' who repeat rather than criticize the views of other 'critical theorists,' and anti-neoliberals who are ruthless Ayn Rand-like self aggrandizers. The only way to fully address these tendencies is to talk to people you disagree with, and find and communicate with people in other disciplines.



Another consequence of this sectarianism is visible in the erosion of scholarly standards of citation. The system of academic incentives is configured to reward publication, and the publication of ideas that are new. This has a curiously perverse impact on the achievement of cumulativity. One seemingly easy and attractive path to saying something new is to say something old in new language, to say something said in another sect or field in the language of your sect or field, or easiest of all, simply ignore what other people have said if it is too much like what you are trying to say. George Santyana is wide quoted in saying that 'those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.' For academics it can unfortunately be said, 'those who can successfully forget what past academics said are free to say it again, and thus advance toward tenure.' When rampant sectarianism and decline in standards of citation is combined with a broader cultural tendency to valorize self-expression and authenticity, academic work can become an exercise in abstract self expressionism.



Confining one's intellectual life within one 'ism' or sect is sure to be self-limiting. Many of the most important and interesting questions arise between and across the sects and schools. Also, there are great opportunities in learning from people who do not fully share your assumptions and approaches. Seriously engaging the work and ideas of scholars in other sects can be very very valuable. Scholars in different sects and schools are also often really taking positions that are not so different as their labels would suggest. Perhaps because my research agenda fits uncomfortably within any of the established schools and isms, I have found particularly great value in seeking out and talking on a sustained basis with people with very different approaches.





My final question is about normativity and the way that normativity is perceived: In Europe and the United States, liberal Internationalism is increasingly considered as hollowed out, as a discursive cover for a tendency to attempt to control and regulate the world—or as an unguided idealistic missile. Doesn't adapting to a post-hegemonic world require dropping such ambitions?



American foreign policy has never been entirely liberal internationalist. Many other ideas and ideologies and approaches have often played important roles in shaping US foreign policy. But the United States, for a variety of reasons, has pursued liberal internationalist foreign policy agendas more extensively, and successfully, than any other major state in the modern state system, and the world, I think, has been made better off in very important ways by these efforts.



The net impact of the United States and of American grand strategy and particularly those parts of American brand strategy that have been more liberal internationalist in their character, has been enormously positive for the world. It has produced not a utopia by any means, but has brought about an era with more peace and security, prosperity, and freedom for more people than ever before in history.



Both American foreign policy and liberal internationalism have been subject to strong attacks from a variety of perspectives. Recently some have characterized liberal internationalism as a type of American imperialism, or as a cloak for US imperialism. Virtually every aspect of American foreign policy has been contested within the United States. Liberal internationalists have been strong enemies of imperialism and military adventurism, whether American or from other states. This started with the Whig's opposition to the War with Mexico and the Progressive's opposition to the Spanish-American War, and continued with liberal opposition to the War in Vietnam.



The claim that liberal internationalism leads to or supports American imperialism has also been recently voiced by many American realists, perhaps most notably John Mearsheimer (Theory Talk #49). He and others argue that liberal internationalism played a significant role in bringing about the War on Iraq waged by the W. Bush administration. This was indeed one of the great debacles of US foreign policy. But the War in Iraq was actually a war waged by American realists for reasons grounded in realist foreign policy thinking. It is true, as Mearsheimer emphasizes, that many academic realists criticized the Bush administration's plans and efforts in the invasion in Iraq. Some self-described American liberal internationalists in the policy world supported the war, but almost all academic American liberal internationalists were strongly opposed, and much of the public opposition to the war was on grounds related to liberal internationalist ideas.



It is patently inaccurate to say that main actors in the US government that instigated the War on Iraq were liberal internationalists. The main initiators of the war were Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Whatever can be said about those two individuals, they are not liberal internationalists. They initiated the war because they thought that the Saddam Hussein regime was a threat to American interests—basically related to oil. The Saddam regime was seen as a threat to American-centered regional hegemony in the Middle East, an order whose its paramount purpose has been the protection of oil, and the protection of the regional American allies that posses oil. Saddam Hussein was furthermore a demonstrated regional revisionist likely to seek nuclear weapons, which would greatly compromise American military abilities in the region. Everything else the Bush Administration's public propaganda machine said to justify the war was essentially window dressing for this agenda. Far from being motivated by a liberal internationalist agenda the key figures in the Bush Administration viewed the collateral damage to international institutions produced by the war as a further benefit, not a cost, of the war. It is particularly ironic that John Mearsheimer would be a critic of this war, which seems in many ways a 'text book' application of a central claim of his 'offensive realism,' that powerful states can be expected, in the pursuit of their security and interests, to seek to become and remain regional hegemons.



Of course, liberal internationalism, quite aside from dealing with these gross mischaracterizations propagated by realists, must also look to the future. The liberal internationalism that is needed for today and tomorrow is going to be in some ways different from the liberal internationalism of the twentieth century. This is a large topic that many people, but not enough, are thinking about. In a recent working paper for the Council on Foreign Relations, John Ikenberry and I have laid out some ways in which we think American liberal internationalism should proceed. The starting point is the recognition that the United States is not as 'exceptional' in its precocious liberal-democratic character, not as 'indispensible' for the protection of the balance of power or the advance of freedom, or as easily 'hegemonic' as it has been historically. But the world is now also much more democratic than ever before, with democracies old and new, north and south, former colonizers and former colonies, and in every civilizational flavor. The democracies also face an array of difficult domestic problems, are thickly enmeshed with one another in many ways, and have a vital role to play in solving global problems. We suggest that the next liberal internationalism in American foreign policy should focus on American learning from the successes of other democracies in solving problems, focus on 'leading by example of successful problem-solving' and less with 'carrots and sticks,' make sustained efforts to moderate the inequalities and externalities produced by de-regulated capitalism, devote more attention to building community among the democracies, and make sustained efforts to 'recast global bargains' and the distribution of authority in global institutions to better incorporate the interests of 'rising powers.'





Daniel Deudney is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He has published widely in political theory and international relations, on substantive issues such as nuclear weapons, the environment as a security issue, liberal and realist international relations theory, and geopolitics.





Related links



Deudney's Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins
Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Democratic Internationalism: An American Grand Strategy for a Post-exceptionalist Era (Council on Foreign Relations Working Paper, 2012) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney et al's Global Shift: How the West Should Respond to the Rise of China (2011 Transatlantic Academy report) here (pdf) 
Read the introduction of Deudney's Bounding Power (2007) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney's Bringing Nature Back In: Geopolitical Theory from the Greeks to the Global Era (1999 book chapter) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Who Won the Cold War? (Foreign Policy, 1992) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney's The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security (Millennium, 1990) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney's Rivers of Energy: The Hydropower Potential (WorldWatch Institute Paper, 1981) here (pdf) 









Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Ten Reasons Why the US Should Renew AGOAMark KennedyDirector, Wahba Institute for Strategic CompetitionIt would be a shame to simply renew the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). There are at least 10 reasons why the US should expand trade more robustly with the continent.It is economically good for the US. Trade is mutually beneficial. A bipartisan group of US senators recently wrote that "By lowering the cost of trade and encouraging investment in the region, AGOA creates valuable opportunities for US businesses, workers, and consumers." Africa will be increasingly consequential. Africa is on a path to be a quarter of global population by 2050 and 39 percent by 2100. The World Bank notes the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement that recently took effect "connects 1.3 billion people across 55 countries with a combined gross domestic product valued at US $3.4 trillion." It could accelerate development propelled by intercontinental trade.To avoid forfeiting Africa to China. The People's Republic of China (PRC) is gaining influence in Africa because of America's negligence. America ranks fourth in foreign direct investment (after China, Russia and the UAE). US trade with African states is just one-fifth the size of China-Africa trade. China has invested at least 2.5 times as much in infrastructure development as the Western world combined. To protect future exports. The US is allowing heavily subsidized telecommunications companies such as Huawei to gain dominance in Africa. This could hamper export opportunities in African markets many US digitally driven products and services. To advance American values. The continent being wired primarily by Huawei increases chances that any smart city functions adopted will be structured to control the citizens rather than empowering them. Being such a laggard in trade with Africa makes it hard for the US to establish a pattern of commerce according to the rule of law. In the countries where AGOA has benefited African countries, it as created opportunities for women. Enhance Critical Minerals Supply Chain Resilience Without Being Exploitive. Africa is a rich source of critical minerals essential to the energy transition. It will be attentive as to whether America is focused on just accessing the continent's rich natural resources or whether it remains committed to development and humanitarian aid together with expanded trade to help its citizens prosper. To avoid future strife. With higher incomes, rich nations have more incentive to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to improve their productivity, making them less reliant on low skill labor. While emerging markets can also benefit from AI, they gain little from replacing low-skill labor. With 43% of Africans lacking electricity, its young population will have difficulty developing skills for a digital world. The combination of less demand for unskilled jobs and a significant growth in supply of such workers presages significantly higher migration or rising conflict unless much more is done to alleviate poverty in sub-Sahara Africa. The continent already represents half the countries that World Banks lists a fragile, conflict afflicted and violent. National security. Rising PRC influence in Africa has many consequences, including its growing military footprint. The PRC has bases in Djibouti and in Equatorial Guinea. It is seeking a naval port on Africa's Atlantic coast. The continent's reliance on Huawei leaves Africa vulnerable to Chinese spying. To show America's heart. Africa continues to be afflicted by extreme poverty. The expansion of trade has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, but AGOA has not been robust enough to help the continent. The 35 AGOA nations collectively account for about 1% of American imports, less than before the act was passed. America needs an even more robust approach to trade to show its heart.To Lead. Seven decades of American leadership demonstrates that doing so is highly beneficial to the peace and prosperity of both the US and the globe. While not renewing AGOA is the opposite of leadership, it will take enhancing AGOA in coordination with the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the US International Development Finance Corporation to demonstrate it.The US must re-energize its efforts in Africa and not leave the continent to China and RussiaKlaus LarresFellow, Global Europe Program and Kissinger Institute on China and the United StatesThere is no question that Washington should engage with the important US-African trade and economic summit in Johannesburg in early November. Fortunately, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai has not only decided to participate in the meeting, but also to serve as its co-chair. The voices coming from Congress during the past few weeks have not been persuasive when they declared loudly that the US should not participate in this crucial meeting due to South Africa's (and other African nations) close relationship with Putin's Russia. In fact, this is exactly why the US should be a strong presence in Johannesburg. The US cannot afford to neglect this precious opportunity to counter the many pro-Russian sentiments on the African continent. There are two other important reasons why US participation in the summit serves Washington's interests.Intensifying trade relations with Africa (and not least with South Africa, the continent's economically most dynamic country) is advantageous in its own right. Expanding and upgrading trade and economic relations with Africa will benefit both sides. Continued access to the many precious raw materials the US needs from Africa is only one of the many advantages Washington would gain. Not least, it will breathe new life and energy into the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), President Biden's flagship trade program for Africa, which should be extended beyond its expiration date of September 30, 2025.Above all, the US should not leave Africa to China. China's commercial engagement goes back to the late 1990s and intensified with Xi Jinping's 2013 Belt and Road Initiative. Since then, China's economic and trade relations with virtually every African nation have taken off, particularly with Ethiopia, Angola, and Zambia. Beijing's two-way trade with Africa is four times as high as Washington's and China's foreign direct investment in Africa is twice as much as the US invests. China thus creates jobs for hundreds of thousands of African workers and greatly supports Africa's manufacturing base. In return, China obtains substantial amounts of raw materials from the African continent. Consequently, China's political influence in Africa has grown immensely and Beijing has also started to develop its military and naval presence on the continent. China's first military base abroad was completed in Djibouti in 2017, and a second base in Equatorial Guinea and naval ports on Africa's Atlantic coast seem to be in the planning stages. Washington should not sit idly by while as this is happening. The political-democratic and cultural image of the US in Africa is still strong. But the African nations need trade and investments. The US (and the 27 European Union countries) can provide much more of either, if only they get their act together. The AGOA summit in Johannesburg is a great opportunity to demonstrate Washington's re-energized efforts to win back the minds, hearts, and not least, the economic cooperation of African nations. AGOA Summit Offers Change to Ramp Up US-African Trade RelationshipKeith RockwellGlobal Fellow, Wahba Institute for Strategic CompetitionThe Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) summit in Johannesburg this week offers a real opportunity for the United States to upgrade its relationship with Africa. It must not be squandered. AGOA is a preferential trade agreement between the US and 35 sub-Saharan African countries that was approved by Congress in 2000 and renewed under the Obama administration in 2015. It is set to expire in 2025. African countries have not benefitted from AGOA to the extent they would like, but they are all strongly in favor of renewing–and improving–the accord as soon as possible. According to the US International Trade Commission, AGOA has reduced poverty and created jobs in Africa. Yet these gains were not universally shared. South Africa, Kenya, and Lesotho have profited through their participation in AGOA. Exporters of automobiles and wine (from South Africa) and textiles and apparel have also done well. AGOA textiles and apparel exporters employ an estimated 240,000–290,000 workers, many of whom are women. Everyone agrees AGOA could deliver more. Although it covers 97% of US import products such as fruits, it does not include dairy products, sugar, meat, and steel. Of the $44.8 billion in goods the US imported from Africa in 2021, only $6.7 billion entered the country under AGOA. This low utilization rate is one of the issues that needs to be addressed at the summit. Almost half of eligible countries now post utilization rates of 2% or less. Half of beneficiary countries export less than $1 million to the US.The low rate of utilization is linked to protectionist US farm policies and a lack of preference for African exporters for energy and mineral-based products, where US global tariffs are low. But the primary reason for low rates of utilization is that many African countries lack the capacity to manufacture products that would be eligible for the preferential tariffs. Many African countries are also frustrated that AGOA is a unilateral, non-binding preference arrangement. Washington can, and does, strip benefits away from African countries that fail to reach eligibility criteria on economic and political policies, security issues, and respect for labor and human rights. Offering trade preferences to unsavory governments is politically toxic, but the sudden termination of benefits also undermines the trading predictability and stability that AGOA is designed to foster. This hampers investment and limits the ability of African companies to participate in global supply chains and value-added manufacturing.The two sides also need to agree on how to structure a future AGOA program to better reflect the dynamism being generated by the African Continental Free Trade Area. The AfCFTA came into force in 2019 and encompasses 55 countries and a market of 1.3 billion people. By tearing down barriers between African countries, the continent's leaders hope to turbocharge intra-African trade, which today is at a lamentable 14.4% of total African trade. Fewer barriers between these countries would help lift 30 million people from poverty and boost continental GDP by $450 billion, or 7%, by 2035 according to the World Bank and African Development Bank. Creating a preferential agreement with so vast a trading bloc is complicated by the wide diversity of these economies, but also by the eligibility requirements. As African companies become better integrated into supply chains it will become even more complicated. Encouraging investment and private sector partnerships in Africa would help integrate entrepreneurs (particularly smaller and medium sized companies) into global trade. One possible area for future cooperation would be in medicines and medical products where there is a substantial need for expanding domestic production and where many African companies have shown great promise. US Trade Representative Katharine Tai, who will lead the delegation, maintains that promoting more inclusive trade is one of her objectives. Facilitating greater participation of smaller companies, many of which are run by women, would be a significant step in this direction. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to getting the AGOA conversations started in Washington has been a lack of urgency. But China's rise to a position of near dominance in Africa has set off alarm bells on Capitol Hill. China is the largest source of investment, lending and trade for Africa. China's 2021 trade with Africa of $250 billion, far exceeded the $62 billion US-Africa trade volume. The good news is that the issue is capturing more attention in Congress. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) introduced a bill in September that would extend AGOA for another 20 years from 2025. Other senators, including Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) are making this issue a priority. Congressional advocates for improving AGOA are engaged in some creative thinking, including the possibility of treating all AfCFTA members as AGOA partners or including other legislation on an AGOA bill, including measures related to trade in critical raw materials. In introducing his bill, Sen. Kennedy stressed the importance of AGOA in checking China's rise in Africa.This week's meeting is an important one for Ambassador Tai as well. She certainly could use a win. The broader US Generalized System of Preferences expired at the end of 2020 and there has been little effort to revive it. Just two weeks ago, US and European Union negotiators failed to reach agreements on sustainable steel trade and critical raw materials that would have enabled closer cooperation on electric vehicle production. Many in Europe lay the blame for this at the feet of Ambassador Tai. The fact that deputy US Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo has been dispatched to Brussels and Berlin this week to smooth things over with European partners can be taken as sign that there is not great confidence in Ambassador Tai's ability to close a deal. The AGOA meeting in South Africa this week will not be the last before the future of AGOA is determined. But it will provide clear signals about whether the US and Ambassador Tai are serious about intensifying trade and investment relations with Africa, or whether they are content to take a backseat to China on a continent that is among the world's most dynamic and strategically important.

Ten Reasons Why the US Should Renew AGOAMark KennedyDirector, Wahba Institute for Strategic CompetitionIt would be a shame to simply renew the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). There are at least 10 reasons why the US should expand trade more robustly with the continent.It is economically good for the US. Trade is mutually beneficial. A bipartisan group of US senators recently wrote that "By lowering the cost of trade and encouraging investment in the region, AGOA creates valuable opportunities for US businesses, workers, and consumers." Africa will be increasingly consequential. Africa is on a path to be a quarter of global population by 2050 and 39 percent by 2100. The World Bank notes the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement that recently took effect "connects 1.3 billion people across 55 countries with a combined gross domestic product valued at US $3.4 trillion." It could accelerate development propelled by intercontinental trade.To avoid forfeiting Africa to China. The People's Republic of China (PRC) is gaining influence in Africa because of America's negligence. America ranks fourth in foreign direct investment (after China, Russia and the UAE). US trade with African states is just one-fifth the size of China-Africa trade. China has invested at least 2.5 times as much in infrastructure development as the Western world combined. To protect future exports. The US is allowing heavily subsidized telecommunications companies such as Huawei to gain dominance in Africa. This could hamper export opportunities in African markets many US digitally driven products and services. To advance American values. The continent being wired primarily by Huawei increases chances that any smart city functions adopted will be structured to control the citizens rather than empowering them. Being such a laggard in trade with Africa makes it hard for the US to establish a pattern of commerce according to the rule of law. In the countries where AGOA has benefited African countries, it as created opportunities for women. Enhance Critical Minerals Supply Chain Resilience Without Being Exploitive. Africa is a rich source of critical minerals essential to the energy transition. It will be attentive as to whether America is focused on just accessing the continent's rich natural resources or whether it remains committed to development and humanitarian aid together with expanded trade to help its citizens prosper. To avoid future strife. With higher incomes, rich nations have more incentive to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to improve their productivity, making them less reliant on low skill labor. While emerging markets can also benefit from AI, they gain little from replacing low-skill labor. With 43% of Africans lacking electricity, its young population will have difficulty developing skills for a digital world. The combination of less demand for unskilled jobs and a significant growth in supply of such workers presages significantly higher migration or rising conflict unless much more is done to alleviate poverty in sub-Sahara Africa. The continent already represents half the countries that World Banks lists a fragile, conflict afflicted and violent. National security. Rising PRC influence in Africa has many consequences, including its growing military footprint. The PRC has bases in Djibouti and in Equatorial Guinea. It is seeking a naval port on Africa's Atlantic coast. The continent's reliance on Huawei leaves Africa vulnerable to Chinese spying. To show America's heart. Africa continues to be afflicted by extreme poverty. The expansion of trade has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, but AGOA has not been robust enough to help the continent. The 35 AGOA nations collectively account for about 1% of American imports, less than before the act was passed. America needs an even more robust approach to trade to show its heart.To Lead. Seven decades of American leadership demonstrates that doing so is highly beneficial to the peace and prosperity of both the US and the globe. While not renewing AGOA is the opposite of leadership, it will take enhancing AGOA in coordination with the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the US International Development Finance Corporation to demonstrate it.The US must re-energize its efforts in Africa and not leave the continent to China and RussiaKlaus LarresFellow, Global Europe Program and Kissinger Institute on China and the United StatesThere is no question that Washington should engage with the important US-African trade and economic summit in Johannesburg in early November. Fortunately, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai has not only decided to participate in the meeting, but also to serve as its co-chair. The voices coming from Congress during the past few weeks have not been persuasive when they declared loudly that the US should not participate in this crucial meeting due to South Africa's (and other African nations) close relationship with Putin's Russia. In fact, this is exactly why the US should be a strong presence in Johannesburg. The US cannot afford to neglect this precious opportunity to counter the many pro-Russian sentiments on the African continent. There are two other important reasons why US participation in the summit serves Washington's interests.Intensifying trade relations with Africa (and not least with South Africa, the continent's economically most dynamic country) is advantageous in its own right. Expanding and upgrading trade and economic relations with Africa will benefit both sides. Continued access to the many precious raw materials the US needs from Africa is only one of the many advantages Washington would gain. Not least, it will breathe new life and energy into the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), President Biden's flagship trade program for Africa, which should be extended beyond its expiration date of September 30, 2025.Above all, the US should not leave Africa to China. China's commercial engagement goes back to the late 1990s and intensified with Xi Jinping's 2013 Belt and Road Initiative. Since then, China's economic and trade relations with virtually every African nation have taken off, particularly with Ethiopia, Angola, and Zambia. Beijing's two-way trade with Africa is four times as high as Washington's and China's foreign direct investment in Africa is twice as much as the US invests. China thus creates jobs for hundreds of thousands of African workers and greatly supports Africa's manufacturing base. In return, China obtains substantial amounts of raw materials from the African continent. Consequently, China's political influence in Africa has grown immensely and Beijing has also started to develop its military and naval presence on the continent. China's first military base abroad was completed in Djibouti in 2017, and a second base in Equatorial Guinea and naval ports on Africa's Atlantic coast seem to be in the planning stages. Washington should not sit idly by while as this is happening. The political-democratic and cultural image of the US in Africa is still strong. But the African nations need trade and investments. The US (and the 27 European Union countries) can provide much more of either, if only they get their act together. The AGOA summit in Johannesburg is a great opportunity to demonstrate Washington's re-energized efforts to win back the minds, hearts, and not least, the economic cooperation of African nations. AGOA Summit Offers Change to Ramp Up US-African Trade RelationshipKeith RockwellGlobal Fellow, Wahba Institute for Strategic CompetitionThe Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) summit in Johannesburg this week offers a real opportunity for the United States to upgrade its relationship with Africa. It must not be squandered. AGOA is a preferential trade agreement between the US and 35 sub-Saharan African countries that was approved by Congress in 2000 and renewed under the Obama administration in 2015. It is set to expire in 2025. African countries have not benefitted from AGOA to the extent they would like, but they are all strongly in favor of renewing–and improving–the accord as soon as possible. According to the US International Trade Commission, AGOA has reduced poverty and created jobs in Africa. Yet these gains were not universally shared. South Africa, Kenya, and Lesotho have profited through their participation in AGOA. Exporters of automobiles and wine (from South Africa) and textiles and apparel have also done well. AGOA textiles and apparel exporters employ an estimated 240,000–290,000 workers, many of whom are women. Everyone agrees AGOA could deliver more. Although it covers 97% of US import products such as fruits, it does not include dairy products, sugar, meat, and steel. Of the $44.8 billion in goods the US imported from Africa in 2021, only $6.7 billion entered the country under AGOA. This low utilization rate is one of the issues that needs to be addressed at the summit. Almost half of eligible countries now post utilization rates of 2% or less. Half of beneficiary countries export less than $1 million to the US.The low rate of utilization is linked to protectionist US farm policies and a lack of preference for African exporters for energy and mineral-based products, where US global tariffs are low. But the primary reason for low rates of utilization is that many African countries lack the capacity to manufacture products that would be eligible for the preferential tariffs. Many African countries are also frustrated that AGOA is a unilateral, non-binding preference arrangement. Washington can, and does, strip benefits away from African countries that fail to reach eligibility criteria on economic and political policies, security issues, and respect for labor and human rights. Offering trade preferences to unsavory governments is politically toxic, but the sudden termination of benefits also undermines the trading predictability and stability that AGOA is designed to foster. This hampers investment and limits the ability of African companies to participate in global supply chains and value-added manufacturing.The two sides also need to agree on how to structure a future AGOA program to better reflect the dynamism being generated by the African Continental Free Trade Area. The AfCFTA came into force in 2019 and encompasses 55 countries and a market of 1.3 billion people. By tearing down barriers between African countries, the continent's leaders hope to turbocharge intra-African trade, which today is at a lamentable 14.4% of total African trade. Fewer barriers between these countries would help lift 30 million people from poverty and boost continental GDP by $450 billion, or 7%, by 2035 according to the World Bank and African Development Bank. Creating a preferential agreement with so vast a trading bloc is complicated by the wide diversity of these economies, but also by the eligibility requirements. As African companies become better integrated into supply chains it will become even more complicated. Encouraging investment and private sector partnerships in Africa would help integrate entrepreneurs (particularly smaller and medium sized companies) into global trade. One possible area for future cooperation would be in medicines and medical products where there is a substantial need for expanding domestic production and where many African companies have shown great promise. US Trade Representative Katharine Tai, who will lead the delegation, maintains that promoting more inclusive trade is one of her objectives. Facilitating greater participation of smaller companies, many of which are run by women, would be a significant step in this direction. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to getting the AGOA conversations started in Washington has been a lack of urgency. But China's rise to a position of near dominance in Africa has set off alarm bells on Capitol Hill. China is the largest source of investment, lending and trade for Africa. China's 2021 trade with Africa of $250 billion, far exceeded the $62 billion US-Africa trade volume. The good news is that the issue is capturing more attention in Congress. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) introduced a bill in September that would extend AGOA for another 20 years from 2025. Other senators, including Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) are making this issue a priority. Congressional advocates for improving AGOA are engaged in some creative thinking, including the possibility of treating all AfCFTA members as AGOA partners or including other legislation on an AGOA bill, including measures related to trade in critical raw materials. In introducing his bill, Sen. Kennedy stressed the importance of AGOA in checking China's rise in Africa.This week's meeting is an important one for Ambassador Tai as well. She certainly could use a win. The broader US Generalized System of Preferences expired at the end of 2020 and there has been little effort to revive it. Just two weeks ago, US and European Union negotiators failed to reach agreements on sustainable steel trade and critical raw materials that would have enabled closer cooperation on electric vehicle production. Many in Europe lay the blame for this at the feet of Ambassador Tai. The fact that deputy US Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo has been dispatched to Brussels and Berlin this week to smooth things over with European partners can be taken as sign that there is not great confidence in Ambassador Tai's ability to close a deal. The AGOA meeting in South Africa this week will not be the last before the future of AGOA is determined. But it will provide clear signals about whether the US and Ambassador Tai are serious about intensifying trade and investment relations with Africa, or whether they are content to take a backseat to China on a continent that is among the world's most dynamic and strategically important.

The more Palestinians believe that Washington is condoning the unprecedented devastation of Gaza and the killing and injuring of tens of thousands of Palestinians, the higher the probability that Hamas's resistance against Israel could expand into a global jihad and raise the terrorism threat against the United States. Will the absence of a settlement of the conflict through a two-state solution or some other fair and equitable modality usher in a new generation of Arab and Islamic global jihadists? Have U.S. policymakers considered the long-term implications of such a frightening development? Isn't it tragic that, after spending over 20 years fighting al-Qaida and ISIS, the United States may be inadvertently contributing to the making of new cadres of violent jihadists, many of whom were not even born before 9/11?The frequent video broadcasts by Abu Ubayda, Hamas's military spokesman, chronicling Al-Qassam Brigades' purported successes against Israeli forces in Gaza are beginning to resemble announcements by former al-Qaida and ISIS military spokesmen, including in some cases, Qur'anic citations of suras and 'ayas (Chapters and verses), mostly revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in Medina (versus Mecca). In previous Gaza wars (2008-2021), Hamas viewed Israel as its primary adversary, the so-called "near enemy."In the current war, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian militants, much like Wahhabi Salafi radicals in the 1990s and early 2000s, have begun to consider the United States as their other enemy, the so-called "far enemy." Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan articulated this view in the latest press conference on December 26.To many of these radicals, the United States, in partnering with Israel's military campaign against the Palestinians, has become a legitimate target for violent jihad. As this view solidifies within Hamas and the Palestinian resistance at large, not to mention across the Arab and Islamic worlds, terrorist threats against the United States — in the region and in the homeland — are likely to increase. Because of Washington's persistent refusal to support United Nations resolutions calling for a permanent ceasefire, Washington has lost what little credibility it had left as an "honest broker" in the Palestine conflict.According to a recent public opinion poll, majorities of Palestinians in Gaza — and more significantly in the West Bank — view the U.S. less favorably than any other time in recent years. As they become more radicalized and frustrated, Hamas and other Palestinian militants will increasingly adopt the view that America is their enemy, and they are therefore duty-bound to wage violent jihad against American facilities and personnel.Al-Qaida has long viewed the United States as an "infidel" far enemy, and if the Gaza war continues in its present configuration, Hamas will follow suit and will join the global jihad. Thus, Hamas's heretofore religious nationalist struggle in Palestine could evolve into a global Islamic jihadist ideology that could resonate among disenfranchised, angry, and unemployed Muslim youth across the Muslim world, including in some Western countries in which sizable Muslim communities live.Palestinians believe that Israel created the first Palestinian displacement, or Nakba, in 1948. In the current Gaza war, Hamas believes that Israel and its partner, the United States, are creating the second Palestinian Nakba in 2023-2024.Hamas's likely ideological transformation As I wrote recently, Hamas's war against Israel over the years has been primarily expressed in the form of resistance — military and political — against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and control of Gaza. Since the horrific October 7 assault on the Israeli communities in southern Israel and the massive Israeli military response, backed by Washington's military, economic and political support, the United States has emerged in Hamas' rhetoric as the second enemy.
In their mind, violent jihad against this new enemy is now permissible and legitimate. Adopting such a position would signal that some Hamas military leaders could move away from the Muslim Brotherhood's mainstream Islamic ideology focusing on local Muslim communities toward the radical rhetoric of Sayyid Qutb, the most extreme thinker of the Muslim Brotherhood, and from there to Wahhabi Salafi jihadism.
Qutb, who was executed by Egypt in the mid-1960s, preached in his book Signposts (ma'alim fi al-Tariq) that the enemies of Islam are Muslim leaders who exhibit un-Islamic behavior and their supporters among foreign infidel leaders, such as Israel and the United States and their allies. He called the Muslim leaders the "near enemy" and the foreign leaders the "far enemy." He urged Muslims to wage a necessary jihad against both groups of leaders and their countries.
Qutb and subsequent radical Palestinian leaders moved closer ideologically to radical Wahhabi clerics and ulama in Saudi Arabia. They jointly began to articulate a common ideological front of global jihad against all infidels and unbelievers domestically and internationally, which set the stage for 9/11. It's noteworthy to remember that Osama bin Laden frequently invoked Palestine in his speeches and messages railing against the United States.
Under the influence of Qutb's writing, leading Hamas jihadists like Shaikh Ahmed Yassin moved away from the Egyptian Al-Azhar Islam, reflected in the three mainstream schools of jurisprudence in Sunni Islam — the Shafi'i, the Maliki, and the Hanafi schools — toward the Saudi Wahhabi interpretation, which primarily adheres to the Hanbali school of jurisprudence, the fourth and most radical school in Sunni Islam.
Under the Hanbali version of Islam, as articulated by the Saudi religious scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the 18th century, jihad is considered a sixth tenet of Islam — the other five being the traditional "pillars" of the religion: the Shahada (profession of one's faith), Salat (prayers), Zakat (alms giving), Sawm (fasting), and the Hajj (Pilgrimage).
Of the 114 Suras in the entire Qur'an, 26 Suras, which feature a significant focus on jihad and fighting, were revealed to Prophet Muhammad in Medina while he was in the process of establishing his Islamic state and battling the mushrikun (polytheists, pagans, idolaters, and disbelievers). Radical jihadis, including followers of al-Qaeda and ISIS, often cite 'ayas from the Medinan Suras in their defense of waging violent jihad against the perceived enemies of Islam. Examples of these Suras are Surat al-Ma'ida, Surat al-Baqara, Surat al-Nisa', and Surat Muhammad.For Hamas and Palestinians in general, the Biden administration has been an integral partner in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's war of retribution in Gaza and its lack of logic, proportionality, and humanity. The White House has argued that Arab regimes for the most part loathe Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood's Islamic ideology and are therefore privately tolerant of Israel's continued destruction of Gaza. This muddled logic, however, primarily focuses on Arab autocratic regimes, not their publics. The devastation of Gaza and the uprooting of nearly two million people will strengthen, not weaken, Arab publics' support for Hamas or a successor group. Hamas is not just a group of militant jihadists comprising 30,000 plus fighters but an idea nurtured by the miserable Palestinian realities on the ground.The way forwardTo break the possibility of more terrorism, it's time for President Biden to realize that the unprecedented and inhumane destruction of Gaza will not destroy Hamas or return the hostages safely. He should end his complicity in Israel's war and work with Israeli and Palestinian leaders to remove Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas from their leadership positions and work with Israelis and Palestinians to elect new leaders.If the Biden administration puts forward a clear path for the two peoples to live together, whether in a two-state paradigm or some other legitimate political arrangement, Hamas' terrorism threat against the United States would fizzle. The Palestinian people, like other peoples in the region, are more interested in living, putting food on the table, and educating their children. Once Israelis and Palestinians agree to move from the destruction of Gaza to a negotiated political and economic reconstruction, only then will the slow process of bringing the bloody history of Hamas' Yahya Sinwar and Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu — the region's newest warmongers — come to an end.

Economic, strategic and cultural connections to Japan have never been stronger and more students across the breadth of our education system, primary through to tertiary, continue to be interested in studying Japanese. But what, beyond Demon Slayer and Pokemon, motivates them and how can that knowledge help universities to build effective and engaging language programs? Japanese is one of the most popular Asian languages taught at tertiary institutions around the world. According to the Survey Report on Japanese-language Education Abroad 2018 (Japan Foundation, 2020), the number of learners outside Japan reached 3,851,774, the second highest on record, and the number of institutions and teachers was the highest since the Foundation's 1979 survey. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, enrolment in Japanese language subjects has remained relatively strong, even in 2021. Oceania (the majority from Australia and New Zealand) has the highest number of learners per 100,000 population globally. However, as the authors of this article, we have become increasingly concerned about the sustainability of advanced Japanese language programs in our region—specifically Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. Language education policies (at the governmental and institutional level) and diminishing investment into language education in the higher education sector have put many Japanese Studies/language programs under strain. Advanced-level subjects generally have lower enrolment numbers than beginner- and intermediate-level subjects, and so are most at risk of being merged, cut back or dropped altogether. According to the US Foreign Services Institute (FSI), Japanese is considered to be one of the 'super-hard languages' that require English native speakers three times as long as French or Italian to attain 'professional working proficiency'. This means that without students' long-term commitment (retention to advanced levels) and well supported, quality education, there can be no sustainable future for Japanese language programs producing highly advanced users of Japanese in those nations. Against this backdrop, we recently launched the Network for Teaching Advanced Japanese Project (上級日本語Network), supported by a Japan Foundation Sakura Mini Grant 2020. This project provides a platform to collect data through surveys and interviews to better understand the current state of advanced Japanese language programs at university level in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, and advocate for communities of practice and ongoing support across the sector. This collaboration involves countries that are members of the Commonwealth. Not only are their universities' medium of instruction English, but they also share similar program structures. The Network for Teaching Advanced Japanese Project approached colleagues from universities in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore in 2020, gathering data on Japanese language programs at 25 institutions in total (Australia 19, New Zealand four, Singapore two). In total, 76 participants responded to the survey and among those respondents, 38 teachers (34 from Australia, two from New Zeland and two from Singapore) participated in online interviews between December 2020 and January 2021. Our survey results show that the 'advanced' level was broadly defined by: the stage of progression at the institution, a proficiency level equivalent to external criteria such as the Japanese Language Proficiency Test or the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages; and the demonstration of specific skills through engagement with types of learning activities or resources (eg progression through language textbooks). What emerged from this is that there is a disparity in what is categorised as constituting the 'advanced level' within different institutional frameworks. Although this may seem merely a comparison with European languages these definitions have significant impact on institutional support for Japanese language. If institutions only support languages through to what we as teachers define as intermediate then it becomes harder for us to graduate advanced users of Japanese. We found that there are subjects with similar content and resources (for example the same textbook) that are called 'advanced' by some universities and 'intermediate' by others. It is common practice that in a three-year university degree program, students who start as beginners can progress to an 'advanced' level in their final year of study, but in many cases, realistically speaking, this 'advanced' level of study is nevertheless perceived as an 'intermediate' level of language acquisition by tertiary teachers of Japanese. The majority of students from the institutions we surveyed usually have three to four hours of class per week (five to six hours at most) during the semester or term. This gives them an average of around 100 class hours per year, and a total of around 300 over their three-year university degree program. It is clear this is insufficient when compared with 2,200 class hours deemed necessary to reach 'professional working proficiency' for Japanese in the aforementioned FSI estimate (for French and Spanish 600-700 and for German 900 class hours). It should be noted that 'class hours' here may assume that language learning does not occur beyond the classroom. Thus, the need to take account of the fact that tertiary students in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore increasingly engage in language learning outside the classroom, for example doing online tasks as part of a blended-learning curriculum, watching Japanese dramas or participating in in-country studies. Our project also found that there is a tendency for the teaching of Asian languages to be adapted to the framework used in the teaching of European languages. It is for example, common practice for universities to offer Levels 1 – 6 in each language with Levels 5 – 6 defined as 'advanced'. This ignores the fact that students progress differently in different languages. The proficiency level reached by students in Japanese language programs at the official 'advanced' level may well be behind those in European language programs. All three countries involved in this project—Australia, New Zealand and Singapore—operate in an English-speaking context associated with the UK tradition of language education which may explain why European languages (which share the Roman alphabet based writing system with English) tend to be privileged in the institutional frameworks. There has been enthusiastic promotion of Asian language education (including Japanese) by the Australian and New Zealand governments since late 1990s, and the ongoing social commitment to multiculturalism. Australia, for example, has released several strategic plans such as the National Asian Language Studies in Australian Schools Strategy (NALSAS, 1995-2002) and recommendations on Asian language studies in the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper (2012). The New Zealand government implemented the Asian Language Learning in Schools (ALLiS) program in 2014, and have committed to a total of $10 million over five years, aiming to support schools by setting up new Asian language learning programs, or strengthening existing ones. In Singapore, mainly in response to industrial demand, the Ministry of Education established their Foreign Language Centre in 1978 to offer couses of French, German and Japanese for secondary school students (the Centre expanded to Ministry of Education Language Centre to offer language couses in wider age groups). Universities and polytechnics in Singapore also established Japanese language programs from the1980s. The development of Asian literacy can be better supported with a less Eurocentric and less English-monolingual mindset. A recent report (May 30, 2021) on the current state of school language programs and assessment in the Australian state of New South Wales suggests European languages such as French are advantaged over Japanese and Arabic, pointing to just such a bias. Further, the dominance of English in the global arena is creating a societal apathy for learning languages other than English. Despite acknowledgement that languages provide a key pathway to fostering 'generalised national multilingualism, social harmony, and economic prosperity' as noted by scholars Shannon Mason and John Hajek, representations of language education in the media can often exacerbate the precarious position of language education in Australia by presenting only superficial, narrow and negative editorial debate.

Mitrofans Slobodjans. MAĢISTRA DARBS . FOREX PAKALPOJUMU UZŅĒMUMA IZVEIDE. - Rīga:Latviajs Universitate, 2010.- 81 lpp. Maģistra darba apjoms ir 81 lappuses, tas satur 13 tabulas, 9 attēlus, 1 pielikumus un 31 izmantotās literatūras avotus. Pirmajā daļā tiek dota projekta ideja, viņa aktualitāte. Foreks tirgus radās divdesmitā gadsimta 70.gados ar piesieto valūtu kursu atcelšanu, tiem pašiem izmainot toreizēja sistēmu pasaules finanšu. Uz valūtu tirgu, tikai pozitīvi iedarbojas pasaules finansiāla krīze, kapitāla daļa no fondu tirgus pārgāja uz valūtu. Augsts bezdarba līmenis liek ļaudīm meklēt jaunus peļņas avotus. Radāmās kompānijas misija - piešķirt ļaudīm iespēju efektīvi tirgot pasaules valūtu tirgū. Kompānijas mērķis pelnīt peļņu uz spredā un kursiem. Otrajā daļā aprakstās uzņēmums, viņa juridiskā forma, nosaukums, vieta, kā arī pamatkapitāls, īpašnieki, pamatlīdzekļi un organizatoriska struktūra. Tiek dots teorētisks katra apakšpunkta pamatojumi un aprakstās pati kompānija. SIA Invest-Tredings tiks iereģistrēts Latvijā, un še gan vedīs savējo darbību. Kapitāls pirmajā posmā būs aizņemts tas un piederēs kompānijas ārvalstu partneriem. Kompānijai Invest-Tredings no pamatlīdzekļiem vajadzīgi galvenokārt mēbele un ofiss. Telpa saimnieciskas darbības tiks ņemta nomā. Kompānijai ir vajadzīgi pasniedzēji – strādājošie treideri valūtu tirgū, sekretāri, aģenti un menedžeri pa klientu saistīšanu, kopumā aptuveni 10 cilvēkus. Stils pārvalde būs demokrātiska un koleģiāla. Darba trešajā daļa tiek dots nozares pētījums, nozares nozīme Latvijas tautsaimniecībai, nozares attīstība pēdējos gados, perspektīvas tuvākajos gados. Pats Foreks tirgus izveidojās 70.gados, kad valūtu kursi tika aizlaisti brīvā peldēšanā. Latvijā brīva valūtas apmainīšana tika atļauta agrāk neka visa PSRS, 1991 Parex saņēma licenci uz doto operāciju. Foreks tirgus tas nav vienkāršs valūtas apmainīšana, tā ir vēl spekulāciju iespēja ar maržinalas tirdzniecības izmantošanu. Viens no pionieriem dotā pakalpojuma bijis Parex banka, 90 gadus beigas. Uz šo brīdi spekulāciju pakalpojumi ar valūtu dod liels kompāniju daudzums, globāls tirgus dod iespēju lietot pakalpojumus ar jebkādai ārvalsta kompānijai. Tirgus segmentā, kura piedāvā ne tikai iespēju atvērt kontu, bet arī spēles apmācību uz Foreks ir tikai trīs - četras kompānijas, kas iesaka, ka šī niša ir brīva. Spēlētāju uz Foreksā Latvijā, daudz atpaliek no ES rādītājiem. Šis tirgus ir pats vienkāršākais un saprotams no visiem finanšu tirgiem, uz valūtu tirgu labvēlīgi ietekmēja arī pasaules finansiāla krīze (ja viena valūta krīt, tad aug cita), kas viss kopā padara šo tirgu par pievilcīgu tuvajos gadus. Ceturtā darba daļā tiek dots kompānijas un piedāvāto pakalpojumu darba apraksts, kā arī kompānijas vieta nozarēs, pakalpojumu un izejvielas vērtībā. Kompānijas mērķis - ieņemt vadošo vietu Foreks tirgū Latvijā, kompāniju segmentā kas piedāvā apmācību valūtas tirgū un iespēju spēlēt. Kompānija piedāvās iespēju strādāt ar galvāniem valūtu pāriem, ar kredītu plecu 1 pret 100. Būs iespēja tirgot, sākot ar 0,5 loti pie spreda 0,0005 USD. Uz kursiem tiek lasīti lekcijas un tiek veikts praktiskas nodarbes par tehnisku un fundamentālu analīzi, par Fibonači un Eliota viļņas teorijas, par atliktajiem orderiem. Kompānijas konts tiks atvērts Deutsche banka. Piektajā daļā aprakstīta mārketingu kompānijas plāns. Globālā valūtu tirgū eksistē tikai 5 tirgus dalībnieku tipi - Centrālas burkas, komerciālas burkas, starptautiskas korporācijas, brokeru sabiedrības, fiziskas sejas. Vislielākais spēlētājs Deutsche banka, kas aizņem aptuveni 21 % valūtu pasaules tirgu. Desmitniekā tādas burkas kā UBS, Barclays, RBS, Citi, J.P. Morgan, HSBS, Goldamn Sachs, Credit Suisse, BNP Baribas. Paši liela skaita grupa ir fiziskas personas, bet tie ar savējo aktivitāti praktiski nevar ietekmēt uz valūtas kursu. Bet mērķu grupu jebkādai kompānijai, kura piedāvā pakalpojumus uz Foreks ir tieši fiziski personas. Kuriem tiek piedāvāti apmācības, u ; Mitofan Slobodian. Master degree work. Company which will offer a wide spectrum of services on Forex markets. Riga, Latvian University 2010. 81 pages. Works target – to explain Company which will offer a wide spectrum of services on Forex markets. Degree work consists of 66 pages, includes 18 tables, 20 figures both 3 appendices, and 51 sources of the used literature. The idea of project, his actuality, is given in the first part. The market of Forex arose up in 70th of the twentieth century with abolition of the tied rates of exchange, changing the same of that time the system world finances. To the market of currencies, only a world financial crisis influences positively, part of capital from a fund market passed to currency. A high unemployment rate compels people to search the new sources of earnings. Mission of the created company - to give possibility effectively to trade in the world currency market to the people. Aim of company to earn an income on a spread and courses. An enterprise, his legal form, name, location, and also fixed assets, proprietors, fixed assets and organizational structure, is described in the second part. The theoretical is given grounds of every subitem and a company is described. LTD. of Ievest-Trading will be registered in Latvia, and here will conduct the activity. As a capital on the first stage will be a loan that and to belong a company will be to the foreign partners. A company Ievest-Trading from the fixed assets need furniture and office technique mainly. An apartment for vision of economic activity will be leased. A company need teachers are operating traders at the market of currencies, secretaries, agents and managers on bringing in of clients, in general complication about 10 persons. Style a management will be democratic and collective. In third of part of work research of industry, value of industry, is given for the Latvian national economy, industries development in the last few years, and prospects in the nearest years. The market of Forex appeared in 70th, when the rates of exchange were sent in the free swimming. In Latvia the free exchange of currency was settled before everything in the USSR, in 1991 Parex got a license to this operation. Market of Forex it is not simple exchange of currency, it yet is possibility of speculations with the use of marginal trade. Parex came forward one of the earliest explorers of this favors Banka in the middle, end of 90th. Now services of speculations with currency give plenty of companies, the market global enables to use services and to any foreign company. In the segment of grant of courses on teaching of playing the Forex present only three are four companies, which do this niche of open. An amount of people is in Latvia of playing the Forex, noted falls behind from the indexes of EU. Market the simplest and clear from all financial markets, to the market of currencies a world financial crisis (if one currency falls, then other grows) influenced favorably, that all together does this market attractive in the nearest years. In fourth part of work description of business of company and given services, and also place of company, is given in industries, cost of services and raw material. Aim of company - to take the leading place at the market of Forex in Latvia, in the segment of companies giving teaching at the market of currencies and possibility to play. A company will give possibility to work with basic currency pair, with a credit shoulder 1 against 100. There will be possibility to trade, since a 0,5 plumb line at a spread 0,0005 USD. On courses will be given lectures and conducted practical employments on a technical and fundamental analysis, on theory Fibonachy and waves of Eliot, about the set aside warrants. Company will be scored first in Deutsche bank. The marketing plan of company is described in a fifth. At the global market of currencies there are only 5 types of market participants - Central banks, commercial banks

After more than three decades of conflict and several bloody wars, the Republic of Azerbaijan recaptured the Armenian-inhabited enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh on September 28. Azerbaijan's lightning victory followed a nine-month blockade of the Lachin Corridor, the only link between the Karabakh region to mainland Armenia, effectively depriving the roughly 120,000 Karabakh Armenians who lived there of food and other necessities.Following Azerbaijan's victory, there was a mass exodus of Armenians from Karabakh and the creation of a severe humanitarian crisis that reminded some of the Armenians' flight from the Ottoman Empire during 1915-16 when as many as a million people died or were killed — considered a genocide by Armenians and part of World War I's tragic collateral damage by the Turks.Many factors contributed to Azerbaijan's final victory in its long-simmering conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. Some factors are rooted in the South Caucasus' complex history as part of the Iranian state until 1813, followed by the Russian and Soviet empires, the USSR's nationalities policies and its practice of using various ethnic groups as levers of influence, and finally the messy breakup of the USSR beginning in 1988. Other factors relate to the disparity in Armenia's and Azerbaijan's size, population, and resources. Unlike Armenia, which has few natural resources, Azerbaijan is an energy-rich country and thus capable of spending large sums on arms.Additional factors include Armenia's persistent internal political differences on the country's foreign policy orientation, as well as rivalries and disagreements between Armenian and Karabakh political elites.Since gaining independence after the Soviet collapse, Armenia has mostly depended on Russian support. But largely due to the 20-month-old war in Ukraine, Moscow's priorities have changed. Both Turkey and Azerbaijan became more important for Moscow, and its failure to adequately support Armenia, particularly by deploying its peacekeeping force to dismantle the blockade, sealed last month's outcome.Unfortunately for Armenia, Azerbaijan also became more important for the West in light of the Ukraine war. This meant that neither Europe nor the United States was willing to take major risks to restrain Baku.Lastly, international and regional geopolitical rivalries and Armenia's vulnerable geopolitical position contributed to its ultimate defeat. Among these factors were the larger Russia-West rivalry for control of Eurasia and Washington's 30-year-old efforts to contain and isolate Iran by denying Tehran any role in the emerging post-Cold War economic and security structures of the Southern Caucasus, most importantly in the construction of pipelines to transport oil and gas from Azerbaijan, the Caspian Sea, and Central Asia to Western markets.To accomplish this aim, the U.S. and Europe effectively assigned a leading role to Turkey in the Caucasus and Central Asia both as a model to be emulated by the Central Asian states and as the West's major regional partner. Perhaps, at the time, Armenia should have seen the writing on the wall and aligned itself more closely with the West while seeking some form of accommodation with Turkey. But given Armenians' history with the Ottomans and Turkey, this was not easy to do, and Yerevan chose to align itself more closely to Russia instead.Armenia did, in fact, retain ties with the West and even joined NATO's Partnership for Peace program. Yet, despite religious and cultural bonds with the West and a politically active Diaspora community, particularly in France and the U.S., Yerevan's closer ties to Moscow resulted in a lingering Western distrust. And, as time went on, the lure of Azerbaijan's energy resources became too strong for the West to resist.Surrounded by Turkey and Azerbaijan, Armenia saw Iran with which it built a constructive relationship after independence, as a potential counterweight to Azerbaijan. But Iran, fearful of antagonizing its own Azeri population concentrated in the northwestern part of the country and concerned about antagonizing a fellow Muslim and mostly Shi'a country, was limited in its response. At the same time, Moscow worked to enhance Armenia's dependence on Russia, making it more difficult for Yerevan to develop closer economic and energy ties with Tehran. In short, U.S. containment of Iran and Russia's desire to control Armenia deprived Yerevan of alternative sources of support.The regional involvement of Israel, the Middle East's most important military power and a sworn enemy of the Islamic Republic, has further complicated matters. As a minority state in the Muslim world that was itself born in part as a result of the Nazi genocide against the Jews in Europe, Israel should theoretically have felt a natural affinity for Armenia. But a desire to expand its diplomatic relations with Muslim states (long before the 2020 Abraham Accords), the lure of energy resources and markets, and its hostility toward Iran have pulled Israel ever closer to Azerbaijan.Over time, Israel became a key supplier of weapons for Baku, providing it with as much as 69 percent of its total arms imports, including some of its most advanced weapons systems, between 2016 and 2020, a trend that intensified significantly as Azerbaijan prepared its offensive to take Karabakh. Moreover, Baku's principal patron and mentor, Turkey, which has its own regional ambitions, supplied additional weaponry and assistance, even to the extent of reportedly providing Syrian mercenaries for Baku to fight in Karabakh during the 2020 Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict.Since Ottoman times, Turkey has coveted what is now the Republic of Azerbaijan, as well as the Iranian province of Azerbaijan. Pan-Turkist and neo-Ottoman forces, with which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is identified, have long wanted to create a land bridge between, first, Turkey and Azerbaijan, and subsequently through northern Iran to Central Asia. In this way, Turkey hopes to realize a direct land route to link all Turkic peoples.Azerbaijan's conquest of Karabakh marks the first step towards this goal. Now, Turkey is insisting on the creation of a land corridor between Azerbaijan and Nakhicevan, an Azerbaijani exclave bounded by Armenia, Iran and Turkey. This would amount to the incorporation of what the Armenians call Syunik and the Azerbaijanis call Zangezur into Azerbaijan, thus bypassing Iran. In a demonstration of Turkey's aims, Erdoğan himself visited Nakhichevan for a meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on September 25, two weeks before Baku's Karabakh offensive, and talked about the opening of the so-called Zangezur Corridor.Iran is understandably concerned by all of these developments. While relations between Baku and Tehran have oscillated between warm and cold since Azerbaijan's independence, they have grown more tense in recent years, particularly as Israel became increasingly critical to Baku's military buildup, possibly in exchange for oil and reportedly also for access to Iran for Israeli intelligence operations. Iran has long been concerned that Azerbaijan may serve as a launch pad for an Israeli, U.S., or joint attack on its territory.As for Turkey's ambitions, it should be noted that the Nakhicavan exclave lies only 90 miles from Tabriz, the capital of Iranian Azerbaijan, which Baku claims is occupied territory it refers to as Southern Azerbaijan. Erdogan appears to share that sentiment; in 2020, his recitation of a poem that claimed that Iran had usurped the region provoked protests in Tehran.Iran has said clearly that it opposes any other territorial changes in the region, especially the creation of a corridor that would eliminate its common border with Armenia. In early October, Iran's president, Ayatollah Ebrahim Raisi, expressed this view to Armenian and Azerbaijani officials who met with him. Earlier, members of parliament had warned that Iran would not tolerate any changes to its border with Armenia, while an article that appeared in Tehran's influential "Iran Diplomacy" even suggested that Iran unilaterally create a 20-mile buffer zone within Karabakh, Nakhichevan, and Syunik in order to prevent any incursions into Iranian territory. A year ago, Iran held large-scale military exercises along its Azerbaijani border, signaling its determination to resist further territorial changes to its detriment.Against this background, the steady rapprochement between Turkey and Israel since last year's exchange of ambassadors — Erdogan was reportedly preparing to host Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu later this month or in November before the latest Gaza war broke out last weekend – has done little to calm Tehran's concerns. Earlier this year, 30-plus members of Israel's Knesset also called for international support for "the national aspirations of the peoples of South Azerbaijan."Thus, the latest Caucasus conflict is not finished, and larger clashes may lie ahead, especially if Azerbaijan pursues its irredentist claims against Iran with the backing of Turkey and Israel. In the last few days, there have been reports that Baku and Tehran are now trying to normalize bilateral relations and even discuss opening a new transit route through Iran to Nakhicevan, which could alleviate some of Tehran's key concerns. However, the deep-rooted sources of tension between Iran and Azerbaijan are unlikely to be quickly resolved, and thus the risk of possible conflict remains high, especially if Iran's rivals pressure Baku.

Despite serious concerns about possible Israeli war crimes and even "plausible" allegations of genocidal acts in its war in the Gaza Strip, the former chief of U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, has accepted a fellowship from one of Washington's most hawkish pro-Israel organizations.The Jewish Institute for National Security of America, or JINSA, announced last week that Gen. Frank McKenzie, who led CENTCOM from 2019 to April 2022, would become the Hertog Distinguished Fellow at JINSA's Gemunder Center for Defense and Strategy.JINSA, which was a major promoter of the U.S. invasion of Iraq 21 years ago (when its name was the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs), has also long championed more confrontational military policies toward Iran, including providing Israel with the means to attack Iran's nuclear facilities and supporting it if it chooses to do so."We are thrilled and honored to have Gen [sic] McKenzie join JINSA," said Michael Makovsky, the group's president and CEO. "As a former CENTCOM commander and J-5, he will be an invaluable source and contributor to JINSA's work on U.S. strategic challenges and opportunities in the Mideast, and how to bolster the U.S.-Israel security relationship."JINSA's press release also highlighted McKenzie's oversight as CENTCOM commander of the "killing of Iran's Quds Force commander General Qassem Soleimani" in January 2020.Aside from promoting pro-Israel policy positions, JINSA's main work has consisted of conducting educational programs and exchanges between U.S. and Israeli military officers since its founding nearly 50 years ago. "JINSA believes that Israel is the most capable and critical U.S. security partner in the 21st century and that a strong America is the best guarantor of Western civilization," according to its current mission statement.During the current Gaza war, JINSA has produced a steady stream of webinars featuring, among others, senior Israeli retired military officers, and near-daily email updates on "Operation Swords of Iron," virtually all of which echo the Israeli government's version of its campaign. JINSA also defend Israel against growing charges by international human rights groups and U.N. experts that its armed forces are guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide evidence for which was deemed "plausible" in January by the International Court of Justice.McKenzie is the first former CENTCOM commander to associate himself formally with JINSA, although the group's roster of "experts," includes several other former regional commanders, including Adm. James Stavridis who served as commanders of both SOUTHCOM and EUCOM, and the former AFRICOM commander, Gen. David Rodriguez. Among other experts are former deputy EUCOM commander Air Force Gen. Charles "Chuck" Wald, who has published a number of op-eds in prominent newspapers over the past dozen years urging U.S. air strikes against Iran's nuclear program.Aside from retired senior military officers, JINSA's experts feature well-known neoconservatives, a number of whom served in various capacities in the George W. Bush administration and played important roles in promoting the 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation. They include Elliott Abrams, who oversaw U.S. policy in the Middle East on the National Security Council, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who served as former Vice President Dick Cheney's national security adviser until his indictment for perjury, John Hannah, who succeeded Libby in Cheney's office, Eric Edelman, who served as Cheney's deputy national security adviser and then as under secretary of defense policy under then-Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and Robert Joseph, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.Makovsky, JINSA's director, moved to Israel as a young man and subsequently worked on Iraq in the Pentagon under Rumsfeld before becoming foreign policy director at the Bipartisan Policy Center where he headed a task force that produced a series of extraordinarily hawkish reports on Iran beginning in 2008. He moved most of the BPC task force staff and advisers to JINSA when he took it over in 2013.For JINSA, McKenzie's acceptance of a fellowship amounts to a real catch, given his recent service as chief of CENTCOM, whose domain stretches from Egypt to Pakistan and Central Asia. Under his command, Israel, which had come under EUCOM's jurisdiction for decades (due to the hostility of most of the region's Arab states), was integrated into CENTCOM — a major priority for both Israel and JINSA and one made possible by the 2020 Abraham Accords under which the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel. As one JINSA report put it, Israel's inclusion "will enable strategic and operational coordination among the United States, Israel and our Arab partners throughout the region against Iran and other serious shared threats."As noted in Makovsky's announcement, McKenzie also oversaw the assassination of Soleimani, a particularly effective organizer and coordinator of Shi'a militias in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, in an operation reportedly aided by Israeli intelligence. And, of course, McKenzie's direct work with the IDF and the military brass of "our Arab partners," authoritarian regimes of the kind long favored by Israel, can only serve to enhance JINSA's work and that of its Israeli Distinguished Fellows, such as Major Gen. Amikam Norkin, a former commander of the Israeli Air Force and member of the IDF General Staff, and Major Gen. (ret.) Yaakov Amidror, a 36-year IDF veteran who also served as Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu's national security adviser and who is regularly featured on JINSA's webinars as a commentator on the IDF's Gaza war.While McKenzie was always careful not to publicly question or contradict U.S. policy while CENTCOM commander, he has been more vocal during retirement. Between the outset of Israel's Gaza war and early February, he was particularly critical of what he described as the Biden administration's "mush" response to attacks on U.S. outposts by pro-Iranian militias in Syria and Iraq and by Houthi rebels in Yemen on shipping in the Red Sea. Recalling what he characterized as Iran's "back[ing] down" after Soleimani's assassination — others would question that characterization — McKenzie argued in the ultra-hawkish opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal that "[t]o reset deterrence, we must apply violence that Tehran understands. …Iranians understand steel." While that no doubt sounds like music to the ears of JINSA's neoconservative funders and experts, McKenzie has also sung somewhat more dissonant notes. On CBS News' "Face the Nation" last month, he clarified that he was "not advocating for striking Iran," but rather not to entirely rule that out that possibility. Even more discordant with JINSA's approach to the Gaza war, he implicitly criticized Israel's ongoing campaign — not, notably because of the appalling civilian toll and destruction it has created — but rather for its leaders' failure to conceive a "vision of an end-state when you begin a military campaign.""And I would argue that needs to be something like a two-state solution. You're going to need help from the Arab nations in the region to go in there and …do something in Gaza. I think Israeli occupation would be the least desirable of all outcomes," he said.Conversely, JINSA and Abrams' similarly hawkish Vandenberg Coalition have been hyping their recent joint plan for an "end-state." While they agreed that Arab states, notably Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt, should indeed oversee (and fund) Gaza's relief, reconstruction, and "deradicalization," security, in their opinion, should be provided by "capable national forces from outside the Middle East and/or private security contractors" in close coordination with Israel which, however, would retain its "freedom of military action throughout the Strip." Or occupation by another name.As for a two-state solution, the report agrees that endorsement of a "long-term political horizon for two states" should be recognized by all concerned. But "rushing ahead with glossy and cosmetic quick fixes, high-level diplomatic gambits, elections, and reunification of the West Bank and Gaza will almost certainly backfire across the board," according to the report, which envisions "an arduous and lengthy process" even before "a revived peace process."Meanwhile, whatever "coalition of the willing" that can be cobbled together to oversee Gaza should focus even more importantly on "strengthening shared U.S.-Israel-Arab interests in resisting Iran-led hegemony," according to the report, an approach that clearly plays to McKenzie's CENTCOM strengths.

On December 4, Venezuelan voters reportedly approved a referendum to annex Essequibo, a Florida-sized portion of neighboring Guyana. On December 5, president Nicolas Maduro ordered his government to "immediately" explore and exploit the oil, gas and mines in the disputed region. But by December 15, a military conflict between the two countries had ostensibly been avoided, for now. So what happened?The status of EssequiboThe modern history of the Essequibo dispute began in 1814, when Great Britain assumed control of the future British Guyana (including Essequibo) via a treaty with the Dutch. For the rest of the century, Britain and the newly independent Venezuelan state filed competing claims to the region, largely either in favor of or against the Schomburgk line, a territorial boundary drawn in service of the British. Once gold was discovered there, these claims became increasingly aggressive, and the parties agreed to submit to an international tribunal (with the United States representing Venezuela).The 1899 tribunal awarded British Guyana more than 90% of the territory and every gold mine. Venezuela criticized the ruling, and many Venezuelans believe the decision was the result of collusion between the Russian and British delegations. Earlier this year, Maduro said, "Our [Essequibo] has been de facto occupied by the British Empire and its heirs and they have destroyed the area."Over the years, the intensity of the dispute has ebbed and flowed. In 1958, Venezuelan dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez planned an invasion of Essequibo before he was ultimately overthrown, and Venezuela continued to insist into the 1960s that the 1899 tribunal's ruling was null and void (owing to the alleged collusion). In 1966, Guyana was granted its independence, shortly after that year's Geneva Agreement between its colonial ruler and Venezuela. This accord is essentially a temporary agreement to come to a permanent solution, stating that, should the two parties fail to resolve the border dispute peacefully, "they shall refer the decision as to the means of settlement to an appropriate international organ upon which they both agree or, failing agreement on this point, to the secretary-general of the United Nations." It is likewise important to note that while the document recognizes Venezuela's position that the 1899 ruling was null and void, it does not endorse it, and therefore the territorial status quo remains.In the wake of the mid-2010s discovery of massive offshore oil deposits in Guyanese waters, the Maduro regime has pursued a revanchist line. In addition to the referendum, his government has instructed the state oil company PDVSA to begin planning the extraction of oil in Essequibo, directed the legislature to nullify offshore oil contracts granted by Guyana, and increased its military presence along the disputed border.In response, Guyana has fortified security ties with Brazil and the United States. The two parties are closer to conflict than they have been in years.Reasons for skepticismThe specter of Essequibo looms large in Venezuela. The region is marked in red in school textbooks as the "zone in reclamation," and Venezuela's claims resonate with much of the country's population. Even the opposition primary's victor, Maria Corina Machado, posted, "We Venezuelans know that Essequibo belongs to Venezuela and we are determined to defend it," while attacking the Maduro government for its insufficient devotion to the cause of annexing Essequibo.
Yet there are sound reasons to believe a full-scale invasion is not imminent. The chief indication is the timing of this latest escalation. The referendum was announced prior to the opposition primary. The opposition, though divided on whether the referendum should occur (an alternative, supported by Guyana's President Irfaan Ali and some of the Venezuelan opposition, was to let the claim go before the International Court of Justice, where the UN said it should go), overwhelmingly supports the Venezuelan claim to Essequibo. With a general election on the docket in 2024 and an unpopular Maduro presiding over precarious economic conditions, Maduro was likely using this crisis to rally nationalists around his platform, divide the opposition, and brand them as puppets of foreign interests.
Furthermore, Maduro might not want to mess with what appears to be an improved reputational standing in the region. Despite what many see as Washington's failed "maximum pressure" regime change campaign, governments are increasingly more willing to engage with Venezuela. In Brazil (which shares a border with both Guyana and Venezuela), President Lula da Silva supported Caracas's aspiration to join the BRICS grouping.
Meanwhile, Colombian President Gustavo Petro hosted negotiations to resolve the Venezuelan political crisis and partnered with Maduro to achieve ceasefires with Colombia's armed groups. Even the United States forged an agreement with Venezuela to lift some oil sanctions in return for political concessions, and Washington is permitting Chevron to again pump Venezuelan oil. Venezuela is no longer the pariah it was, and Maduro has survived several overlapping challenges to his rule. It would not stand to reason that he would jeopardize his standing at home and abroad over Guyana.
At the same time, many of the governments willing to engage with Venezuela have a stake in avoiding war. Prodding from Brazil, Colombia, and Caribbean states encouraged both parties to come to the table for negotiations in St. Vincent on December 14, which produced a mutual agreement not to use force, a commitment to establishing a joint commission to address Essequibo-related issues, and a framework for future negotiations in Brazil. While not a permanent solution, this could defuse tensions for a period of time.
Brazil's interests in regional integration and UN Security Council permanent member status have guided its stance, which has combined military deployments and calls for negotiations in response to Maduro's calls to annex the disputed territory. The Caribbean Community has backed Guyana despite receiving energy subsidies from Venezuela for years. Finally, China, which has taken a neutral position on the dispute and has strong relations with both countries, has a vested interest in preventing a war, given its national oil company's 25 percent stake in the ExxonMobil-led consortium controlling the Stabroek oil fields, located just offshore of Essequibo.
Then there is the question of capability. Venezuela's military would initially be better equipped than Guyana's, with more than 100,000 men, 600 armored vehicles, 200 main battle tanks, 100 combat capable planes, and dozens of helicopters, in comparison to Guyana's 4,000-5,000 active personnel. However, the Venezuelan military suffers from corruption, mismanagement, and desertions, which have hindered its performance. Namely, the tanks Venezuela sent to the Colombian border during a standoff in 2008 failed to make a difference, as poor maintenance rendered many of their gun sights inoperable. Lack of maintenance and parts reportedly have left much of their air force currently grounded.Even if Maduro were able to garner the requisite soldiers, a Venezuelan incursion would have to navigate jungles and swampland, as well as overcome the inherent advantage of the defense. There are no roads from Venezuela into Essequibo (rendering even well-maintained tanks useless), and sustaining a military presence in the country would prove a challenge given the terrain and the military's state of disrepair.Role of the United StatesSo far, U.S. officials "have yet to see the sort of activity along the border they would expect if Maduro intended to launch an imminent, full-scale invasion." But should one occur, Washington should not intervene militarily. An American intervention would lend credence to Venezuelan propaganda that claims the conflict is the product of Western imperialists and ExxonMobil. It could also, as was the case in Libya, morph into a regime change campaign in a country where Washington's recent track record of picking winners and losers is abysmal.
Finally, there are few American interests at stake in the jungle of Guyana, so sending forces to the region would endanger them for little geopolitical gain.While a Venezuelan invasion would be a tragedy for the people of Guyana, it is also an unlikely outcome in the near term, as well as one that should not be countered by the United States joining the war.

Every year, the State Department issues its new "Country Reports on Terrorism," and each year, the rationale for Cuba's listing among the state sponsors of international terrorism gets thinner. The 2022 report, issued just last month, justifies the inclusion of the other countries on the list — North Korea, Iran, and Syria — by citing specific acts of state terrorism or ongoing support for terrorist groups. The report on Cuba, however, is simply an historical account of how Cuba ended up on the list in the first place rather than a rationale for keeping it there.In 1982, President Ronald Reagan designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism for supporting revolutionary movements in Central America. In 2015, President Obama determined, based on an intelligence review, that Cuba was not a state sponsor of terrorism and took it off the list. In January 2021, just days before leaving office, President Trump put Cuba back on the terrorism list in a transparent political pay-off to conservative Cuban American supporters in south Florida, and a last-ditch attempt to complicate Joe Biden's stated intention to resume normalizing relations with Havana. Trump's rationale was that Cuba, which had been hosting peace talks between the Colombian government and the ELN guerrilla movement, refused to extradite the ELN negotiators to Colombia's new conservative government after it broke off the talks — despite the fact that Colombia had previously signed a protocol specifying that if talks collapsed, the ELN negotiators would be guaranteed safe passage back to Colombia. Norway, co-guarantor of the talks along with Cuba, sided with Havana. (Norway was not designated a state sponsor of terrorism.)Even that thin rationale disappeared when Gustavo Petro was elected president of Colombia in 2022, restarted the peace talks, and demanded that Washington remove Cuba from the terrorism list, calling its inclusion "an injustice."Not until its final sentence does the 2022 Terrorism Report offer any rationale for Cuba remaining on the list: "Cuba also continues to harbor several U.S. fugitives from justice wanted on charges related to political violence, many of whom have resided in Cuba for decades."Cuba has, in fact, given political asylum to a handful of U.S. political exiles accused or convicted of politically motivated acts of violence in the 1970s. The United States, of course, has given political asylum to many more Cubans who engaged in politically-motivated violent attacks in Cuba — some of them trained by the CIA as soldiers in its secret war against Cuba in the 1960s. But does harboring U.S. fugitives qualify as sponsoring international terrorism? Although the fugitives have been in Cuba since the 1970s, they were not cited as a rationale for Cuba's designation as a state sponsor until 1988, by which time, the annual reports admitted, there was no longer any evidence of Cuba supporting any foreign revolutionary groups. The law requiring the annual State Department terrorism report defines international terrorism as "terrorism involving citizens or the territory of more than one country." That does not fit the U.S. fugitives, whose violent acts were committed in the United States before they sought asylum in Cuba. Some of their actions might qualify as domestic terrorism, but not international terrorism. Nor does giving alleged terrorists political asylum constitute providing them with a terrorist sanctuary, which the law defines as territory from which terrorists are allowed "to carry out terrorist activities… or as a transit point." None of the U.S. fugitives have planned or plotted terrorist attacks against the United States since arriving in Cuba half a century ago. In 2015, when President Obama took Cuba off the list, Secretary of State John Kerry implicitly acknowledged that the U.S. fugitives were not a valid reason to keep Cuba on the list.In short, there is no longer any legitimate rationale whatsoever for Cuba being designated a state sponsor of terrorism. Cuba stays on the list because the Biden administration does not have the political courage to remove it — even though Cuba and the United States have a Memorandum of Agreement and active dialogue on counter-terrorism cooperation! Various U.S. officials have offered different stories about whether the Biden administration is reviewing Cuba's designation. Shortly after Biden's inauguration, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said it was under review, along with the rest of Trump's Cuba policies. More recently, in March 2023, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was browbeaten by Rep. Maria Salazar (R-Fla.) into declaring it was not being reviewed. A number of Democratic members of Congress who have been pushing the administration to take Cuba off the list were given the impression by Biden officials that the policy was being reviewed — until Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Eric Jacobstein told them last week that it was not. They were livid, according to a report in The Intercept.Treating Cuba's listing like a political poker chip has real costs, not only to Cuba but to the United States as well. Most obviously, it delegitimizes the list itself, reducing it to little more than an arbitrary political cudgel. Cuba's designation has alienated important U.S. allies in Latin America and Europe. For Latin Americans, it is a symbol of Washington's broader policy of regime change, a policy universally opposed in the region. Colombia has taken the lead in organizing Latin American governments to pressure the Biden administration to take Cuba off the list. When Secretary Blinken visited President Petro in Bogotá in October 2022, Petro made a point of publicly calling for Cuba to be removed from the list. Blinken replied, "We have clear laws, clear criteria, clear requirements, and we will continue as necessary to revisit those to see if Cuba continues to merit that designation." But since the administration refuses to actually "revisit" Cuba's designation, the clear laws, criteria, and requirements never come into play. Most Europeans are able to visit the United States without seeking a visa under the ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization) visa waiver program — unless they have recently traveled to a country on the state sponsors of terrorism list. The impact of this sanction on European travel to Cuba has been significant. The number of visitors from the major European countries (Britain, France, Italy, Spain, and Germany) remains significantly depressed from pre-COVID levels while the number from Canada, which is not part of the ESTA program, has returned to pre-pandemic levels. European governments regard this restriction on their citizens as utterly unjustified and their representatives in Havana are as vocal as the Latin American diplomats in complaining about it to U.S. officials. But thus far, to no avail.As campaign 2024 kicks off, the chances that the Biden administration will admit the obvious and take Cuba off the terrorism list appear increasingly remote. There have been 16 U.S. presidential elections since Fidel Castro rode into Havana in 1959, and only once has the incumbent U.S. president relaxed sanctions during an election year — Obama in 2016 as part of his normalization policy. No president running for re-election has ever relaxed sanctions during a campaign.Cuba is living through its worst economic crisis since the 1990s, unable to access the international financial system because of the terrorism designation. But apparently, Cubans will be condemned to suffer for at least another year, branded with the Scarlett Letter T for terrorist, while the Dimmesdales of Biden's campaign try to curry favor with Cuban Americans in south Florida who are not going to vote for him anyway.

In the article was given the N. Berdyaev's interpretation of Marxism transformation specifics in historical practice of Russian society. The relevance of this study lies in the analyzing of undeniable importance: how Western ideological doctrines are transformed by non-Western societies in accordance with their value orientations, internal attitudes, and needs.The sources for this work writing were, first of all, the numerous works of N. Berdyaev himself, devoted to the problems of history and historical eschatology, personal freedom, and the spiritual determination of social revolutions. The subject of analysis was also the political and philosophical "Silver Age" works, devoted to revolutionary topics of the late XIX – early XX century. A number of provisions from domestic and foreign works on the problems of revolutionary modernity and "post-modernity" were also attracted. This article also includes author's thoughts published on pages of a number of domestic scientific journals.N. Berdyaev defined the Russian revolution as a revolution of unique conditions and unique content. And only "very changed, transformed Marxism" could respond to these "unique conditions and contents". The main claim of Leninism was to become the new activist Marxist philosophy of the " proletarian revolutions era". He relied on the thesis of Marx and Engels that a "jump from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom" would necessarily occur.Lenin and the Russian Communists managed to convince themselves that for them this time of the "big jump" had already come. They felt within themselves the strength and ability to change the whole world with the help of "extreme" revolutionary activity,. We observe something similar later on with the example of the Maoist "big jump".According to this super-activist intention, Bolshevik theory is trying to give a new interpretation to dialectical materialism. The main category here is the category of self-movement. The properties of the spirit are transferred to matter – freedom, activity, mind. The activity of the proletariat forms the economy, processes of the environment in his own way. This is the philosophy of activism and titanism which have to inherent to the proletarian mind.Orthodox and at the same time activist Soviet philosophy, Berdyaev defined as the philosophy of social titanism. Philosophical work should be "built into" labor, in social construction, should serve it. Absolute truth is recognized only in activity, in struggle, in labor efforts. The titanic exaltation of revolutionary will presupposes the existence of a real world.Leninism also claimed a new understanding of freedom. Here, freedom is not understood as freedom of choice, but as an active change of life, as an act that is carried out not by an individual, but by a social person, after he made a choice. Berdyaev indicates that the individual does not have freedom from the social collective, he does not have a personal conscience and personal consciousness. The freedom of the individual lies in exceptional fitness for the collective. But if the personality has adapted and merged with the collective, then he receives tremendous freedom and tremendous power in relation to the rest of the world.Communist moral consciousness is torn by the contradiction between the attitude to the past and the present, on the one hand, and attitude to the future, on the other. There is no one humanity yet. There are classes of exploiters and exploited. Therefore, there can be no single morality. But in the future, after the world communist revolution, when the classes disappear, and a single humanity would be formed – then an integral universal human morality will arise. According to N. Berdyaev, Russian communism, if wee look at it deeper, is a deformation of the Russian idea, which took ugly forms in the atmosphere of World War I and social decay.The general historical conclusion of Berdyaev is quite pessimistic. It is very consonant with our political experience: "A revolutionary myth always contains an unconscious deception, and at the same time it is impossible without a revolutionary myth . In this sense, it will never be realized within the framework of this world, in the kingdom of Caesar". ; У статті проаналізовано інтерпретацію М. Бердяєвим особливостей трансформації марксизму в історичній практиці російського суспільства. Аналізується те, як марксизм, трансформований у більшовицьку ідеологію та філософію, вплинув на суспільну свідомість і саму організацію російського суспільства. Актуальність даного дослідження полягає в безперечній необхідності аналізу того, як західні ідеологічні доктрини трансформуються незахідними суспільствами відповідно до їхніх ціннісних орієнтацій, внутрішніх установок і потреб. Це певною мірою дозволяє зрозуміти те які сенси вкладають політичні еліти незахідних спільнот в поширені на Заході поняття, такі як «революція», «демократія», «свобода» і т. д. і як вони відповідно до цих сенсів вибудовують свою внутрішню та зовнішню політику. У цьому плані великий інтерес представляє герменевтичне тлумачення робіт відомого соціального і політичного філософа М. Бердяєва.Джерелами для написання цієї роботи стали, передусім, численні твори самого М. Бердяєва, присвячені проблемам історії та історичної есхатології, свободи особистості, духовної детермінації соціальних революцій, та різнобічні політико-філософські твори «срібного століття» кінця ХІХ – початку ХХ ст. Також в науковий обіг був залучений ряд положень з вітчизняних і зарубіжних робіт з проблематики революційної «сучасності та пост-сучасності». В основу цієї статті увійшли також авторські роздуми, опубліковані на сторінках низки вітчизняних наукових журналів.У викладі доводиться, що російську революцію М. Бердяєв розцінював ії як революцію унікальних умов і унікального змісту. І цим «унікальним умовам і змісту» мог відповідати тільки дуже змінений, трансформований марксизм. Головна претензія ленінізму зводилася до того, щоб стати новою активістською марксистською філософією епохи пролетарських революцій. Він спирався на тезу Маркса і Енгельса про те, що обов'язково відбудеться "стрибок з царства необхідності у царство свободи".Ленін і російські комуністи зуміли переконати себе у тому, що для них цей час "великого стрибка" вже наступив. Вони почувають у собі силу і здатність за допомогою "екстремальної" революційної активності змінити увесь світ. Щось подібне ми спостерігаємо і пізніше на прикладі маоістського "великого стрибка".Відповідно до цієї супер-активістської інтенції більшовицька теорія намагається дати нове тлумачення діалектичному матеріалізму. Основною категорією тут стає категорія само-руху. На матерію переносяться властивості духу – свобода, активність, розум. Активність пролетаріату переробляє середовище і по-своєму формує економіку. Це і є філософія активізму, якої притаманний прометеївській, титанічний пафос.Борючись проти ідеалізму, більшовики, приховано прагнули надати матерії характеру активного духу. Ортодоксальну і разом з тим активістську радянську філософію Бердяєв визначав також як філософію соціального титанізму. Філософська робота повинна бути "вмонтована" в працю, в соціальне будівництво, повинна його обслуговувати. Титанічна екзальтація революційної волі припускає існування реального світу, над яким відбувається акт його зміни.Ленінізм також заявляв про нове розуміння свободи. Тут свобода розуміється не як свобода вибору, а як активна зміна життя, як акт, який здійснюється не індивідуальною, а соціальною людиною, після того як нею зроблений вибір. Особистість не має свободи щодо соціального колективу, вона не має особистої совісті та особистої свідомості. Її свобода полягає у винятковій пристосованості до колективу. Але особистість, що пристосувалася і злилася з колективом, одержує величезну свободу і величезну силу стосовно всього іншого світу. На цьому більшовики будували свою стратегію "нової людини".Комуністична моральна свідомість роздирається протиріччям між ставленням до минулого та сьогодення, з одного боку, і до майбутнього – з іншого. Єдиного людства ще немає. Є класи експлуататорів і експлуатованих. Тому не може бути і єдиної моралі. Але в майбутньому, після світової комуністичної революції, коли зникнуть класи, утвориться єдине людство – тоді виникне і єдина загальнолюдська мораль. Російський комунізм, вважає М. Бердяєв, якщо глянути на нього глибше, є деформацією російської ідеї, що прийняла в атмосфері війни і соціального розкладання потворні форми.Загальноісторичний висновок Бердяєва має досить песимістичний і вельми співзвучний нашому політичному досвіду характер: "Революційний міф завжди містить у собі несвідомий обман, і разом з тим без революційного міфу не можна. В цьому сенсі він ніколи не буде здійснений у межах цього світу, в царстві Кесаря".

In the article was given the N. Berdyaev's interpretation of Marxism transformation specifics in historical practice of Russian society. The relevance of this study lies in the analyzing of undeniable importance: how Western ideological doctrines are transformed by non-Western societies in accordance with their value orientations, internal attitudes, and needs.The sources for this work writing were, first of all, the numerous works of N. Berdyaev himself, devoted to the problems of history and historical eschatology, personal freedom, and the spiritual determination of social revolutions. The subject of analysis was also the political and philosophical "Silver Age" works, devoted to revolutionary topics of the late XIX – early XX century. A number of provisions from domestic and foreign works on the problems of revolutionary modernity and "post-modernity" were also attracted. This article also includes author's thoughts published on pages of a number of domestic scientific journals.N. Berdyaev defined the Russian revolution as a revolution of unique conditions and unique content. And only "very changed, transformed Marxism" could respond to these "unique conditions and contents". The main claim of Leninism was to become the new activist Marxist philosophy of the " proletarian revolutions era". He relied on the thesis of Marx and Engels that a "jump from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom" would necessarily occur.Lenin and the Russian Communists managed to convince themselves that for them this time of the "big jump" had already come. They felt within themselves the strength and ability to change the whole world with the help of "extreme" revolutionary activity,. We observe something similar later on with the example of the Maoist "big jump".According to this super-activist intention, Bolshevik theory is trying to give a new interpretation to dialectical materialism. The main category here is the category of self-movement. The properties of the spirit are transferred to matter – freedom, activity, mind. The activity of the proletariat forms the economy, processes of the environment in his own way. This is the philosophy of activism and titanism which have to inherent to the proletarian mind.Orthodox and at the same time activist Soviet philosophy, Berdyaev defined as the philosophy of social titanism. Philosophical work should be "built into" labor, in social construction, should serve it. Absolute truth is recognized only in activity, in struggle, in labor efforts. The titanic exaltation of revolutionary will presupposes the existence of a real world.Leninism also claimed a new understanding of freedom. Here, freedom is not understood as freedom of choice, but as an active change of life, as an act that is carried out not by an individual, but by a social person, after he made a choice. Berdyaev indicates that the individual does not have freedom from the social collective, he does not have a personal conscience and personal consciousness. The freedom of the individual lies in exceptional fitness for the collective. But if the personality has adapted and merged with the collective, then he receives tremendous freedom and tremendous power in relation to the rest of the world.Communist moral consciousness is torn by the contradiction between the attitude to the past and the present, on the one hand, and attitude to the future, on the other. There is no one humanity yet. There are classes of exploiters and exploited. Therefore, there can be no single morality. But in the future, after the world communist revolution, when the classes disappear, and a single humanity would be formed – then an integral universal human morality will arise. According to N. Berdyaev, Russian communism, if wee look at it deeper, is a deformation of the Russian idea, which took ugly forms in the atmosphere of World War I and social decay.The general historical conclusion of Berdyaev is quite pessimistic. It is very consonant with our political experience: "A revolutionary myth always contains an unconscious deception, and at the same time it is impossible without a revolutionary myth . In this sense, it will never be realized within the framework of this world, in the kingdom of Caesar". ; У статті проаналізовано інтерпретацію М. Бердяєвим особливостей трансформації марксизму в історичній практиці російського суспільства. Аналізується те, як марксизм, трансформований у більшовицьку ідеологію та філософію, вплинув на суспільну свідомість і саму організацію російського суспільства. Актуальність даного дослідження полягає в безперечній необхідності аналізу того, як західні ідеологічні доктрини трансформуються незахідними суспільствами відповідно до їхніх ціннісних орієнтацій, внутрішніх установок і потреб. Це певною мірою дозволяє зрозуміти те які сенси вкладають політичні еліти незахідних спільнот в поширені на Заході поняття, такі як «революція», «демократія», «свобода» і т. д. і як вони відповідно до цих сенсів вибудовують свою внутрішню та зовнішню політику. У цьому плані великий інтерес представляє герменевтичне тлумачення робіт відомого соціального і політичного філософа М. Бердяєва.Джерелами для написання цієї роботи стали, передусім, численні твори самого М. Бердяєва, присвячені проблемам історії та історичної есхатології, свободи особистості, духовної детермінації соціальних революцій, та різнобічні політико-філософські твори «срібного століття» кінця ХІХ – початку ХХ ст. Також в науковий обіг був залучений ряд положень з вітчизняних і зарубіжних робіт з проблематики революційної «сучасності та пост-сучасності». В основу цієї статті увійшли також авторські роздуми, опубліковані на сторінках низки вітчизняних наукових журналів.У викладі доводиться, що російську революцію М. Бердяєв розцінював ії як революцію унікальних умов і унікального змісту. І цим «унікальним умовам і змісту» мог відповідати тільки дуже змінений, трансформований марксизм. Головна претензія ленінізму зводилася до того, щоб стати новою активістською марксистською філософією епохи пролетарських революцій. Він спирався на тезу Маркса і Енгельса про те, що обов'язково відбудеться "стрибок з царства необхідності у царство свободи".Ленін і російські комуністи зуміли переконати себе у тому, що для них цей час "великого стрибка" вже наступив. Вони почувають у собі силу і здатність за допомогою "екстремальної" революційної активності змінити увесь світ. Щось подібне ми спостерігаємо і пізніше на прикладі маоістського "великого стрибка".Відповідно до цієї супер-активістської інтенції більшовицька теорія намагається дати нове тлумачення діалектичному матеріалізму. Основною категорією тут стає категорія само-руху. На матерію переносяться властивості духу – свобода, активність, розум. Активність пролетаріату переробляє середовище і по-своєму формує економіку. Це і є філософія активізму, якої притаманний прометеївській, титанічний пафос.Борючись проти ідеалізму, більшовики, приховано прагнули надати матерії характеру активного духу. Ортодоксальну і разом з тим активістську радянську філософію Бердяєв визначав також як філософію соціального титанізму. Філософська робота повинна бути "вмонтована" в працю, в соціальне будівництво, повинна його обслуговувати. Титанічна екзальтація революційної волі припускає існування реального світу, над яким відбувається акт його зміни.Ленінізм також заявляв про нове розуміння свободи. Тут свобода розуміється не як свобода вибору, а як активна зміна життя, як акт, який здійснюється не індивідуальною, а соціальною людиною, після того як нею зроблений вибір. Особистість не має свободи щодо соціального колективу, вона не має особистої совісті та особистої свідомості. Її свобода полягає у винятковій пристосованості до колективу. Але особистість, що пристосувалася і злилася з колективом, одержує величезну свободу і величезну силу стосовно всього іншого світу. На цьому більшовики будували свою стратегію "нової людини".Комуністична моральна свідомість роздирається протиріччям між ставленням до минулого та сьогодення, з одного боку, і до майбутнього – з іншого. Єдиного людства ще немає. Є класи експлуататорів і експлуатованих. Тому не може бути і єдиної моралі. Але в майбутньому, після світової комуністичної революції, коли зникнуть класи, утвориться єдине людство – тоді виникне і єдина загальнолюдська мораль. Російський комунізм, вважає М. Бердяєв, якщо глянути на нього глибше, є деформацією російської ідеї, що прийняла в атмосфері війни і соціального розкладання потворні форми.Загальноісторичний висновок Бердяєва має досить песимістичний і вельми співзвучний нашому політичному досвіду характер: "Революційний міф завжди містить у собі несвідомий обман, і разом з тим без революційного міфу не можна. В цьому сенсі він ніколи не буде здійснений у межах цього світу, в царстві Кесаря".