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Vietnam is seared in American history and memory like almost no other distant nation since World War II. Seen as the first domino in the supposedly relentless march of communism across Southeast Asia, it later caused the downfall of a president and left a trail of tears and recriminations in its wake that echoed all the way until the Gulf War in 1991. And it opened a window — even if for a brief few years — for serious questioning at home of both the means and the ends of U.S. foreign policy. How times have changed! The lavish welcome accorded to President Biden in Vietnam is just the latest sign of the dramatic shift. Clearly, Washington is eager to deepen ties with Vietnam with China on its mind. But if Washington thinks Hanoi will, at some point in the foreseeable future, align with Washington on countering China on the security plane, it would be sadly mistaken. Vietnam indeed has a China strategy, but it is not America's China strategy. Being clear-eyed about this can open doors to thinking about the true payoffs of the relationship. Vietnam upgrading its relations with the United States to the level of "comprehensive strategic partnership" merely means ties have drawn level with a similar status bestowed earlier to China, India, Russia, and South Korea. China is also Vietnam's biggest trade partner by far. Though Hanoi has welcomed the U.S. Navy, it has also hosted similar visits from Japan and India, among others. And unlike some other U.S. partners in Asia, American defense sales to Vietnam remain limited and confined to lower-value products. Vietnam conducts military exercises with foreign powers, but they are dominated by a focus on disaster relief and peacekeeping, or come in very expansive almost-multilateral formats such as RIMPAC. Hanoi, which has a sharp maritime dispute with Beijing, is nevertheless not pursuing a geopolitical alignment with Washington so much as a hedging strategy involving all of Asia's major powers. The real story of the U.S.-Vietnam relationship is geoeconomics. Vietnam — which Washington shamefully bombed and strafed practically back to the stone age in the 1960s and 70s — is now, incredibly, Asia's new economic tiger. Even more remarkably, it has become the United States' 8th largest trade partner in goods and looks set to overtake the U.K., (currently seventh-largest partner) very soon. U.S. bilateral trade in goods with Vietnam reached $139 billion in 2022, a 20-fold increase in 20 years. Washington's emphasis on moving supply chains away from China aligns with Vietnam's desire to attract as much trade, investment, and manufacturing as possible. Vietnam also possesses the world's second-largest rare earth reserves, a key asset in a time when the global energy transition is taking off. Vietnam saw a surge in solar installations recently and signed up to a U.S.-led initiative to reduce its dependence on coal. Vietnam has also joined the Biden administration's Indo-Pacific Economic Framework and is a part of both the CPTPP and RCEP trade agreements. Clearly, there is a serious convergence of geoeconomic interests, and both sides are acting on this recognition. But while Vietnam looks toward a rapid rise, its feet appear firmly planted. The anchor is provided by its famous "Four No's" policy: no siding with one country against another, no military alliances, no foreign military bases, and no using force or threatening to use force in international relations. This does not preclude having military relations with other powers, but even in those, balance is pursued. Vietnam keeps its powder dry — for instance it has developed its own potent maritime militia to counter Chinese maritime assertions. But if there is one state in Asia that demonstrates both resolute strategic autonomy and committed non-alignment, it is Vietnam. It would take a huge strategic error by China to change that. President Biden denied that countering China was the motivation for his visit. The United States was not trying to start a "new cold war," he said, and was focused on "stability" in Asia. But Washington's actions speak louder than words. The Philippines is a case in point. In recent months, the United States has expanded its military footprint in the Philippines and doubled down on deep military coordination, also involving its other allies, with Manila. This has enhanced chances of a great power war and is also turning out to have divisive impacts on Filipino domestic politics. Of course, Chinese intrusive actions — most recently trying to stop Philippine resupplies to its troops perched precariously on the Second Thomas Shoal and asserting a new, illegal 10-dash line map — are contributory factors. And, of course, the Philippines is also exercising its own agency in all this. But the asymmetric realities of power in the Washington-Manila alliance give reasons to suspect U.S. "agency" is much more consequential in the dramatic U-turn in the trajectory of the alliance. Biden's skipping the ASEAN and East Asia summits in Jakarta and going to Hanoi instead also sent the unfortunate signal that Washington is focused more on building up potential China-balancers than prioritizing ASEAN centrality. Despite the vociferous denials, the logic of a new cold war with China is very much alive in many quarters in Washington. The United States should resist this logic, which includes seeing Vietnam's own serious maritime rifts with China as an opportunity to bring Hanoi over to "our side." Aiding Vietnam's economic rise, and encouraging supply chain diversification where sensible, is important to pursue. It will create opportunities for American businesses and workers, deepen bilateral ties and automatically help create a more multipolar Asia, reducing chances of absolute Chinese dominance. But we will likely not see enhanced military interoperability and heavy-duty exercises between Washington and Hanoi. In their bilateral relations, Hanoi's terms will set the bar, also because Vietnam has its own concerns about U.S. policies that mirror China's. Hanoi remains very wary of Washington's "democracy v. autocracy" rhetoric and so-called values-based interventions. "Color revolutions" and the "politicization of human rights" even made it to the joint statement by Chinese and Vietnamese leaders during General Secretary Trong's visit to Beijing in November 2022. Vietnam's rise is also a sign of how a middle power in Asia and the Global South can find the will to not remain hostage to the suffering of two genocidal wars (against France and the United States) and another damaging invasion (by China), even though Hanoi effectively won all these wars. Vietnam is a case study in channeling past trauma into a laser-like focus on rise — "don't get mad, get rich." This is being achieved by the one-party state through a deliberate emphasis on external multi-alignment, investing in the capacities of its people, and a focused embrace of trade and investment. The United States, in contrast, let its own victory in the Cold War go to its head with disastrous invasions and coercive projects to remake entire regions. And today, the impulse is to wall off major trading powers and adversaries and pursue forward presence to deter rivals. Much of the American political class is also deeply fearful of trade agreements. These are two very different countries, but Vietnam provides America an antidotal geopolitical model worth reflecting on.
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Sixty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. According to his biographer, Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy's thinking had evolved in the year before his killing. In an obituary in The Saturday Evening Post on December 14, 1963, Schlesinger said this about the president in those last months: "What preoccupied him most, I believe, was the peace of the world and the future of mankind. His historian's perspective made him see the conflict with Communism not as a holy war but as a difficult and perilous struggle for adjustment and accommodation. The world, he deeply believed, was in its nature and its historical movement a diverse world — a world which had room for great diversity of economic systems, of political creeds, of philosophic faiths. He respected the distinctive values and traditions, the distinctive identities, of other nations and other societies. Above all, life must survive on this planet. He knew what nuclear war would mean, and he believed that the avoidance of such a war was the common interest of mankind — a common interest which must transcend all conflicts of ideology and national ambition. This common interest was the bridge across the dark abyss. His deepest purpose was to strengthen that bridge against storms of suspicion and fear, and to persuade his adversaries that, if each nation and people respected the integrity of the rest and accepted the reality of the world of diversity, if nations abandoned a messianic effort to remake the world in their own image, peace would be possible, and humanity would endure."This is a far cry from President Joe Biden's "good vs evil" and "dictators vs. democrats" rhetoric of today. Interestingly, it bears resemblance to Chinese President Xi Jinping's comment last week when meeting with Biden: "Planet Earth is big enough for the two countries to succeed, and one country's success is an opportunity for the other. It is an objective fact that China and the United States are different in history, culture, social system, and development path. However, as long as they respect each other, coexist in peace, and pursue win-win cooperation, they will be fully capable of rising above differences and find the right way for the two major countries to get along with each other."It is also worth noting that Kennedy only five months before Dallas had given what some have called one of the most enduring speeches of his time. On June 10, 1963, he asked the American University commencement audience, "what kind of peace do we seek?""So, let us not be blind to our differences but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."Sixty years and more than a generation ago these words held promise, then seemingly lost amid the chaos of assassination, and war. There is no cost to resurfacing them now, in a world no less uncertain.
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Loet Leydesdorff on the Triple Helix: How Synergies in University-Industry-Government Relations can Shape Innovation Systems
This is the sixth and last 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
The relationship between technological innovation processes and the nation state remains a challenge for the discipline of International Relations. Non-linear and multi-directional characteristics of knowledge production, and the diffusive nature of knowledge itself, limit the general ability of governments to influence and steer innovation processes. Loet Leydesdorff advances the framework of the "Triple Helix" that disaggregates national innovation systems into evolving university-industry-government eco-systems. In this Talk, amongst others, he shows that these eco-systems can be expected to generate niches with synergy at all scales, and emphasizes that, though politics are always involved, synergies develop unintentionally.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is the most relevant aspect of the dynamics of innovation for the discipline of International Relations?
The main challenge is to endogenize the notions of technological progress and technological development into theorizing about political economies and nation states. The endogenization of technological innovation and technological development was first placed on the research agenda of economics by evolutionary economists like Nelson and Winter in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this context, the question was how to endogenize the dynamics of knowledge, organized knowledge, science and technology into economic theorizing. However, one can equally well formulate the problem of how to reflect on the global (sub)dynamics of organized knowledge production in political theory and International Relations.
From a longer-term perspective, one can consider that the nation states – the national or political economies in Europe – were shaped in the 19th century, somewhat later for Germany (after 1871), but for most countries it was during the first half of the 19th century. This was after the French and American Revolutions and in relation to industrialization. These nation states were able to develop an institutional framework for organizing the market as a wealth-generating mechanism, while the institutional framework permitted them to retain wealth, to regulate market forces, and also to steer them to a certain extent. However, the market is not only a local dynamics; it is also a global phenomenon.
Nowadays, another global dynamics is involved: science and technology add a dynamics different from that of the market. The market is an equilibrium-seeking mechanism at each moment of time. The evolutionary dynamics of science and technology nowadays adds a non-equilibrium-seeking dynamics over time on top of that, and this puts the nation state in a very different position. Combining an equilibrium-seeking dynamics at each moment of time with a non-equilibrium seeking one over time results in a complex adaptive dynamics, or an eco-dynamics, or however you want to call it – these are different words for approximately the same thing.
For the nation state, the question arises of how it relates to the global market dynamics on the one side, and the global dynamics of knowledge and innovation on the other. Thus, the nation state has to combine two tasks. I illustrated this model of three subdynamics with a figure in my 2006 book entitled The Knowledge-Based Economy: Modeled, measured, simulated (see image). The figure shows that first-order interactions generate a knowledge-based economy as a next-order or global regime on top of the localized trajectories of nation states and innovative firms. These complex dynamics have first to be specified and then to be analyzed empirically.
For example, the knowledge-based dynamics change the relation between government and the economy; and they consequently change the position of the state in relation to wealth-retaining mechanisms. How can the nation state be organized in such a way as to retain wealth from knowledge locally, while knowledge (like capital) tends to travel beyond boundaries? One can envisage the complex system dynamics as a kind of cloud – a cloud that touches the ground at certain places, as Harald Bathelt, for example, formulated.
How can national governments shape conditions for the cloud to touch and to remain on the ground? The Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations can be considered as an eco-system of bi- and tri-lateral relations. The three institutions and their interrelations can be expected to form a system carrying the three functions of (i) novelty production, (ii) wealth generation, and (iii) normative control. One tends to think of university-industry-government relations first as neo-corporatist arrangements between these institutional partners. However, I am interested in the ecosystem shaped through the tri- and bilateral relationships.
This ecosystem can be shaped at different levels. It can be a regional ecosystem or a national ecosystem, for instance. One can ask whether there is a surplus of synergy between the three (sub-)dynamics of university-industry-government relations and where that synergy can generate wealth, knowledge, and control; in which places, and along trajectories for which periods of time – that is, the same synergy as meant by "a cloud touching the ground".
For example, when studying Piedmont as a region in Northern Italy, it is questionable whether the synergy in university-industry-government relations is optimal at this regional level or should better be examined from a larger perspective that includes Lombardy. On the one hand, the administrative borders of nations and regions result from the construction of political economies in the 19th century; but on the other hand, the niches of synergy that can be expected in a knowledge-based economy are bordered also; for example, in terms of metropolitan regions (e.g., Milan–Turin–Genoa).
Since political dynamics are always involved, this has implications for International Relations as a field of study. But the dynamic analysis is different from comparative statics (that is, measurement at different moments of time). The knowledge dynamics can travel and be "footloose" to use the words of Raymond Vernon, although it leaves footprints behind. Grasping "wealth from knowledge" (locally or regionally) requires taking a systems perspective. However, the system is not "given"; the system remains under reconstruction and can thus be articulated only as a theoretically informed hypothesis.
In the social sciences, one can use the concept of a hypothesized system heuristically. For example, when analyzing the knowledge-based economy in Germany, one can ask whether more synergy can be explained when looking at the level of the whole country (e.g., in terms of the East-West or North-South divide) or at the level of Germany's Federal States? What is the surplus of the nation or at the European level? How can one provide political decision-making with the required variety to operate as a control mechanism on the complex dynamics of these eco-systems?
A complex system can be expected to generate niches with synergy at all scales, but as unintended consequences. To what extent and for which time span can these effects be anticipated and then perhaps be facilitated? At this point, Luhmann's theory comes in because he has this notion of different codifications of communication, which then, at a next-order level, begin to self-organize when symbolically generalized.
Codes are constructed bottom-up, but what is constructed bottom-up may thereafter begin to control top-down. Thus, one should articulate reflexively the selection mechanisms that are constructed from the bottom-up variation by specifying the why as an hypothesis. What are the selection mechanisms? Observable relations (such as university-industry relations) are not neutral, but mean different things for the economy and for the state; and this meaning of the observable relations can be evaluated in terms of the codes of communication.
Against Niklas Luhmann's model, I would argue that codes of communication can be translated into one another since interhuman communications are not operationally closed, as in the biological model of autopoiesis. One also needs a social-scientific perspective on the fluidities ("overflows") and translations among functions, as emphasized, for example, by French scholars such as Michel Callon and Bruno Latour. In evolutionary economics, one distinguishes between market and non-market selection environments, but not among selection environments that are differently codified. Here, Luhmann's theory offers us a heuristic: The complex system of communications tends to differentiate in terms of the symbolic generalizations of codes of communication because this differentiation is functional in allowing the system to process more complexity and thus to be more innovative. The more orthogonal the codes, the more options for translations among them. The synergy indicator measures these options as redundancy. The selection environments, however, have to be specified historically because these redundancies—other possibilities—are not given but rather constructed over long periods of time.
How did you arrive where you currently work on?
I became interested in the relations between science, technology, and society as an undergraduate (in biochemistry) which coincided with the time of the student movement of the late 1960s. We began to study Jürgen Habermas in the framework of the "critical university," and I decided to continue with a second degree in philosophy. After the discussions between Luhmann and Habermas (1971), I recognized the advantages of Luhmann's more empirically oriented systems approach and I pursued my Ph.D. in the sociology of organization and labour.
In the meantime, we got the opportunity to organize an interfaculty department for Science and Technology Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam after a competition for a large government grant. In the context of this department, I became interested in methodology: how can one compare across case studies and make inferences? Actually, my 1995 book The Challenge of Scientometrics had a kind of Triple-Helix model on the cover: How do cognitions, texts, and authors exhibit different dynamics that influence one another?
For example, when an author publishes a paper in a scholarly journal, this may add to his reputation as an author, but the knowledge claimed in the text enters a process of validation which can be much more global and anonymous. These processes are mediated since they are based on communication. Thus, one can add to the context of discovery (of authors) and the context of justification (of knowledge contents) a context of mediation (in texts). The status of a journal, for example, matters for the communication of the knowledge content in the article. The contexts operate as selection environments upon one another.
In evolutionary economics, one is used to distinguishing between market and non-market selection environments, but not among more selection environments that are differently codified. At this point, Luhmann's theory offers a new perspective: The complex system of communications tends to differentiate in terms of the symbolic generalization of codes of communication because this differentiation among the codes of communication allows the system to process more complexity and to be more innovative in terms of possible translations. The different selection environments for communications, however, are not given but constructed historically over long periods of time. The modern (standardized) format of the citation, for example, was constructed at the end of the 19th century, but it took until the 1950s before the idea of a citation index was formulated (by Eugene Garfield). The use of citations in evaluative bibliometrics is even more recent.
In evolutionary economics, one distinguishes furthermore between (technological) trajectories and regimes. Trajectories can result from "mutual shaping" between two selection environments, for example, markets and technologies. Nations and firms follow trajectories in a landscape. Regimes are global and require the specification of three (or more) selection environments. When three (or more) dynamics interact, symmetry can be broken and one can expect feed-forward and feedback loops. Such a system can begin to flourish auto-catalytically when the configuration is optimal.
From such considerations, that is, a confluence of the neo-institutional program of Henry Etzkowitz and my neo-evolutionary view, our Triple Helix model emerged in 1994: how do institutions and functions interrelate and change one another or, in other words, provide options for innovation? Under what conditions can university-industry-government relations lead to wealth generation and organized knowledge production? The starting point was a workshop about Evolutionary Economics and Chaos Theory: New directions for technology studies held in Amsterdam in 1993. Henry suggested thereafter that we could collaborate further on university-industry relations. I answered that I needed at least three (sub)dynamics from the perspective of my research program, and then we agreed about "A Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations". Years later, however, we took our two lines of research apart again, and in 2002 I began developing a Triple-Helix indicator of synergy in a series of studies of national systems of innovation.
What would you give as advice to students who would like to get into the field of innovation and global politics?
In general, I would advise them to be both a specialist and broader than that. Innovation involves crossing established borders. Learn at least two languages. If your background is political science, then take a minor in science & technology studies or in economics. One needs both the specialist profile and the potential to reach out to other audiences by being aware of the need to make translations between different frameworks. Learn to be reflexive about the status of what one can say in one or the other framework.
For example, I learned to avoid the formulation of grandiose statements such as "modern economies are knowledge-based economies," and to say instead: "modern economies can increasingly be considered as knowledge-based economies." The latter formulation provides room for asking "to what extent," and thus one can ask for further information, indicators, and results of the measurement.
In the sociology of science, specialisms and paradigms are sometimes considered as belief systems. It seems to me that by considering scholarly discourses as systems of rationalized expectations one can make the distinction between normative and cognitive learning. Normative learning (that is, in belief systems) is slower than cognitive learning (in terms of theorized expectations) because the cognitive mode provides us with more room for experimentation: One can afford to make mistakes, since one's communication and knowledge claims remain under discussion, and not one's status as a communicator. The cognitive mode has advantages; it can be considered as the surplus that is further developed during higher education. Normative learning is slower; it dominates in the political sphere.
What does the "Triple Helix" reveal about the fragmentation of "national innovation systems"?
In 2003, colleagues from the Department of Economics and Management Studies at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam offered me firm data from the Netherlands containing these three dimensions: the economic, the geographical, and the technological dimensions in data of more than a million Dutch firms. I presented the results at the Schumpeter Society in Turin in 2004, and asked whether someone in the audience had similar data for other countries. I expected Swedish or Israeli colleagues to have this type of statistics, but someone from Germany stepped in, Michael Fritsch, and so we did the analysis for Germany. These studies were first published in Research Policy. Thereafter, we did studies on Hungary, Norway, Sweden, and recently also China and Russia.
Several conclusions arise from these studies. Using entropy statistics, the data can be decomposed along the three different dimensions. One can decompose national systems geographically into regions, but one can also decompose them in terms of the technologies involved (e.g., high-tech versus medium-tech). We were mainly relying on national data. And of course, there are limitations to the data collections. Actually, we now have international data, but this is commercial data and therefore more difficult to use reliably than governmental statistics.
For the Netherlands, we obtained the picture that would more or less be expected: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Eindhoven are the most knowledge-intensive and knowledge-based regions. This is not surprising, although there was one surprise: We know that in terms of knowledge bases, Amsterdam is connected to Utrecht and then the geography goes a bit to the east in the direction of Wageningen. What we did not know was that the niche also spreads to the north in the direction of Zwolle. The highways to Amsterdam Airport (Schiphol) are probably the most important.
In the case of Germany, when we first analyzed the data at the level of the "Laender" (Federal States), we could see the East-West divide still prevailing, but when we repeated the analysis at the lower level of the "Regierungsbezirke" we no longer found the East-West divide as dominant (using 2004 data). So, the environment of Dresden for example was more synergetic in Triple-Helix terms than that of Saarbruecken. And this was nice to see considering my idea that the knowledge-based economy increasingly prevails since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union. The discussion about two different models for organizing the political economy—communism or liberal democracy—had become obsolete after 1990.
After studying Germany, I worked with Balázs Lengyel on Hungarian data. Originally, we could not find any regularity in the Hungarian data, but then the idea arose to analyze the Hungarian data as three different innovation systems: one around Budapest, which is a metropolitan innovation system; one in the west of the country, which has been incorporated into Western Europe; and one in the east of the country, which has remained the old innovation system that is state-led and dependent on subsidies. For the western part, one could say that Hungary has been "europeanized" by Austria and Germany; it has become part of a European system.
When Hungary came into the position to create a national innovation system, free from Russia and the Comecon, it was too late, as Europeanization had already stepped in and national boundaries were no longer as dominant. Accordingly, and this was a very nice result, assessing this synergy indicator on Hungary as a nation, we did not find additional synergy at the national (that is, above-regional) level. While we clearly found synergy at the national level for the Netherlands and also found it in Germany, but at the level of the Federal States, we could not find synergy at a national level for Hungary. Hungary has probably developed too late to develop a nationally controlled system of innovations.
A similar phenomenon appeared when we studied Norway: my Norwegian colleague (Øivind Strand) did most of our analysis there. To our surprise, the knowledge-based economy was not generated where the universities are located (Oslo and Trondheim), but on the West Coast, where the off-shore, marine and maritime industries are most dominant. FDI (foreign direct investment) in the marine and maritime industries leads to knowledge-based synergy in the regions on the West Shore of Norway. Norway is still a national system, but the Norwegian universities like Trondheim or Oslo are not so much involved in entrepreneurial networks. These are traditional universities, which tend to keep their hands off the economy.
Actually, when we had discussions about these two cases, Norway and Hungary, which both show that internationalization had become a major factor, either in the form of Europeanization in the Hungarian case, or in the form of foreign-driven investments (off-shore industry and oil companies) in the Norwegian case, I became uncertain and asked myself whether we did not believe too much in our indicators? Therefore, I proposed to Øivind to study Sweden, given the availability of well-organized data of this national system.
We expected to find synergy concentrated in the three regional systems of Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö/Lund. Indeed, 48.5 percent of the Swedish synergy is created in these three regions. This is more than one would expect on the basis of the literature. Some colleagues were upset, because they had already started trying to work on new developments of the Triple Helix, for example, in Linköping. But the Swedish economy is organized and centralized in this geographical dimension. Perhaps that is why one talks so much about "regionalization" in policy documents. Sweden is very much a national innovation system, with additional synergy between the regions.
Can governments alter historical trajectories of national, regional or local innovation systems?
Let me mention the empirical results for China in order to illustrate the implications of empirical conclusions for policy options. We had no Chinese data set, but we obtained access to the database Orbis of the Bureau van Dijk (an international company, which is Wall Street oriented, assembling data about companies) that contains industry indicators such as names, addresses, NACE-codes, types of technology, the sizes of each enterprise, etc. However, this data can be very incomplete. Using this incomplete data for China, we said that we were just going to show how one could do the analysis if one had full data. We guess that the National Bureau of Statistics of China has complete data. I did the analysis with Ping Zhou, Professor at Zhejiang University.
We analyzed China first at the provincial level, and as expected, the East Coast emerged as much more knowledge intense than the rest of the country. After that, we also looked at the next-lower level of the 339 prefectures of China. From this analysis, four of them popped up as far more synergetic than the others. These four municipalities were: Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Chongqing.
These four municipalities became clearly visible as an order of magnitude more synergetic than other regions. The special characteristic about them is that –as against the others – these four municipalities are administered by the central government. Actually, it came out of my data and I did not understand it; but my Chinese colleague said that this result was very nice and specified this relationship.
The Chinese case thus illustrates that government control can make a difference. It shows – and that is not surprising, as China runs on a different model – that the government is able to organize the four municipalities in such a way as to increase synergy. Of course, I do not know what is happening on the ground. We know that the Chinese system is more complex than these three dimensions suggest. I guess the government agencies may wish to consider the option of extending the success of this development model, to Guangdong for example or to other parts of China. Isn't it worrisome that all the other and less controlled districts have not been as successful in generating synergy?
Referring more generally to innovation policies, I would advise as a heuristics that political discourse is able to signal a problem, but policy questions do not enable us to analyze the issues. Regional development, for example, is an issue in Sweden because the system is very centralized, more than in Norway, for example. But there is nothing in our data that supports the claim that the Swedish government is successful in decentralizing the knowledge-based economy beyond the three metropolitan regions. We may be able to reach conclusions like these serving as policy advice. One develops policies on the basis of intuitive assumptions which a researcher is sometimes able to test.
As noted, one can expect a complex system continuously to produce unintended consequences, and thus it needs monitoring. The dynamics of the system are different from the sum of the sub-dynamics because of the interaction effects and feedback loops. Metaphors such as a Triple Helix, Mode-2, or the Risk Society can be stimulating for the discourse, but these metaphors tend to develop their own dynamics of proliferating discourses.
The Triple Helix, for example, can first be considered as a call for collaboration in networks of institutions. However, in an ecosystem of bi-lateral and tri-lateral relations, one has a trade-off between local integration (collaboration) and global differentiation (competition). The markets and the sciences develop at the global level, above the level of specific relations. A principal agent such as government may be locked into a suboptimum. Institutional reform that frees the other two dynamics (markets and sciences) requires translation of political legitimation into other codes of communication. Translations among codes of communication provide the innovation engine.
Is there a connection between infrastructures and the success of innovation processes?
One of the conclusions, which pervades throughout all advanced economies, is that knowledge intensive services (KIS) are not synergetic locally because they can be disconnected – uncoupled – from the location. For example, if one offers a knowledge-intensive service in Munich and receives a phone call from Hamburg, the next step is to take a plane to Hamburg, or to catch a train inside Germany perhaps. Thus, it does not matter whether one is located in Munich or Hamburg as knowledge-intensive services uncouple from the local economy. The main point is proximity to an airport or train station.
This is also the case for high-tech knowledge-based manufacturing. But it is different for medium-tech manufacturing, because in this case the dynamics are more embedded in the other parts of the economy. If one looks at Russia, the knowledge-intensive services operate differently from the Western European model, where the phenomenon of uncoupling takes place. In Russia, KIS contribute to coupling, as knowledge-intensive services are related to state apparatuses.
In the Russian case, the knowledge-based economy is heavily concentrated in Moscow and St. Petersburg. So, if one aims –as the Russian government proclaims – to create not "wealth from knowledge" but "knowledge from wealth" – that is, oil revenues –it might be wise to uncouple the knowledge-intensive services from the state apparatuses. Of course, this is not easy to do in the Russian model because traditionally, the center (Moscow) has never done this. Uncoupling knowledge-intensive services, however, might give them a degree of freedom to move around, from Tomsk to Minsk or vice versa, steered by economic forces more than they currently are (via institutions in Moscow).
Final question. What does path-dependency mean in the context of innovation dynamics?
In The Challenge of Scientometrics. The development, measurement, and self-organization of scientific communications (1995), I used Shannon-type information theory to study scientometric problems, as this methodology combines both static and dynamic analyses. Connected to this theory I developed a measurement method for path-dependency and critical transitions.
In the case of a radio transmission, for example, you have a sender and a receiver, and in between you may have an auxiliary station. For instance, the sender is in New York and the receiver is in Bonn and the auxiliary station is in Iceland. The signal emerges in New York and travels to Bonn, but it may be possible to improve the reception by assuming the signal is from Iceland instead of listening to New York. When Iceland provides a better signal, it is possible to forget the history of the signal before it arrived in Island. It no longer matters whether Iceland obtained the signal originally from New York or Boston. One takes the signal from Iceland and the pre-history of the signal does not matter anymore for a receiver.
Such a configuration provides a path-dependency (on Iceland) in information-theoretical terms, measurable in terms of bits of information. In a certain sense you get negative bits of information, since the shortest path in the normal triangle would be from New York to Bonn, and in this case the shortest path is from New York via Iceland to Bonn. I called this at the time a critical transition. In a scientific text for instance, a new terminology can come up and if it overwrites the old terminology to the extent that one does not have to listen to the old terminology anymore, one has a critical transition that frees one from the path-dependencies at a previous moment of time.
Thus, my example is about radical and knowledge-based changes. As long as one has to listen to the past, one does not make a critical transition. The knowledge-based approach is always about creative destruction and about moving ahead, incorporating possible new options in the future. The hypothesized future states become more important than the past. The challenge, in my opinion, is to make the notion of options operational and to bring these ideas into measurement. The Triple-Helix indicator measures the number of possible options as additional redundancy. This measurement has the additional advantage that one becomes sensitive to uncertainty in the prediction.
Loet Leydesdorff is Professor Emeritus at the Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR) of the University of Amsterdam. He is Honorary Professor of the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit (SPRU) of the University of Sussex, Visiting Professor at the School of Management, Birkbeck, University of London, Visiting Professor of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC) in Beijing, and Guest Professor at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. He has published extensively in systems theory, social network analysis, scientometrics, and the sociology of innovation (see at http://www.leydesdorff.net/list.htm). With Henry Etzkowitz, he initiated a series of workshops, conferences, and special issues about the Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations. He received the Derek de Solla Price Award for Scientometrics and Informetrics in 2003 and held "The City of Lausanne" Honor Chair at the School of Economics, Université de Lausanne, in 2005. In 2007, he was Vice-President of the 8th International Conference on Computing Anticipatory Systems (CASYS'07, Liège). In 2014, he was listed as a highly-cited author by Thomson Reuters.
Literature and Related links:
Science & Technology Dynamics, University of Amsterdam / Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR)
Leydesdorff, L. (2006). The Knowledge-Based Economy: Modeled, Measured, Simulated. Universal Publishers, Boca Raton, FL.
Leydesdorff, L. (2001). A Sociological Theory of Communication: The Self-Organization of the Knowledge-Based Society. Universal Publishers, Boca Raton, FL.
Leydesdorff, L. (1995). The Challenge of Scientometrics . The development, measurement, and self-organization of scientific communications. Leiden, DSWO Press, Leiden University.
http://www.leydesdorff.net/
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Alexander Dugin on Eurasianism, the Geopolitics of Land and Sea, and a Russian Theory of Multipolarity
IR has long been regarded as an Anglo-American social science. Recently, the discipline has started to look beyond America and England, to China (Theory Talk #51, Theory Talk #45), India (Theory Talk #63, Theory Talk #42), Africa (Theory Talk #57, Theory Talk #10) and elsewhere for non-Western perspectives on international affairs and IR theory. However, IR theorists have paid little attention to Russian perspectives on the discipline and practice of international relations. We offer an exciting peek into Russian geopolitical theory through an interview with the controversial Russian geopolitical thinker Alexander Dugin, founder of the International Eurasian Movement and allegedly an important influence on Putin's foreign policy. In this Talk, Dugin—among others—discusses his Theory of a Multipolar World, offers a staunch critique of western and liberal IR, and lays out Russia's unique contribution to the landscape of IR theory.
Print version of this Talk (pdf) Russian version
What, according to you, is the central challenge or principle debate within IR and what would be your position within this debate or towards that challenge?
The field of IR is extremely interesting and multidimensional. In general, the discipline is much more promising than many think. I think that there is a stereometry today in IR, in which we can distinguish a few axes right away.
The first, most traditional axis is realism – the English school – liberalism.
If the debates here are exhausted on an academic level, then on the level of politicians, the media, and journalists, all the arguments and methods appear new and unprecedented each time. Today, liberalism in IR dominates mass consciousness, and realist arguments, already partially forgotten on the level of mass discourse, could seem rather novel. On the other hand, the nuanced English school, researched thoroughly in academic circles, might look like a "revelation" to the general public. But for this to happen, a broad illumination of the symmetry between liberals and realists is needed for the English school to acquire significance and disclose its full potential. This is impossible under the radical domination of liberalism in IR. For that reason, I predict a new wave of realists and neorealists in this sphere, who, being pretty much forgotten and almost marginalized, can full well make themselves and their agenda known. This would, it seems to me, produce a vitalizing effect and diversify the palette of mass and social debates, which are today becoming monotone and auto-referential.
The second axis is bourgeois versions of IR (realism, the English school, and liberalism all together) vs. Marxism in IR. In popular and even academic discourse, this theme is entirely discarded, although the popularity of Wallerstein (Theory Talk #13) and other versions of world-systems theory shows a degree of interest in this critical version of classical, positivistic IR theories.
The third axis is post-positivism in all its varieties vs. positivism in all its varieties (including Marxism). IR scholars might have gotten the impression that postmodern attacks came to an end, having been successfully repelled by 'critical realism', but in my opinion it is not at all so. From moderate constructivism and normativism to extreme post-structuralism, post-positivistic theories carry a colossal deconstructive and correspondingly scientific potential, which has not yet even begun to be understood. It seemed to some that postmodernism is a cheerful game. It isn't. It is a new post-ontology, and it fundamentally affects the entire epistemological structure of IR. In my opinion, this axis remains very important and fundamental.
The fourth axis is the challenge of the sociology of international relations, which we can call 'Hobson's challenge'. In my opinion, in his critique of euro-centrism in IR, John M. Hobson laid the foundation for an entirely new approach to the whole problematic by proposing to consider the structural significance of the "euro-centric" factor as dominant and clarifying its racist element. Once we make euro-centrism a variable and move away from the universalistic racism of the West, on which all systems of IR are built, including the majority of post-positivistic systems (after all, postmodernity is an exclusively Western phenomenon!), we get, theoretically for now, an entirely different discipline—and not just one, it seems. If we take into account differences among cultures, there can be as many systems of IR as there are cultures. I consider this axis extremely important.
The fifth axis, outlined in less detail than the previous one, is the Theory of a Multipolar World vs. everything else. The Theory of a Multipolar World was developed in Russia, a country that no one ever took seriously during the entire establishment of IR as a discipline—hence the fully explainable skepticism toward the Theory of a Multipolar World.
The sixth axis is IR vs. geopolitics. Geopolitics is usually regarded as secondary in the context of IR. But gradually, the epistemological potential of geopolitics is becoming more and more obvious, despite or perhaps partially because of the criticism against it. We have only to ask ourselves about the structure of any geopolitical concept to discover the huge potential contained in its methodology, which takes us to the very complex and semantically saturated theme of the philosophy and ontology of space.
If we now superimpose these axes onto one another, we get an extremely complex and highly interesting theoretical field. At the same time, only one axis, the first one, is considered normative among the public, and that with the almost total and uni-dimensional dominance of IR liberalism. All the wealth, 'scientific democracy', and gnoseological pluralism of the other axes are inaccessible to the broad public, robbing and partly deceiving it. I call this domination of liberalism among the public the 'third totalitarianism', but that is a separate issue.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about IR?
I began with Eurasianism, from which I came to geopolitics (the Eurasianist Petr Savitskii quoted the British geopolitician Halford Mackinder) and remained for a long time in that framework, developing the theme of the dualism of Land and Sea and applying it to the actual situation That is how the Eurasian school of geopolitics arose, which became not simply the dominant, but the only school in contemporary Russia. As a professor at Moscow State University, for six years I was head of the department of the Sociology of International Relations, which forced me to become professionally familiar with the classical theories of IR, the main authors, approaches, and schools. Because I have long been interested in postmodernism in philosophy (I wrote the book Post-philosophy on the subject), I paid special attention to post-positivism in IR. That is how I came to IR critical theory, neo-Gramscianism, and the sociology of IR (John Hobson, Steve Hobden, etc.). I came to the Theory of a Multipolar World, which I eventually developed myself, precisely through superimposing geopolitical dualism, Carl Schmitt's theory of the Grossraum, and John Hobson's critique of Western racism and the euro-centrism of IR.
In your opinion, what would a student need in order to become a specialist in IR?
In our interdisciplinary time, I think that what is most important is familiarity with philosophy and sociology, led by a paradigmatic method: the analysis of the types of societies, cultures, and structures of thought along the line Pre-Modernity – Modernity – Post-Modernity. If one learns to trace semantic shifts in these three epistemological and ontological domains, it will help one to become familiar with any popular theories of IR today. Barry Buzan's (Theory Talk #35) theory of international systems is an example of such a generalizing and very useful schematization. Today an IR specialist must certainly be familiar with deconstruction and use it at least in its elementary form. Otherwise, there is a great danger of overlooking what is most important.
Another very important competence is history and political science. Political science provides generalizing, simplifying material, and history puts schemas in their context. I would only put competence in the domain of economics and political economy in third place, although today no problem in IR can be considered without reference to the economic significance of processes and interactions. Finally, I would earnestly recommend to students of IR to become familiar, as a priority, with geopolitics and its methods. These methods are much simpler than theories of IR, but their significance is much deeper. At first, geopolitical simplifications produce an instantaneous effect: complex and entangled processes of world politics are rendered transparent and comprehensible in the blink of an eye. But to sort out how this effect is achieved, a long and serious study of geopolitics is required, exceeding by far the superficiality that limits critical geopolitics (Ó Tuathail et. al.): they stand at the beginning of the decipherment of geopolitics and its full-fledged deconstruction, but they regard themselves as its champions. They do so prematurely.
What does it entail to think of global power relations through a spatial lens ('Myslit prostranstvom')?
This is the most important thing. The entire philosophical theme of Modernity is built on the dominance of time. Kant already puts time on the side of the subject (and space on the side of the body, continuing the ideas of Descartes and even Plato), while Husserl and Heidegger identify the subject with time altogether. Modernity thinks with time, with becoming. But since the past and future are rejected as ontological entities, thought of time is transformed into thought of the instant, of that which is here and now. This is the basis for the ephemeral understanding of being. To think spatially means to locate Being outside the present, to arrange it in space, to give space an ontological status. Whatever was impressed in space is preserved in it. Whatever will ripen in space is already contained in it. This is the basis for the political geography of Friedrich Ratzel and subsequent geopoliticians. Wagner's Parsifal ends with the words of Gurnemanz: 'now time has become space'. This is a proclamation of the triumph of geopolitics. To think spatially means to think in an entirely different way [topika]. I think that postmodernity has already partly arrived at this perspective, but has stopped at the threshold, whereas to cross the line it is necessary to break radically with the entire axiomatic of Modernity, to really step over Modernity, and not to imitate this passage while remaining in Modernity and its tempolatry. Russian people are spaces [Russkie lyudi prostranstva], which is why we have so much of it. The secret of Russian identity is concealed in space. To think spatially means to think 'Russian-ly', in Russian.
Geopolitics is argued to be very popular in Russia nowadays. Is geopolitics a new thing, from the post-Cold War period, or not? And if not, how does current geopolitical thinking differ from earlier Soviet (or even pre-soviet) geopolitics?
It is an entirely new form of political thought. I introduced geopolitics to Russia at the end of the 80s, and since then it has become extremely popular. I tried to find some traces of geopolitics in Russian history, but besides Vandam, Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky, and a few short articles by Savitskii, there was nothing. In the USSR, any allusion to geopolitics was punished in the harshest way (see the 'affair of the geopoliticians' of the economic geographer Vladimir Eduardovich Den and his group). At the start of the 90s, my efforts and the efforts of my followers and associates in geopolitics (=Eurasianism) filled the worldview vacuum that formed after the end of Soviet ideology. At first, this was adopted without reserve by the military (The Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia), especially under Igor Rodionov. Then, geopolitics began to penetrate into all social strata. Today, this discipline is taught in the majority of Russian universities. So, there was no Soviet or pre-Soviet geopolitics. There is only the contemporary Eurasian school, which took shape at the end of the 80s. Foundations of Geopolitics was the first programmatic text of this school, although I had published most of texts in that book earlier, and some of them were circulated as texts in government circles. Recently, in 2012, I released two new textbooks: Geopolitics and The Geopolitics of Russia, which together with The War of Continents are the results of work in this field, along four axes.
In your book International Relations, not yet published in English, you set out your Theory of a Multipolar World as a distinct IR theory. What are the basic components of the Theory of a Multipolar World—and how is it different from classical realism?
In order to be understood and not get into the details, I can say that the Theory of a Multipolar World seriously and axiomatically adopts Samuel Huntington's thesis about the plurality of civilizations. Russia has its own author, who claimed the same thing more than a hundred years ago: Nikolay Danilevsky, and then the Eurasianists. However, everything starts from precisely this point: civilization is not one, but many. Western civilization's pretension to universalism is a form of the will to domination and an authoritarian discourse. It can be taken into account but not believed. It is nothing other than a strategy of suppression and hegemony. The following point follows: we must move from thinking in terms of one civilization (the racism of euro-centric versions of IR) to a pluralism of subjects. However, unlike realists, who take as the subject of their theory nation-states, which are themselves products of the European, bourgeois, modern understanding of the Political, the Theory of a Multipolar World proposes to take civilizations as subjects. Not states, but civilizations. I call them 'large politeiai', or civilizations, corresponding to Carl Schmitt's 'large spaces'. As soon as we take these civilizations—'large politeiai'—as subjects, we can then apply to them the full system of premises of realism: anarchy in the international system, sovereignty, the rationality of egoistic behavior, etc. But within these 'politeiai', by contrast, a principle more resembling liberalism, with its pacifism and integration, operates, only with the difference that here we are not talking about a 'planetary' or 'global' world, but about an intra-civilizational one; not about global integration, but about regional integration, strictly within the context of civilizational borders. Post-positivism, in turn, helps here for the deconstruction of the authoritarian discourse of the West, which masks its private interests by 'universal values', and also for the reconstruction of civilizational identity, including with the help of technological means: civilizational elites, civilizational media, civilizational economic algorithms and corporations, etc. That is the general picture.
Your theory of multipolarity is directed against the intellectual, political, and social hegemony of the West. At the same time, while drawing on the tools of neo-Marxist analysis and critical theory, it does not oppose Western hegemony 'from the left', as those approaches do, but on the basis of traditionalism (Rene Guenon, Julius Evola), cultural anthropology, and Heideggerian phenomenology, or 'from the right'. Do you think that such an approach can appeal to Anglo-American IR practitioners, or is it designed to appeal mainly to non-Western theorists and practitioners? In short, what can IR theorists in the West learn from the theory of multipolarity?
According to Hobson's entirely correct analysis, the West is based on a fundamental sort of racism. There is no difference between Lewis Morgan's evolutionistic racism (with his model of savagery, barbarism, civilization) and Hitler's biological racism. Today the same racism is asserted without a link to race, but on the basis of the technological modes and degrees of modernization and progress of societies (as always, the criterion "like in the West" is the general measure). Western man is a complete racist down to his bones, generalizing his ethnocentrism to megalomaniacal proportions. Something tells me that he is impossible to change. Even radical critiques of Western hegemony are themselves deeply infected by the racist virus of universalism, as Edward Said showed with the example of 'orientalism', proving that the anticolonial struggle is a form of that very colonialism and euro-centrism. So the Theory of a Multipolar World will hardly find adherents in the Western world, unless perhaps among those scholars who are seriously able to carry out a deconstruction of Western identity, and such deconstruction assumes the rejection of both Right (nationalistic) and Left (universalistic and progressivist) clichés. The racism of the West always acquires diverse forms. Today its main form is liberalism, and anti-liberal theories (most on the Left) are plagued by the same universalism, while Right anti-liberalisms have been discredited. That is why I appeal not to the first political theory (liberalism), nor the second (communism, socialism), nor to the third (fascism, Nazism), but to something I call the Fourth Political Theory (or 4PT), based on a radical deconstruction of the subject of Modernity and the application of Martin Heidegger's existential analytic method.
Traditionalists are brought in for the profound critique of Western Modernity, for establishing the plurality of civilizations, and for rehabilitating non-Western (pre-modern) cultures. In Russia and Asian countries, the Theory of a Multipolar World is grasped easily and naturally; in the West, it encounters a fully understandable and fully expected hostility, an unwillingness to study it carefully, and coarse slander. But there are always exceptions.
What is the Fourth Political Theory (4PT) and how is it related to the Theory of a Multipolar World and to your criticism of the prevailing theoretical approaches in the field of IR?
I spoke a little about this in the response to the previous question. The Fourth Political Theory is important for getting away from the strict dominance of modernity in the sphere of the Political, for the relativization of the West and its re-regionalization. The West measures the entire history of Modernity in terms of the struggle of three political ideologies for supremacy (liberalism, socialism, and nationalism). But since the West does not even for a moment call into question the fact that it thinks for all humanity, it evaluates other cultures and civilizations in the same way, without considering that in the best case the parallels to these three ideologies are pure simulacra, while most often there simply are no parallels. If liberalism won the competition of the three ideologies in the West at the end of the 20th century, that does not yet mean that this ideology is really universal on a world scale. It isn't at all. This episode of the Western political history of modernity may be the fate of the West, but not the fate of the world. So other principles of the political are needed, beyond liberalism, which claims global domination (=the third totalitarianism), and its failed alternatives (communism and fascism), which are historically just as Western and modern as liberalism. This explains the necessity of introducing a Fourth Political Theory as a political frame for the correct basis of a Theory of a Multipolar World. The Fourth Political Theory is the direct and necessary correlate of the Theory of a Multipolar World in the domain of political theory.
Is IR an American social science? Is Russian IR as an academic field a reproduction of IR as an American academic field? If not, how is IR in Russia specifically Russian?
IR is a Western scientific discipline, and as such it has a prescriptive, normative vector. It not only studies the West's dominance, it also produces, secures, defends, and propagandizes it. IR is undoubtedly an imperious authoritarian discourse of Western civilization, in relation to itself and all other areas of the planet. Today the US is the core of the West, so naturally in the 20th century IR became more and more American as the US moved toward that status (it began as an English science). It is the same with geopolitics, which migrated from London to Washington and New York together with the function of a global naval Empire. As with all other sciences, IR is a form of imperious violence, embodying the will to power in the will to knowledge (as Michel Foucault explained). IR in Russia remains purely Western, with one detail: in the USSR, IR as such was not studied. Marxism in IR did not correspond to Soviet reality, where after Stalin a practical form of realism (not grounded theoretically and never acknowledged) played a big role—only external observers, like the classical realist E.H. Carr, understood the realist essence of Stalinism in IR. So IR was altogether blocked. The first textbooks started to appear only in the 90s and in the fashion of the day they were all liberal. That is how it has remained until now. The peculiarity of IR in Russia today lies in the fact that there is no longer anything Russian there; liberalism dominates entirely, a correct account of realism is lacking, and post-positivism is almost entirely disregarded. The result is a truncated, aggressively liberal and extremely antiquated version of IR as a discipline. I try to fight that. I recently released an IR textbook with balanced (I hope) proportions, but it is too early to judge the result.
Stephen Walt argued in a September article in Foreign Policy that Russia 'is nowhere near as threatening as the old Soviet Union', in part because Russia 'no longer boasts an ideology that can rally supporters worldwide'. Do you agree with Walt's assessment?
There is something to that. Today, Russia thinks of itself as a nation-state. Putin is a realist; nothing more. Walt is right about that. But the Theory of a Multipolar World and the Fourth Political Theory, as well as Eurasianism, are outlines of a much broader and large-scale ideology, directed against Western hegemony and challenging liberalism, globalization, and American strategic dominance. Of course, Russia as a nation-state is no competition for the West. But as the bridgehead of the Theory of a Multipolar World and the Fourth Political Theory, it changes its significance. Russian policies in the post-Soviet space and Russia's courage in forming non-Western alliances are indicators. For now, Putin is testing this conceptual potential very gingerly. But the toughening of relations with the West and most likely the internal crises of globalization will at some point force a more careful and serious turn toward the creation of global alternative alliances. Nevertheless, we already observe such unions: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, the Eurasian Union—and they require a new ideology. Not one like Marxism, any universalism is excluded, but also not simple realist maneuvers of regional hegemons. Liberalism is a global challenge. The response to it should also be global. Does Putin understand this? Honestly, I don't know. Sometimes it seems he does, and sometimes it seems he doesn't.
Vladimir Putin recently characterized the contemporary world order as follows: 'We have entered a period of differing interpretations and deliberate silences in world politics. International law has been forced to retreat over and over by the onslaught of legal nihilism. Objectivity and justice have been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. Arbitrary interpretations and biased assessments have replaced legal norms. At the same time, total control of the global mass media has made it possible when desired to portray white as black and black as white'. Do you agree with this assessment? If so, what is required as a response to this international situation?
These are true, but rather naïve words. Putin is just indignant that the West establishes rules in its own interests, changes them when necessary, and interprets allegedly 'universal norms' in its own favor. But the issue is that this is the structure of the will to power and the very organization of logo-phallo-phono-centric discourse. Objectivity and justice are not possible so long as speech is a monologue. The West does not know and does not recognize the other. But this means that everything will continue until this other wins back the right to recognition. And that is a long road. The point of the Theory of a Multipolar World is that there are no rules established by some one player. Rules must be established by centers of real power. The state today is too small for that; hence the conclusion that civilizations should be these centers. Let there be an Atlantic objectivity and Western justice. A Eurasian objectivity and Russian justice will counter them. And the Chinese world or Pax Sinica [world/peace: same word in Russian] will look different than the Islamic one. Black and white are not objective evaluations. They depend on the structure of the world order: what is black and what is white is determined by one who has enough power to determine it.
How does your approach help us understand Russia's actions on the world stage better than other IR approaches do? What are IR analyses of Russia missing that do not operate with the conceptual apparatus of multipolarity?
Interesting question. Russia's behavior internationally is determined today by the following factors:
First, historical inertia, accumulating the power of precedents (the Theory of a Multipolar World thinks that the past exists as a structure; consequently, this factor is taken into account from many sides and in detail, while the 'tempocentrism' (Steve Hobden, John Hobson) of classical IR theories drops this from sight. We have to pay attention to this especially taking into consideration the fact that Russia is in many ways still a traditional society and belongs to the 'imperial system' of IR.) There are, besides, Soviet inertia and stable motives ('Stalinism in IR');
Second, the projective logic of opposition to the West, stemming from the most practical, pragmatic, and realist motivations (in the spirit of Caesarism, analyzed by neo-Gramscians) will necessarily lead Russia (even despite the will of its leaders) to a systemic confrontation with American hegemony and globalization, and then the Theory of a Multipolar World will really be needed (classical IR models, paying no attention to the Theory of a Multipolar World, drop from sight the possible future; i.e., they rob themselves of predictive potential because of purely ideological prejudices and self-imposed fears).
But if an opponent underestimates you, you have more chances to land an unexpected blow. So I am not too disturbed by the underestimation of the Theory of a Multipolar World among IR theorists.
In the western world, the divide between academia and policy is often either lamented ('ivory tower') or, in light of the ideal of academic independence, deemed absent. This concerns a broader debate regarding the relations between power, knowledge and geopolitics. How are academic-policy relations in Russia with regards to IR and is this the ideal picture according to you?
I think that in our case both positions have been taken to their extreme. On one hand, today's authorities in Russia do not pay the slightest attention to scholars, dispatching them to an airless and sterile space. On the other hand, Soviet habits became the basis for servility and conformism, preserved in a situation when the authorities for the first time demand nothing from intellectuals, except for one thing: that they not meddle in socio-political processes. So the situation with science is both comical and sorrowful. Conformist scholars follow the authorities, but the authorities don't need this, since they do not so much go anywhere in particular as react to facts that carry themselves out.
If your IR theory isn't based on politically and philosophically liberal principles, and if it criticizes those principles not from the left but from the right, using the language of large spaces or Grossraum, is it a fascist theory of international relations? Are scholars who characterize your thought as 'neo-fascism', like Andreas Umland and Anton Shekhovstov, partially correct? If not, why is that characterization misleading?
Accusations of fascism are simply a figure of speech in the coarse political propaganda peculiar to contemporary liberalism as the third totalitarianism. Karl Popper laid the basis for this in his book The Open Society and its Enemies, where he reduced the critique of liberalism from the right to fascism, Hitler, and Auschwitz, and the criticism of liberalism from the left to Stalin and the GULAG. The reality is somewhat more complex, but George Soros, who finances Umland and Shekhovstov and is an ardent follower of Popper, is content with reduced versions of politics. If I were a fascist, I would say so. But I am a representative of Eurasianism and the author of the Fourth Political Theory. At the same time, I am a consistent and radical anti-racist and opponent of the nation-state project (i.e. an anti-nationalist). Eurasianism has no relation to fascism. And the Fourth Political Theory emphasizes that while it is anti-liberal, it is simultaneously anti-communist and anti-fascist. I think it isn't possible to be clearer, but the propaganda army of the 'third totalitarianism' disagrees and no arguments will convince it. 1984 should be sought today not where many think: not in the USSR, not in the Third Reich, but in the Soros Fund and the 'Brave New World'. Incidentally, Huxley proved to be more correct than Orwell. I cannot forbid others from calling me a fascist, although I am not one, though ultimately this reflects badly not so much on me as on the accusers themselves: fighting an imaginary threat, the accuser misses a real one. The more stupid, mendacious, and straightforward a liberal is, the simpler it is to fight with him.
Does technological change in warfare and in civil government challenge the geopolitical premises of classical divisions between spaces (Mackinder's view or Spykman's) heartland-rimland-offshore continents)? And, more broadly perhaps, does history have a linear or a cyclical pattern, according to you?
Technological development does not at all abolish the principles of classical geopolitics, simply because Land and Sea are not substances, but concepts. Land is a centripetal model of order, with a clearly expressed and constant axis. Sea is a field, without a hard center, of processuality, atomism, and the possibility of numerous bifurcations. In a certain sense, air (and hence also aviation) is aeronautics. And even the word astronaut contains in itself the root 'nautos', from the Greek word for ship. Water, air, outer space—these are all versions of increasingly diffused Sea. Land in this situation remains unchanged. Sea strategy is diversified; land strategy remains on the whole constant. It is possible that this is the reason for the victory of Land over Sea in the last decade; after all, capitalism and technical progress are typical attributes of Sea. But taking into consideration the fundamental character of the balance between Leviathan and Behemoth, the proportions can switch at any moment; the soaring Titan can be thrown down into the abyss, like Atlantis, while the reason for the victory of thalassocracy becomes the source of its downfall. Land remains unchanged as the geographic axis of history. There is Land and Sea even on the internet and in the virtual world: they are axes and algorithms of thematization, association and separation, groupings of resources and protocols. The Chinese internet is terrestrial; the Western one, nautical.
You have translated a great number of foreign philosophical and geopolitical works into Russian. How important is knowledge transaction for the formation of your ideas?
I recently completed the first release of my book Noomachy, which is entirely devoted precisely to the Logoi of various civilizations, and hence to the circulation of ideas. I am convinced that each civilization has its own particular Logos. To grasp it and to find parallels, analogies, and dissonances in one's own Logos is utterly fascinating and interesting. That is why I am sincerely interested in the most varied cultures, from North American to Australian, Arabic to Latin American, Polynesian to Scandinavian. All the Logoi are different and it is not possible to establish a hierarchy among them. So it remains for us only to become familiar with them. Henry Corbin, the French philosopher and Protestant who studied Iranian Shiism his entire life, said of himself 'We are Shiites'. He wasn't a Shiite in the religious sense, but without feeling himself a Shiite, he would not be able to penetrate into the depths of the Iranian Logos. That is how I felt, working on Noomachy or translating philosophical texts or poetry from other languages: in particular, while learning Pierce and James, Emerson and Thoreau, Poe and Pound I experienced myself as 'we are Americans'. And in the volume devoted to China and Japan, as 'we are Buddhists'. That is the greatest wealth of the Logos of various cultures: both those like ours and those entirely unlike ours. And these Logoi are at war; hence, Noomachy, the war of the intellect. It is not linear and not primitive. It is a great war. It creates that which we call the 'human', the entire depth and complexity of which we most often underestimate.
Final question. You call yourself the 'last philosopher of empire'. What is Eurasanism and how does it relate to the global pivot of power distributions?
Eurasianism is a developed worldview, to which I dedicated a few books and a countless number of articles and interviews. In principle, it lies at the basis of the Theory of a Multipolar World and the Fourth Political Theory, combined with geopolitics, and it resonates with Traditionalism. Eurasianism's main thought is plural anthropology, the rejection of universalism. The meaning of Empire for me is that there exists not one Empire, but at minimum two, and even more. In the same way, civilization is never singular; there is always some other civilization that determines its borders. Schmitt called this the Pluriverse and considered it the main characteristic of the Political. The Eurasian Empire is the political and strategic unification of Turan, a geographic axis of history in opposition to the civilization of the Sea or the Atlanticist Empire. Today, the USA is this Atlanticist Empire. Kenneth Waltz, in the context of neorealism in IR, conceptualized the balance of two poles. The analysis is very accurate, although he erred about the stability of a bipolar world and the duration of the USSR. But on the whole he is right: there is a global balance of Empires in the world, not nation-States, the majority of which cannot claim sovereignty, which remains nominal (Stephen Krasner's (Theory Talk #21) 'global hypocrisy'). For precisely that reason, I am a philosopher of Empire, as is almost every American intellectual, whether he knows it or not. The difference is only that he thinks of himself as a philosopher of the only Empire, while I think of myself as the philosopher of one of the Empires, the Eurasian one. I am more humble and more democratic. That is the whole difference.
Alexander Dugin is a Russian philosopher, the author of over thirty books on topics including the sociology of the imagination, structural sociology, ethnosociology, geopolitical theory, international relations theory, and political theory, including four books on the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. His most recent books, only available in Russian at the moment, are Ukraine: My War and the multi-volume Noomachia: Wars of the Intellect. Books translated into English include The Fourth Political Theory, Putin vs. Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed From the Right, and Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of Another Beginning.
Related links
Who is Alexander Dugin? Interview with Theory Talks editor Michael Millerman (YouTube) TheFourth Political Theory website (English): Evrazia.tv (Russian) Evrazia.tv (English) Geopolitics.ru (English version) InternationalEurasian Movement (English version) Centerfor Conservative Studies (Russian)
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It speaks volumes that the death of Henry Kissinger, announced on Wednesday, drew major news obituaries that rivaled those of late American presidents' in length and depth. The news was met with equal parts of vitriol and paeans across social media, the former reflected in words like "war criminal" and "monster," the latter, "genius" and "master."His intellectually-driven, hard-nosed statecraft and strategy has long been embraced by realists who appreciate Kissinger's rejection of ideological doctrine in favor of interest-driven realpolitik. They credit him with détente and managing the Soviet threat in the Cold War. His critics say his approach was responsible for government-led massacres in developing nations and Washington's scorched earth policies in Indochina. Humanity suffered while the "great game" was played, no matter how well, from the Nixon White House and in later presidencies (12 total) for which Kissinger advised.But was his impact on U.S. foreign policy ultimately positive or negative? We asked a wide range of historians, former diplomats, journalists and scholars to pick one and defend it.Andrew Bacevich, George Beebe, Tom Blanton, Michael Desch, Anton Fedyashin, Chas Freeman, John Allen Gay, David Hendrickson, Robert Hunter, Anatol Lieven, Stephen Miles, Tim Shorrock, Monica Duffy Toft, Stephen WaltAndrew Bacevich, historian and co-founder of the Quincy InstituteI met Kissinger just once, at a small gathering in New York back in the 1990s. When the event adjourned, he walked over to where I was sitting and spoke to me. "Did you serve in the military?" "Yes," I said. "In Vietnam?" "Yes." His tone filled with sadness, he said: "We really wanted to win that one."I did not reply but as he walked away, I thought: What an accomplished liar.George Beebe, Director of Grand Strategy, Quincy InstituteHenry Kissinger's impact on American foreign policy, although controversial, was on balance overwhelmingly positive. As he entered office in 1968, America was overextended abroad and beset by domestic political conflict. An increasingly powerful Soviet Union threatened to achieve superiority over America's nuclear and conventional arsenals. The United States needed to extract itself from Vietnam and focus on domestic healing, yet any retreat into isolationism would allow Moscow a free hand to intimidate Western Europe and spread communism through the post-colonial world. Kissinger's answer to this problem, conceived in partnership with President Nixon, was a masterwork of diplomatic realism. Seeing an opportunity to exploit tensions between Moscow and Beijing, he orchestrated a surprise opening to Maoist China that reshaped the international order, counterbalancing Soviet power and complicating the Kremlin's strategic challenge. In parallel, the United States pursued détente with Moscow, producing a landmark set of trade, arms control, human rights, and confidence-building arrangements that helped to constrain the arms race and make the Cold War more manageable and predictable.By comparison to 1968, the scale of the problems we face today seems more daunting. The Cold War architecture of arms control and security arrangements is in tatters. Our middle class is more distrustful and disaffected, our international reputation more damaged, and our ability to manage the challenges of a peer Chinese rival more limited. A statesman with Kissinger's strategic acumen and diplomatic skill is very much needed. Tom Blanton, Director, National Security Archive, George Washington UniversityThe declassified legacy of Henry Kissinger undermines the triumphant narrative he labored so hard to build, even for his successes. The opening to China, for example, turns out to be Mao's idea with Nixon's receptiveness, initially dissed by Kissinger. His shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East did reduce violence but it took Anwar Sadat and then Jimmy Carter to make the peace that Kissinger failed to accomplish. The 1973 Vietnam settlement was actually available in 1969, but Kissinger mistakenly believed he could do better by going through Moscow or Beijing. Meanwhile, Kissinger's callousness about the human cost runs through all the documents. Millions of Bangladeshis murdered by Pakistan's genocide while Kissinger stifled dissent in the State Department. A million Vietnamese and 20,000 Americans who died for Kissinger's "decent interval." Some 30,000 Argentines disappeared by the junta with Kissinger's green light. Thousands of Chileans killed by Pinochet while Kissinger joked about human rights. Untold numbers of Cambodians dead under Kissinger's secret bombing.Adding insult to all these injuries, Kissinger cashed in over the past 45 years through sustained influence peddling and self-promotion, paying no price for repeated bad judgments like opposing the Reagan-Gorbachev arms cuts, and supporting the 2003 Iraq invasion. A dark legacy indeed.Michael Desch, Professor of International Relations at the University of Notre Dame Almost all of the obituaries for Henry Kissinger characterize him as the quintessential realist, harkening back to a bygone era of European great power politics in which statesmen played the 19th century version of the board game Risk otherwise known as the balance of power. Kissinger seemed straight out of central casting for this role with his deep, sonorous voice and perpetual Mittel-Europa accent. All that was missing was a monocle and a Pickelhaube. But in reality, Kissinger was at best an occasional realist. His best scholarly book — "A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22" — came out in 1957 and was more of a work of history than an articulation of a larger realpolitik theory of global politics in which power is used, and more importantly not used, to advance a country's national interest.And while his (and Richard Nixon's) opening to the People's Republic of China in 1972 remains a masterstroke of balance of power politics in action, at the drop of an egg-roll dividing the heretofore seemingly monolithic Communist Bloc, he was more often an inconstant realist.At times Kissinger embraced a crude might-makes-right approach (think of the Athenians bullying of the Melians in Book V of Thucydides) epitomized by the escalation to deescalate the war in Vietnam by invading Cambodia and the meddling in the fractious politics of Third World countries like Chile, seemingly to no other end than that's what great powers do. More recently, he's worked to remain the indispensable statesman through an embarrassingly obsequious pattern of making himself indispensable to nearly every subsequent president, whether or not they were really interested in sitting at the knee of the master realpolitiker. His hedged endorsement of George W. Bush's disastrous Iraq war is exhibit A on this score.Kissinger kept himself in the limelight for much of his career but not as a consistent voice of realism in foreign policy.Anton Fedyashin, associate professor of history, American UniversityIn his long and distinguished career, Henry Kissinger made many decisions that history may judge harshly, but oversimplifying and exaggerating complex geopolitical issues was not one of them. With their instinctive aversion to the trap of conceptual binarism, Kissinger and Nixon applied their flexible realism to China and the USSR in 1972. Abandoning the assumption that all communists were evil forced Beijing and Moscow to outbid each other for U.S. favors. Treating the USSR as a post-revolutionary state that put national interests above ideology, Nixon and Kissinger decided to bring the Soviets into the American-managed world order while letting them keep their hegemony in Eastern Europe.In Kissinger's realist version of containment, statesmanship was judged by the management of ambiguities, not absolutes. As Kissinger put it in an interview with The Economist earlier this year, "The genius of the Westphalian system and the reason it spread across the world was that its provisions were procedural, not substantive." Kissinger's realist wisdom would serve American leaders well as they navigate the rough waters of transitioning to a multipolar world order. The era of great power balancing is back, and non-binarist realism can help Washington manage hegemonic decline rather than catalyzing it.Ambassador Chas Freeman, visiting scholar at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public AffairsKissinger embodied a global and strategic view and because it was global, it often offended specialists in regional affairs. Because it was strategic, he often made tactical sacrifices for strategic gain. And the tactical sacrifices that he made were often rather ugly at the regional or local level. The classic example of that is the refusal to intervene in the war in Bangladesh. Obviously, he had nothing but contempt for ideological foreign policy. This has led ideologues, of which we have an abundance, to see him as an enemy, and you're seeing this now with some of the coverage after his passing.Kissinger's achievement of detente at a crucial point in the Cold War will be remembered for its brilliance, as will his significant scholarship. His statecraft and scholarship were inseparable. He was a very good negotiator and probably had more experience negotiating great power relations than any secretary of state since early in the Republic. He was moderately successful in the short term. He was not successful in the long term because his interlocutors correctly perceived that he was manipulative. If one wishes to keep relationships open to future transactions, one must not cheat on current transactions. But this problem is not uncommon. It's very typical in American politics. For example, Jim Baker was famously uninterested in nurturing relationships. He was interested in immediate results in his dealings with foreign governments. He left a lot of anger and dissatisfaction in his wake. Kissinger less so, but the same for different reasons, reflecting his personality, his character, and the character of the president he served.John Allen Gay, Executive Director, John Quincy Adams SocietyKissinger's legacy in the Third World commands the most attention and criticism. He has been made the face of the tremendous toll the Cold War took on the wretched of the earth. Yet his work on great power relations deserves more regard. The opening to China he engineered with President Richard Nixon was a masterstroke to exploit division in the Communist world. Granted, the Sino-Soviet split had happened long before, and the opening was more a Nixon idea, but Kissinger set the table. And Kissinger was also a central figure in détente with the Soviet Union.Both policies were deeply unpopular with the forerunners to the neoconservative movement, but reflected the Continental realist mindset that Kissinger, along with thinkers like Hans J. Morgenthau, brought into the American foreign policy discourse. The opening to China and détente were, in fact, linked. As Kissinger pointed out, the opening to China challenged the Soviet Union to prevent the opening from growing; contrary to the advice of Sovietologists, this did not prompt new Soviet aggression, but made the Soviets more pliable. As Kissinger wrote in his 1994 book "Diplomacy" — "To the extent both China and the Soviet Union calculated that they either needed American goodwill or feared an American move toward its adversary, both had an incentive to improve their relations with Washington. […] America's bargaining position would be strongest when America was closer to bot communist giants than either was to the other." And so it was. Today's practitioners of great-power politics would do well to borrow more from this happier part of Kissinger's legacy. They have instead helped drive China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea together, and have no answer to this emerging alignment beyond lectures and sanctions. The19th century European statesmen Kissinger admired would have seen the failure of such a policy. David Hendrickson, author, "Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition"The great oddity of Nixon and Kissinger's record in foreign policy is that they gave up as unprofitable and dangerous the pursuit of ideological antagonism with the Great Powers (the Soviet Union and China), but then pursued the Cold War crusade with a vengeance against small powers. Kissinger's diplomatic career reminds me of the charge that Hauterive (a favorite of Napoleon's) brought against the confusions of the ancien regime, that it applied "the terms sound policy, system of equilibrium, maintenance or restoration of the balance of power . . . to what, in fact was only an abuse of power, or the exercise of arbitrary will."Parts of Kissinger's record, like the bombing of Cambodia, are indefensible, but there are good parts too: had Henry the K been in charge of our Russia policy over the last decade, we could have avoided the conflagration in Ukraine. He was sounder on China and Taiwan than 90 percent of the howling commentariat. He was, in addition, a serious scholar who wrote some good books about the construction of world order (A World Restored, Diplomacy). Young people should take his thought seriously, not consign him to the ninth circle.Robert Hunter, former U.S. Ambassador to NATOLike all outstanding teachers, Henry Kissinger was also a showman — and he could be fun. He used his accent and self-deprecating humor as weapons for his policies and getting them taken seriously. Journalists might at times scorn what he was doing and how he did it, but they were still charmed and tended so often to give him the benefit of the doubt — as well as the credit, even when not deserved. Everyone recalls his roles in promoting détente with the Soviet Union and, even more, the opening to China, with Richard Nixon following in his wake. In fact, both policies sprang from Nixon's mind. But when the dust settled, Kissinger was the Last Man Standing."Henry," we could call him who never worked for him (!), made intelligent and literate speeches on foreign policy that everyone could understand, bringing it into the limelight. A man of great ego, he still recruited and inspired talented acolytes at the State Department and White House — matched only by Brent Scowcroft and Zbig Brzezinski. He had other policy positives in the Middle East ("shuttle diplomacy") but major negatives in Chile, in prolonging the Vietnam War, and bombing Cambodia.Take him altogether, a true Man of History.Anatol Lieven, Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy InstituteThe problem about any just assessment of Henry Kissinger is that the good and bad parts of his record are organically linked. His Realism led him to an awareness of the vital interests of other countries, a willingness to compromise, and a prudence in the exercise of U.S. power that all too many American policymakers have altogether lacked and that the United States today desperately needs. This Realist acceptance of the world as it is however also contributed to a cynical disregard for basic moral norms — notably in Cambodia and Bangladesh — that have forever tarnished his and America's name.When in office, reconciliation with China and the pursuit of Middle East peace took real moral courage on Kissinger's part, given the forces arrayed against these policies in the United States. But in his last decades, though he initially criticized NATO expansion and called for the preservation of relations with Russia and China, he never did so with the intellectual and moral force of a George Kennan.Perhaps in the end the best comment on Kissinger comes from an epithet by his fellow German Jewish thinker on international affairs Hans Morgenthau: "It is a dangerous thing to be a Machiavelli. It is a disastrous thing to be a Machiavelli without Virtu" — an Italian term embracing courage, moral steadfastness and basic principle.Stephen Miles, President, Win Without WarNearly as many words have been spilled marking the end of Henry Kissinger's life as the lives he's responsible for ending, but let me add a few more. It would be easy to simply say that the devastating impact of Kissinger on U.S. foreign policy was clearly and wholly negative. As Spencer Ackerman noted in his essential obituary, few Americans, if any, have ever been as responsible for the death of so many of their fellow human beings. But Kissinger's true impact was not just in being a war criminal but in setting a new standard for doing so with impunity. Earlier this year, he was feted with a party for his 100th birthday attended not just by crusty old Cold Warriors remembering 'the good ole days,' but also by a veritable who's who of today's elite from billionaire CEOs and cabinet members to fashion megastars and NFL team owners. Sure, he may have been responsible for a coup here or a genocide there, but shouldn't we all just look past that and recognize his influence, power, and intellect? Does it really matter what he used those talents for?And in the end, that's the benefit of Kissinger's horrific life and decidedly not-untimely death. By never making amends for the harm he did and never being held accountable for the horrors he caused, he made clear just how truly broken and flawed U.S. foreign policy is. Perhaps now that he has finally left the stage, we can begin to change that. Tim Shorrock, Washington-based journalistKissinger nearly destroyed three Asian countries by causing the deaths of thousands in U.S. bombing raids, covertly intervened to subvert democracy in Chile, and encouraged an Indonesian dictator to invade newly independent East Timor and inflict a genocide upon its people. These were criminal acts that should have made him a pariah. Instead, he is lauded as a visionary by our ruling elite. And it was mostly accomplished through lies and deceit, in the name of corporate profit.I'll never forget in 1972 watching Kissinger declare "peace is at hand" in Vietnam. After years of protesting this immoral war, I truly thought that Vietnam's suffering, and my own countrymen's, was finally over; they had won and we had lost. But my hope was shattered that Christmas, when Kissinger and Nixon ordered B-52s to carpet-bomb Hanoi in an arrogant act of defiance and malice. Afterwards, a shaky peace agreement was signed that could have sparked an honorable U.S. withdrawal. But it took 3 more years of bloodshed before the United States was forced out.Kissinger broke my trust in America as a just nation and overseas sparked a deep hatred of U.S. foreign policy. Few statesmen have caused such harm.Monica Duffy Toft, Professor of International Politics and Director, Center for Strategic Studies, Fletcher School, Tufts UniversityI have a pair of midcentury teak chairs once belonging to the late eminent scholar Samuel P. Huntington in my office. Sam was a colleague and friend of Henry Kissinger's, and a mentor to me. Sam and I sat in these chairs discussing world politics and the everyday challenges of running a scholarly institute. When a new set of chairs arrived, Sam insisted I take the old ones, but not before emphasizing their significance — reminders of the hours he and Kissinger spent in deep debate and casual banter. These chairs have history.Henry Kissinger was, and shall remain, a controversial figure. His gifts were two. First, across decades of U.S. foreign policy challenges, he remained consistent in his conception of power, and how U.S. power should be used to enhance the security of the United States. Second, he was gifted at assembling, mentoring, and deploying cross-cutting networks of influential people. Like many of my colleagues who study international politics, there are policies — his support of Salvador Allende's ouster in Chile, for example — I find odious. I am also uncomfortable with Kissinger's elitism: his preferred policies favored those with wealth and political power at the expense of those without.But what I admire about Kissinger's U.S. foreign policy legacy and, by extension, international politics, was his profound grasp of the importance of historical context: a thing as important to sound U.S foreign policy today as it is rare; and of which I am pleasantly reminded every time I sit in one of Sam's chairs.Stephen Walt, Quincy Institute board member, professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy SchoolHenry Kissinger was the most prominent U.S. statesman of his era, and that era lasted a very long time. His main achievements were not trivial: a long-overdue opening to China, some high-wire "shuttle diplomacy" after the 1973 October War, and several useful arms control treaties during the period of détente. But he was also guilty of some monumental misjudgments, including prolonging the Vietnam War to no good purpose and expanding it into Cambodia at a frightful human cost. His diplomatic acrobatics in the Middle East were impressive, but they were only necessary because he had missed the signs that Egypt was readying for war in 1973 in order to break a diplomatic deadlock that he had helped orchestrate. His indifference to human rights and civilian suffering sacrificed thousands of lives and made a mockery of U.S. pretensions to moral superiority.Kissinger owed his enduring influence not to a superior track record as a pundit or sage but to his own energy, unquenchable ambition, unparalleled networking skills, and the elite's reluctance to hold its members accountable. After all, this is a man who downplayed the risks of China's rise (while earning fat consulting fees there), backed the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, opposed the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, and dismissed warnings that open-ended NATO enlargement would make Europe less rather than more secure. Kissinger also perfected the art of transmuting government service into a lucrative consulting career, setting a troubling precedent for others. Debates about his legacy will no doubt continue, but one suspects that the reverence that his acolytes exhibit today will gradually fade now that he is no longer here to sustain it.Dear RS readers: It has been an extraordinary year and our editing team has been working overtime to make sure that we are covering the current conflicts with quality, fresh analysis that doesn't cleave to the mainstream orthodoxy or take official Washington and the commentariat at face value. Our staff reporters, experts, and outside writers offer top-notch, independent work, daily. Please consider making a tax-exempt, year-end contribution to Responsible Statecraft so that we can continue this quality coverage — which you will find nowhere else — into 2024. Happy Holidays!