she FIERCE
Jan. 26th, 2008 01:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
intertribal
while we're on the subject of rising second-world powers and diminishing American powers, here's a really good article by Parag Khanna that sums up the likely future of geopolitics: Waving Goodbye to Hegemony.
To understand the second world, you have to start to think like a second-world country. What I have seen in these and dozens of other countries is that globalization is not synonymous with Americanization; in fact, nothing has brought about the erosion of American primacy faster than globalization. While European nations redistribute wealth to secure or maintain first-world living standards, on the battlefield of globalization second-world countries’ state-backed firms either outhustle or snap up American companies, leaving their workers to fend for themselves. The second world’s first priority is not to become America but to succeed by any means necessary.
I believe that a complex, multicultural landscape filled with transnational challenges from terrorism to global warming is completely unmanageable by a single authority, whether the United States or the United Nations. Globalization resists centralization of almost any kind. Instead, what we see gradually happening in climate-change negotiations (as in Bali in December) — and need to see more of in the areas of preventing nuclear proliferation and rebuilding failed states — is a far greater sense of a division of labor among the Big Three, a concrete burden-sharing among them by which they are judged not by their rhetoric but the responsibilities they fulfill. The arbitrarily composed Security Council is not the place to hash out such a division of labor. Neither are any of the other multilateral bodies bogged down with weighted voting and cacophonously irrelevant voices. The big issues are for the Big Three to sort out among themselves.
So let’s play strategy czar. You are a 21st-century Kissinger. Your task is to guide the next American president (and the one after that) from the demise of American hegemony into a world of much more diffuse governance. What do you advise, concretely, to mitigate the effects of the past decade’s policies — those that inspired defiance rather than cooperation — and to set in motion a virtuous circle of policies that lead to global equilibrium rather than a balance of power against the U.S.?
We have learned the hard way that what others want for themselves trumps what we want for them — always.
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Date: 2008-01-27 02:04 am (UTC)The rest is really interesting, but I don't quite know what to say to it. I would fail as strategy czar...
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Date: 2008-01-27 02:15 am (UTC)I'm trying not to fail as strategy czar but I think I still would. Le sigh. Anyhow that gives a good taste of the kind of thing I study, I guess, in summarized form.
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Date: 2008-01-27 02:28 am (UTC)well, at least you know i think what you study is really interesting. and a lot of people would fail as strategy czar, if it makes you feel any better. and you are not expected to save the world at 20. but you're already strategizing?
ahaha, i should write about what i study. ohhhh man. yeah, i'm not there yet. that's okay, though, nobody knows all i need to know (to be a competent anthro-linguist or whatever) as an undergrad. most undergraduate schools don't even have a linguistics program... I can tell you what I DON'T study, though, lol. Traditional anthro, for one.
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Date: 2008-01-27 02:39 am (UTC)this is only part of what I study - this is the "grand picture", not the in-depth stuff.
and really, I'm not there yet either.
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Date: 2008-01-27 09:30 pm (UTC)well, yeah, i imagine the in-depth stuff would be more over my head...