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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: paul_philp who wrote (64489)	1/5/2003 9:48:49 PM
From: tekboy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

he does cover a lot of ground that I do not see covered in the popular media often. fair enough, I suppose. As I said, it's not that I disagreed all that much with the piece, just didn't strike me as saying much new. If one takes into account what is new and unique about the situation, then it is predictable and overplayed? let me make that point more clearly. Lots of people have focused on the Bush administration's nattering--the new National Security Strategy, etc.--as it was hugely important. And lots of people are engaged in reading and writing deep thumbsuckers about what we should do, etc. etc. What I'm saying is that basic structural features of the current situation account for, oh, maybe 85% of what we're doing, leaving only the last fraction and the tone to be driven by the people in power at the moment. Apart from gratuitously annoying most of the world and hastening the coming of Gulf War II (so we provoke it rather than Saddam), I don't think the Bush administration has done all that much of importance in foreign policy that any other administration wouldn't have done were it in power at this particular time under these particular circumstances. (That's obviously a large and somewhat oversimplified claim, and substantiating it convincingly issue by issue would take more time than I have at the moment, but I think by and large it would hold up if I bothered to think about it closely.) Post-Cold War for Dummies Yes and no. It's not a narrative of events or a coherent introductory survey, but rather a compendium of the most important statements in some key intellectual debates. The best general introduction to understanding contemporary American foreign policy would still, I think, be Richard Haass's "The Reluctant Sheriff," although it's a few years out of date now. The two books would complement each other well, I think. tb@professor.com