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I have not read those particular books, but I have probably read many of the draft essays that went into them. I think that Huntington is too enamored of the "raw clash", when it is obvious that economic development means modernization, and ultimately modernization means Americanization. It is as ineluctable as the spread of Rome, and does not depend on arms. It will, however, not be very smooth...As for Luttwak, he has been harping on the supposed decline of the States for too long for me to altogether credit his larger theories, although he remains an interesting strategic thinker. He has a European's distrust of allowing markets to determine outcomes, and so has actually proposed trying to enforce a higher level of personal savings, emulating Japanese economic planning, and other nostrums that presupposed a quasi- Cold War among trading nations... |
