Over at Outside the Beltway this morning I’ve published a pair of posts on international relations. The first is a response to Robert Kagan’s column urging the international community to respond to the attacks in Mumbai. Here’s a snippet from that post:
On the one hand my immediate reaction to Mr. Kagan’s column was to wonder what color the sky was in the world of which he writes. “The international community†speaks through international institutions. NATO is, essentially, a North American-European alliance, as one might guess from the name of the organization. It doesn’t speak for the world.
The only international institution that comes to mind as having the sort of internationalness that would be required for such an action is the United Nations and there is no chance whatever that the United Nations would muster a force to step over the Pakistani government to subdue areas of Pakistan that the government of Pakistan hasn’t had the ability or willingness to bring under its own control. Russia and China, each a permanent member of the Security Council with the veto that brings, simply won’t allow it to happen.
The second post is about the need for a grand strategy in the War on Terror. My suspicions are that the Obama Administration will be realist in the sense that it won’t come up with one and that a realistic foreign policy will continue to spread joy and merriment wherever it goes.
You quoted an interesting Zakaria essay, there. It’s a good read, although I think Zakaria is far too optimistic about China; we’re talking about a country with massive corruption, environmental degradation, and an economy where dropping below 8% annual growth (a growth rate the US would KILL to have during a good boom) causes extra degrees of rioting, unrest, and urban unemployment.
We’ve been sort of drifting towards a Middle East-centered Grand Strategy since the end of the Cold War. This worries me; I’d much rather the US started to unplug itself from the Middle East when possible, and focus on strengthening our ties in East Asia and Latin America.