None of the Above (![[info]](http://klab.lv/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} artis) rakstīja,@ 2019-11-03 20:16:00 |
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The Return of Marco Polo's World and the U.S. Military Response. ROBERT D. KAPLAN
This lengthy essay argues that as Europe disappears, Eurasia coheres. In other words, “The supercontinent is becoming one fluid, comprehensible unit of trade and conflict, as the Westphalian system of states weakens and older, imperial legacies – Russian, Chinese, Iranian, [and] Turkish – become paramount. Every crisis from Central Europe to the ethnic-Han Chinese heartland is now interlinked. There is [only] one singular battlespace.” The question for Continental America, given its status as an 'island' far away from the Eurasian supercontinent, is whether it will be able to “keep its powder dry” or not.
One of the main themes that runs though the book is that the days of monolithic nation states are over, and the future will be more fragmented, more chaotic, and more dangerous than the present. The United States can no longer be the world’s policeman, and both Russia and China will have to deal with serious internal instabilities.
- those Muslim prison-states have all but collapsed (either on their own or by outside interference), unleashing a tide of refugees into debt-ridden and economically stagnant European societies.
- The more urbanized, the more educated, and even the more enlightened the world becomes, counterintuitively, the more politically unstable it becomes, too. This is what techno-optimists and those who inhabit the world of fancy corporate gatherings are prone to miss: They wrongly equate wealth creation—and unevenly distributed wealth creation at that—with political order and stability.
- Russia does not require an invasion, only a zone of influence in the Intermarium that it can achieve by gradually compromising the democratic vitality of rimland states. (Hungary, in particular, is well on its way in this regard.)
- America is learning an ironic truth of empire: You endure by not fighting every battle. In the first century A.D., Tiberius preserved Rome by not interfering in bloody internecine conflicts beyond its northern frontier. Instead, he practiced strategic patience as he watched the carnage. He understood the limits of Roman power.
- It took England nearly half a century to hold the first meeting of a parliament after the signing of the Magna Carta, and more than seven hundred years to achieve women’s suffrage. What we in the West define as a healthy democracy took England the better part of a millennium to achieve. A functioning democracy is not a tool kit that can be easily exported, but an expression of culture and historical development.
- If the United States helps topple the dictator Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday, then what will it do on Thursday, when it finds that it has helped midwife to power a Sunni jihadist regime, or on Friday, when ethnic cleansing of the Shia-trending Alawites commences?
- The fact that the world is modernizing does not mean that it is Westernizing. The impact of urbanization and mass communications, coupled with poverty and ethnic divisions, will not lead to peoples’ everywhere thinking as we do.
- liberalism thrives only when security can be taken for granted—and that in the future we may not have that luxury.
- the external aggression of these new regional hegemons is, in part, motivated by internal weakness, as they employ nationalism to assuage unraveling domestic economies upon which the stability of their societies rests.
- People everywhere—in the West, in the Middle East, in Russia, in China—desperately need something to believe in, if only to alleviate their mental condition. They are dangerously ready for a new catechism given the right circumstances, for what passes as a new fad or cult in the West can migrate toward extremism in less stable or chaotic societies.
- In In The Face of War: Reflections of Men and Combat (1976), Larteguy writes that contemporary wars are, in particular, made for the side that doesn’t care about “the preservation of a good conscience.” So he asks, “How do you explain that to save liberty, liberty must first be suppressed?” His answer can only be thus: “In that rests the weakness of democratic regimes, a weakness that is at the same time a credit to them, an honor.”
- “The heart of liberalism is individualism,” [Huntington] wrote. “It emphasizes the reason and moral dignity of the individual.” But the military man, because of the nature of his job, has to assume irrationality and the permanence of violent conflict in human relations.
- “The liberal glorifies self-expression” because the liberal takes national security for granted; the military man glorifies “obedience” because he does not take that security for granted.
- the twenty-first century will be defined by vulgar, populist anarchy that elites at places like Aspen and Davos will have less and less influence upon, and will less and less be able to comprehend. Imperialism, then, will be viewed as much with nostalgia as with disdain.
https://css.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/sp
This lengthy essay argues that as Europe disappears, Eurasia coheres. In other words, “The supercontinent is becoming one fluid, comprehensible unit of trade and conflict, as the Westphalian system of states weakens and older, imperial legacies – Russian, Chinese, Iranian, [and] Turkish – become paramount. Every crisis from Central Europe to the ethnic-Han Chinese heartland is now interlinked. There is [only] one singular battlespace.” The question for Continental America, given its status as an 'island' far away from the Eurasian supercontinent, is whether it will be able to “keep its powder dry” or not.
One of the main themes that runs though the book is that the days of monolithic nation states are over, and the future will be more fragmented, more chaotic, and more dangerous than the present. The United States can no longer be the world’s policeman, and both Russia and China will have to deal with serious internal instabilities.
- those Muslim prison-states have all but collapsed (either on their own or by outside interference), unleashing a tide of refugees into debt-ridden and economically stagnant European societies.
- The more urbanized, the more educated, and even the more enlightened the world becomes, counterintuitively, the more politically unstable it becomes, too. This is what techno-optimists and those who inhabit the world of fancy corporate gatherings are prone to miss: They wrongly equate wealth creation—and unevenly distributed wealth creation at that—with political order and stability.
- Russia does not require an invasion, only a zone of influence in the Intermarium that it can achieve by gradually compromising the democratic vitality of rimland states. (Hungary, in particular, is well on its way in this regard.)
- America is learning an ironic truth of empire: You endure by not fighting every battle. In the first century A.D., Tiberius preserved Rome by not interfering in bloody internecine conflicts beyond its northern frontier. Instead, he practiced strategic patience as he watched the carnage. He understood the limits of Roman power.
- It took England nearly half a century to hold the first meeting of a parliament after the signing of the Magna Carta, and more than seven hundred years to achieve women’s suffrage. What we in the West define as a healthy democracy took England the better part of a millennium to achieve. A functioning democracy is not a tool kit that can be easily exported, but an expression of culture and historical development.
- If the United States helps topple the dictator Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday, then what will it do on Thursday, when it finds that it has helped midwife to power a Sunni jihadist regime, or on Friday, when ethnic cleansing of the Shia-trending Alawites commences?
- The fact that the world is modernizing does not mean that it is Westernizing. The impact of urbanization and mass communications, coupled with poverty and ethnic divisions, will not lead to peoples’ everywhere thinking as we do.
- liberalism thrives only when security can be taken for granted—and that in the future we may not have that luxury.
- the external aggression of these new regional hegemons is, in part, motivated by internal weakness, as they employ nationalism to assuage unraveling domestic economies upon which the stability of their societies rests.
- People everywhere—in the West, in the Middle East, in Russia, in China—desperately need something to believe in, if only to alleviate their mental condition. They are dangerously ready for a new catechism given the right circumstances, for what passes as a new fad or cult in the West can migrate toward extremism in less stable or chaotic societies.
- In In The Face of War: Reflections of Men and Combat (1976), Larteguy writes that contemporary wars are, in particular, made for the side that doesn’t care about “the preservation of a good conscience.” So he asks, “How do you explain that to save liberty, liberty must first be suppressed?” His answer can only be thus: “In that rests the weakness of democratic regimes, a weakness that is at the same time a credit to them, an honor.”
- “The heart of liberalism is individualism,” [Huntington] wrote. “It emphasizes the reason and moral dignity of the individual.” But the military man, because of the nature of his job, has to assume irrationality and the permanence of violent conflict in human relations.
- “The liberal glorifies self-expression” because the liberal takes national security for granted; the military man glorifies “obedience” because he does not take that security for granted.
- the twenty-first century will be defined by vulgar, populist anarchy that elites at places like Aspen and Davos will have less and less influence upon, and will less and less be able to comprehend. Imperialism, then, will be viewed as much with nostalgia as with disdain.
https://css.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/sp
