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Monday, October 03, 2016
US Diplomacy and Interventionism in the Age of Endless War
Is the United States on the verge of enshrining humanitarian intervention as a bedrock principle of foreign policy?
While
the mainstream media focuses on losers and winners in the race between
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, a largely unreported debate is going
on over the future course of U.S. diplomacy. Its outcome will have a
profound effect on how Washington projects power—both diplomatic and
military—in the coming decade.
The issues at stake are hardly abstract. The United States is currently engaged in active wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. It has deployed troops on the Russian border, played push –and-shove with China in Asia, and greatly extended its military footprint on the African continent. It would not be an exaggeration to say—as former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry has recently done—that the world is a more dangerous place today than it was during darkest times of the Cold War.
Tracking the outlines of this argument is not easy, in part because the participants are not always forthcoming about what they are proposing, in part because the media oversimplifies the issues. In its broadest framework, “realists” represented by former National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Harvard’s Steven Walt, and University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer have squared off against “humanitarian interventionists” like current UN Ambassador Samantha Power. Given that Power is a key advisor to the Obama administration on foreign policy and is likely to play a similar role if Clinton is elected, her views carry weight. http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/10/03/us-diplomacy-and-interventionism-age-endless-war?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=email_this&utm_source=email
The issues at stake are hardly abstract. The United States is currently engaged in active wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. It has deployed troops on the Russian border, played push –and-shove with China in Asia, and greatly extended its military footprint on the African continent. It would not be an exaggeration to say—as former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry has recently done—that the world is a more dangerous place today than it was during darkest times of the Cold War.
Tracking the outlines of this argument is not easy, in part because the participants are not always forthcoming about what they are proposing, in part because the media oversimplifies the issues. In its broadest framework, “realists” represented by former National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Harvard’s Steven Walt, and University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer have squared off against “humanitarian interventionists” like current UN Ambassador Samantha Power. Given that Power is a key advisor to the Obama administration on foreign policy and is likely to play a similar role if Clinton is elected, her views carry weight. http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/10/03/us-diplomacy-and-interventionism-age-endless-war?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=email_this&utm_source=email
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