Prof. Slaughter:

You supported the war in Iraq. That war caused 650,000 unnecessary deaths.

Do you see why there might be a little problem when you talk about a strategy for protecting liberty and upholding the rule of law... backed by force if necessary?

I hate to rub it in but in Iraq you supported force without the rule of law. And over half a million people have died because of that illegal use of force.

Is that particular fact so completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand that it doesn't merit being addressed?

Isn't the fact that the rest of the world will have utter contempt for our values for a long time bound to affect our capacity to play a constructive role?

Iraq was the major event of this generation. You got it wrong. Now you tell us how to get "national security right." Do you see the problem?

To call upon Americans to “pay attention to the actual life conditions of individuals within states around the world and recognize the ways in which their governments treat them can threaten us” is to advance an unsupported assertion as an underpinning of (excuse for?) a grand global strategy -- Wilson at his meddlesome worst.

Most of the listed "terrors" can and will be met by important and interested nations working within international administrative organizations; and yes, their procedures require greater transparency and democratization than they exhibit today. But they don't require a grand strategy to operate effectively.

And I think that, as a matter of common decency, few would argue against offering a nation's authoritarian elite carrots in consideration of their lifting their foot from their subjects' necks. And a stick, too, but not a stick whose effect will be the destabilization of that nation's society.

I didn't realize this. If Prof. Slaughter would like credibility at this site she needs to explain why she was so imperceptive as to support Bush's con job, explain that she realizes exactly what was wrong in the neo-cons thought process, and explain how the new national security approach will avoid the simplistic views of reality as exhibited by the Bush crowd.

Then she can be a serious player in this discussion.

Tom

I think democracy is the outcome of a long process of ever growing liberties, each of which sustains the other liberties and so on.
In the mean time we have modus vivendi and even we might discover or learn love something we haven't even heard of before.

the logic of ever-growing liberties leads us right back to man in a state of nature, where s/he has total liberty to love, cooperate, share, but also to plunder, kill and rape. Total Liberty is total disater.

As to the vision of Man as transcending evolutionary forces that constantly threatens all life with extinction, I might share that view to some extent. Still scarcity of resources does not bode well for this utopian vision in the short and medium range either.

My God, for once I agree with artappraiser! I have always wondered why people think there should be any goal for foreign policy higher than "Avoid catastrophe." I mean, even meeting that standard would be a considerable improvement.

A sweet book about Turkey's transition to modernity is "Birds Without Wings", and it portrays the sad result of the "big idea" that enraptured both Greeks and Turks around the time of WWI. The writer laments the loss of shared community formerly enjoyed by disparate cultures in the small towns of Anatolia.

It might be small ideas that are needed.

I've been working on my Linux box for the past couple of weeks -- don't ask; I wouldn't know the answer, anyway -- and must have missed the announcement that the "Truman Project" has morphed into the "Princeton Project."

When did that happen? 

Core truths are things like: Humans are multicellular organisms, murder is wrong, and 2+2 =4.

Grand Strategies often reduce to Grand Tragedies.

The more complex and non-empirically or analytically verifiable, the less a chance it has to correspond to the (admittedly) elusive REAL. So I would say to artappraiser and all the minions of relativists out there: au contraire. If you want to present evidence for your relativism don't appeal to anything like a "Grand Strategy" or "Cosmic Vision". Show me that 2+ 2 =4 is open to debate, or that perhaps you (as you read this) really might not exist at all. If you can't tackle these simple truths, don't bother proclaiming the triumph of relativism. Don't tell us how smokey it gets when Princeton "experts" in International Relations wax eloquently about Grand Designs, Grand Strategies or whatever else is grand.

There is a utility in sketching these "visions of a future world", if only to assuage the anxieties of the present.
At least it brings to our attention what the world MIGHT be like in the future if we follow their prescriptions. It's like predicting the weather. You would not dismiss it as useless merely because the predication is not guaranteed.
In short--among his/her numerous other noble traits--Man is a predicting animal (which btw you might add to your list of things that are NOT relative truths)

"Fortune magazine recently wrote a piece about how Bill Ford stepped down with the admission that Ford’s business model just didn’t work any more. Fortune observed, “Ford’s lament is the signature cry of our age. Across sectors—retailing, brokerage, software, publishing, computers—business models that produced profits for decades have shut down. In most cases managers aren’t sure what the new model will be, but they’re absolutely certain it won’t have a multidecade lifespan.”

- I'm not sure what the above means. Toyota makes the same kind of product as Ford, and makes a profit. Of course, if the business model was "people will buy whatever sh** we produce" then the sooner that business model shuts down, the better.

To me (and I suspect to Vico, as well), your "core truths" seem to be tautologies.

On Tuesday there were reports that 2 pigs in Indonesia tested positive for H5N1. I do not know if it was the strain which is proving close to universally fatal to humans but if it is we are one big step closer to annihilation.

Professor Slaughter

What are the broader goals that you see as part of a foreign policy? Should there an effort to allow each nation state to determine its own fate and its own policies? What is to be done with groups that demand self determinaton? Should there be a midwifing of a greater globalism?

The Right and the Left are both is hysteric mode urging Americans to be afraid of something whether terrorism or economic globalism and Wal-Mart. Can you really have a non-authoritarian, or even non-totalitarian foreign policy based on people's fears? There seems to be too great a temptation to squelch all dissent and a demand for a lockstep type of thinking. Why shouldn't the goal of an American foreign policy first and foremost be the promotion of a liberal global system and an increasing liberalism within each nation?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

I intended freedoms in the sense of freedom of. You have certainly read Sen about it.

This is the sort of report that worries me, because it comes across as "the sky is falling". The annual patterns of influenza often involve birds to pigs to humans. Typically, world epidemiologists sit down about 9 months before the next flu season (obviously, there are meetings in the northern and southern hemispheres), at which they decide which strains, usually three, need to be in the next vaccine batch. While there are some promising approaches to speeding the process, it takes about 9 months, once the strains are selected, to make and distribute vaccine.

The big concern, of course, is that a new strain pops up that isn't covered by the vaccine. Balancing that, and not having seen the report, isn't there some significance that Indonesian public health people, in a third world country, were efficient enough to suspect and test the pigs? Frankly, I am amazed at how epidemiologists are working this problem, with seemingly every country trying to be proactive?

Sometimes flu crosses directly from birds to humans; sometimes pigs are involved. The questions, in any animal or human, Are how contagious the strain is, and how dangerous is the clinical disease in humans.

Do you have any specific reason to believe that the presence in pigs means both that the strain has mutated to be both more contagious and more virulent, and has a greater probability of affecting humans?

Every year, there are epidemics, but pandemics are much more rare. The worst was 1918-1920, with at least 40 million dead. 1957 and 1968 had 0,5 to 1 million. One can argue "well, it's getting close to time for another", or "Pandemics are rare to begin with, but there are now preventive and treatment measures that weren't available in 1918 or 1957, and only in a limited way in 1968."

If there is crossover to humans, I expect there to be very vigorous quarantine, and quite possibly large-scale administration of drugs that can prevent as well as cure. No guarantees, but we increasingly get better prepared. "We", in this case, means the world.

North Korea had an outbreak among birds, reported it, and had people from neighboring countries and the World Health Organization involved in dealing with it. It turned out to be an H7 strain. Personally, I find it significant when perhaps the most hostile and reclusive government in the world recognizes some things transcend borders.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

You're right, kosmotropic; your examples of "core truths" are not tautologies; indeed, they're not even trivialities.  They're simply not-examples.

In the world of English speakers and of users of Arabic numerals the sentences "murder is wrong" and "2 x 2 = 4" are simply definitional and have nothing whatever to do with "truth" which implicates a judgment concerning whether a statement appears to describe in a coherent manner such part of the real world to which the statement is directed as has come to the attention of us humans, thus far.

Of course, mobility is a problem, and we are learning from it. One of the best examples came from SARS, which had been isolated to several Asian cities, but broke out in Toronto and spread further there. "Patient Zero" was a physician, IIRC, from Hong Kong.

Retrospective analysis of further transmission showed that much of it came from health care workers that did not use proper respiratory protections. While they had respirator masks quite capable of filtering out the virus, they often did not properly fit the mask to their face. It is from experiences like this that techniques are refined. Were I to go back into clinical work with such patients, I'd probably have to shave my beard to get a proper mask seal.

Incidentally, the detection of accidental or deliberate disease transmission is one of the reasons I argue for both universal health care access and electronic medical records are part of national security. Data mining, with appropriate privacy protection, of health records -- when it is convenient and affordable for patients to get health care -- is quite likely the best early warning technique for a new disease outbreak.

To be a bit technical, antiviral drugs and antibiotics tend to be completely different chemical classes. Yes, resistance is a serious concern, just as much in bacteria as with viruses. The rate of new antimicrobial drug (a more general term) is not as fast as it once was, and some things are coming out just in time. Vancomycin, for example, was often reserved for Staphylococcus infection resistant to penicillins. Many hospitals, trying to reserve it, require an infectious disease specialist approve every prescription for it. When reports of vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcs aureus (VRSA) came out, they were considered critical on a worldwide basis, and absolutely strict isolations were used for the patients. In most of those VRSA cases, combinations of antibiotics worked. We now have the streptogramins as backup to vancomycin, but it's a constant war. Indeed, wars have an effect: Acinetobacter baumanii is an essentially new infection found in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is sensitive only to some specialized antibiotics such as imipenem and carbenicillin, which are expensive and often in short supply. We are starting to see imipenem resistance. Large military hospitals such as Walter Reed are setting up separate wards for these patients, to improve isolation.

You are quite correct that there are greater threats. Ironically, the Administration cut funds to the Centers for Disease Control, considered not just a US but a world resource on infectious disease, while spending some tens of billions on national ballistic missile defense. Which is more likely -- a disease outbreak requiring excellent resources, or a North Korean ICBM? We don't have budget for everything.

My question to you would be, however, why there is such fear of avian flu, even if there is an example of crossover into pigs. I don't know if this is a media-created panic or what; the kinds of things described happen every year.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

so then the psychopathic killer who thinks murder is great simply does not know the definition of the word 'murder', he is merely lacking in knowledge of the English language....lol

I don't see this as one of your better efforts, Howard.  You say, "The proper role of the military is that which civilian policymakers assign to it."  That is nonsense.  That is another way of saying civilian policymakers can make no mistakes - they are omnipotent.  Hitler assigned to the German military the role of taking over the world, so by your statement, that was a proper role for the military.  It wasn't, and assigning to the US military the role of invading Iraq was not a proper role.  No aggressive, illegal, irrational role is a proper one for the military.

Then you question, "...are you suggesting that once attacked, the US should not have taken the war to Tokyo and Berlin?"  That is not germane to the discussion. The attacks on Japan and Germany in WWII were defensive responses to the attacks on the US by Japan, and the declaration of war against the US by Germany.  Those are not aggressive attacks, but defensive ones.  An aggressive attack would have been for the US to invade Japan in 1938, as a preemptive move to head off a feared attack by Japan.  That would not have been acceptable, and would not have been a proper role for the US military.

We simply must start from the position that our country does not mount unjustified, illegal attacks on other nations.  Failing to do that puts us in the same moral category as Nazi Germany, a place we must never allow ourselves to be placed. 

Hoppy in Sacramento

You say, "The proper role of the military is that which civilian policymakers assign to it." That is nonsense.

That is another way of saying civilian policymakers can make no mistakes - they are omnipotent.

Hitler assigned to the German military the role of taking over the world,

so by your statement, that was a proper role for the military. It wasn't, and assigning to the US military the role of invading Iraq was not a proper role. No aggressive, illegal, irrational role is a proper one for the military.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Hoppy, I know a good many professional military, active and retired. I was honored to be invited onto some private mailing lists, where there are very few civilians, and people speak both frankly, and also of their emotional aspect. In many respects, those that expect to fight are, and not for any kind of cowardice, the last to want to go to war because they know it too well. That being said, if it is necessary, they want to be decisive.

One married military couple I know have spent more time apart than together, rarely being deployed to the same country. They've both had two tours in Iraq, although they are now in Texas. He is trying to decide what is the right thing to do for his next assignment; he's been offered a prestigious job as a drill instructor, but a different unit has asked him to come back to Iraq. One of the things I honor about him is that he's trying to decide where he can best mentor soldiers: in their initial preparation, or on deployment.

She's juggling several things: more civilian education, accepting the Officer Candidate School invitation that's been made several times, or possibly going back to Iraq. Her current assignment is as a military photojournalist, so she often sees much more than she would like. A long letter of hers eloquently addressed the stress she felt when it was her turn to hose the blood out of a medical evacuation helicopter, and being amazed she has not yet lost anyone close to her.

As Robert E. Lee said, "It is well war is so terrible, lest we become too fond of it." Hal Moore's autobiographical title says much: "We were soldiers once, and young." I've known military personnel from private to three-star general, and they don't look forward to war. At the same time, if they must, there's an informal prayer. It's not "God protect me", but "God, don't let me screw up and get my buddies killed."

Turning to the relationship between military and foreign policy, I can go back to Sun Tzu, circa 400 BC, and read how the greatest general wins wars without fighting battles. Deterrence is more than a mere theory. I can cite any number of military theorists who say the same thing, in different contexts, in different times. A Special Forces officer once commented "We do the things that no one should have to do, but sometimes they are necessary." Believe it or not, many Army Special Forces people are happiest when training and nation-building.

Yes, fighting should be the last resort, but a purely defensive force having no deterrent value. Military force has to be part of the armament of a sane national strategy, but used as a last resort. With the issue of Darfur, I see economic means, perhaps out of the box, rather than a fundamentally infeasible military intervention. Unfortunately, no foreign policy can be perfect, if for no other reason that not all governments in the world are perfect.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I subscribe to ProMED, which is a mailing list run by the International Society for Infectious Diseases. There are often several mailings per day, which can be pure scientific reports, media reports with substantial annotation by epidemiologists, or unconfirmed news reports. Now, as luck would have it, I had an email problem for the last several days (mutters at "self-learning" firewall now uninstalled), so I just started getting it again after a few days.
The most significant item today is a case of polio in Kenya, which is being investigated -- it came from a Somali refugee. It is of severe concern if it originated in Kenya, as it would be the first wild polio case in Kenya since 1984. This report came from the chief scientist of the Kenyan health ministry, and follows the confirmatory tests from the continental viral lab in South Africa. Intermediate-level tests in Kenya followed by the specific typing in South Africa took about a month, but the report is now fairly definitive that it was a strain known to be in Somalia.

Somalia, some years ago, was the site either of the last or next-to-last smallpox infection (sorry, one was Somalia and one was Bangladesh, but I don't remember which). As you know, smallpox has been eradicated in the wild. Polio is close to eradication; the Western Hemisphere is very close to being declared polio-free.

The reason I give this background is that ProMED usually has one or more reports per day on influenza. As I've mentioned, the international cooperation on this is unprecedented. There has been bird-to-human transmission, but no human-to-human transmission, and the avian transmission involved, at the least, preparing raw fowl and more often being on a farm.

Power-grab authoritarianism isn't going to be helped by sky-is-falling speculation on blogs. If you'd like to see the current reporting, send an email with "subscribe promed" in the body to majordomo@promedmail.org.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Some broad comments on the report, which I've just finished reading:

*The single largest flaw I see is that it makes no sense to propose a grand strategy--the bringing about of ordered liberty-- whose goals we do not have the means, even multilaterally, to effectuate. In particular, the report vastly over-emphasizes the ability of the US, even working collaboratively with others as we should be, to bring about internal domestic change in other countries in a direction we think we desire.

*I am better able to envision the US and others fostering some greater degree of international institution-building which could lead to more discussion and interchange among nations prior to the making by some nations of some decisions with clear international consequences. That seems sensible enough to me, worth a try, to see what it yields, which may or may not be much. Certainly the nations of the world have many common problems which they cannot address on their own and which will require cross-national collaboration if they are to be addressed successfully. I don't see anything to be lost in this regard.

*There is no effort to address, even in a general way, the tension between the perceived need to collaborate with other nations on security matters vs. the stated goal of promoting ordered liberty in those nations. The Bush Administration's democracy promotion rhetoric looks and is utterly ridiculous in part because of the failure to realize how self destructive it is for the US government's efforts to promote democracy to, on the one hand, set up military bases, say, in one of the "stans", while laying off on the democracy promotion rhetoric with these nations.

*I agree with sphealey in believing the authors assume with too much optimism that a new US Administration is going to be able to pick up roughly where Bill Clinton left off. The re-election of Bush has done immense long-term damage to the trust other nations have in the ability of the US to see and avoid crackpot foreign policy by throwing out incompetent Presidents after a single term.

*The report simply over-estimates US power at this point in time. Realism about what the US is capable of at this time are absent from the tone and substance of the report. To take one example, on page 49, a sentence reads "...Politically, we should offer China greater status and position within the regional and global system." With regard to the regional realities in the Far East, it seems to me that the US is in no position to offer China greater status and position regionally. Rather, at this point, in many respects, it would be China that would have to offer the US greater regional status in the Far East. The report's authors want the US to use its power to create a trans-Pacific institution that would deal the US into discussion of Far East security concerns. I can't help but wonder if China thinks at this point that it neither needs nor wants us in that equation, thank you very much. It's hard to imagine anything that could happen in the Far East that would be a greater concern to the US than North Korea now going nuclear. Yet given the clearly expressed American sense of crisis there, the US's basic policy right now is to hope China deals with it. So from the Chinese point of view, who needs the US?

Yes, they worry a little about Japan, but Japan isn't going to engage in aggression against the Chinese, regardless of whether the US is there to supposedly restrain them or not. The Russians for their part look to me to be charting their own course. As an oil supplier they feel they have a trump card to play with both the US and China lest either of them gets any funny ideas.

We really are in a much weaker position that the tenor of this report reflects. A whole lot has changed to drain the US of relative power and influence, not just as a result of the past 5+ years, but greatly exacerbated by the past 5+ years. Our military is struggling to transition to a set of capabilities reflective of what the country needs in this day and burdens itself and the US economy with much wasteful spending. Our economy is clearly struggling, with the sources of our past advantages--advanced knowledge and technology in particular--things we no longer have any ability to hoard. Our soft power has dissipated dramatically with the loss of worldwide credibility and respect suffered under this Administration in particular, as the highflown rhetoric we continue to use rings hollow when others look at our increasingly dissonant actions. Etc.

All of that will take not only time, but some very different policy directions consistently followed, to begin to recover from. And we will not get back to a position of dominance remotely comparable to what we held in the immediate post WWII and Cold War aftermaths. That just is not in the cards.

*For me, one of the major elephants in the room when it comes to defining ordered liberty is freedom of association, specifically the freedom to form unions. Are we going to include that prominently in what we say about human rights to the Chinese? What if any real leverage do we have? Where does that fit with other issues and interests we have in that relationship? If we are going to push them on the right to unionize to keep wages from being artificially low there, are we going to do the same in our country?

There is recognition of the need for economic opportunity and a decent standard of living, and a growing middle class, if many of these other nations are going to buy into ordered liberty or democracy. But right now large corporations are engaged in an concerted effort to hold down wages in the US and abroad.

What will be the countervailing force to prevent that dynamic from triggering global recession due to depressed aggregate demand, and creating widespread cynicism about what democracy, capitalism, or any other ism that is a philosphy of government or economics really has to offer the ordinary person anyway here or abroad? We may want to sell democracy and "development" (US style). But that doesn't mean others are going to want to buy it. Especially given how it is playing out domestically in the US, with an increasingly struggling middle class.

Weak unions in the US have contributed to the long-term inability of workers to see wage gains consonant with productivity increases, as well as a gradually shredded safety net.

For those who do not think a resuscitated union movement, here and abroad, is part of that solution, what is the alternative? Is it supposed to happen out of the kindess of the hearts of large employers who right now hold most of the best cards?

In China, there is no freedom to form labor unions, with the parallel result that workers there are subject to grossly abusive treatment and may experience similar difficulties in getting wage increases commensurate with enterprise productivity improvements.

There is a line on page 33 that to me is rich: (re US ME policy, "We must aim to empower those in every country whose primary concern is the welfare of the people..."

You mean, like in our own country? We aren't doing that here. The present Administration and Congress do not give a s*** about any other than already well off Americans and well-heeled special interests. What makes the authors think we have a clue as to how to do this in the ME? I agree with those who believe that by far and away the most important single step the US could take to regain influence and respect in the world is clean up our act domestically--on so many levels.

All of these liberal internationalists are going to need to wake up and realize they are going to need to become ardent domestic unionists and safety-net expanders if they are going to make any headway with the US public. What language there is in this report is tepid.

I have a number of specific comments but if I write those up they will have to go into another post given the already excessive length of this one.

Outstanding comments American Dreamer.

John Ikenberry has described in several places the phenomenon he calls a "security trap". He portrays the US position as an ironic or paradoxical one, in which we have vast power, but in which attempts to exert that power result in resistance, and an ultimate failure to influence people to do what we want.

Somehow he fails to draw the evident conclusion from this that to the extent that the US is unable to exert influence on others, it lacks power - since power is by definition the ability to influence outcomes. To say that the US has certain kinds of power that don't work is as absurd as saying that a person is incredibly wealthy in virtue of his possession of great sums of a certain currency, despite the fact that the currency in question is one that few people will take in exchange for things of value.

Despite the professed liberal internationalist concern with kinds of power other than military power, they still seem dazzled by the conventional trappings of power: big ships and large numbers of tanks and divisions. They can't understand the "paradoxical" situation in which these things don't contribute as much as they once did to a state's power.

The US does still possess great power; and there is certainly no other single state which possesses more power, not by a longshot. But US power relative to the globe is declining. As you say, the Bush administration has exacerbated and accelerated this decline, but it is really a longer term historical process which we have only a limited ability to arrest.

The point was to get in line for positions in a future Democratic administration. Ticket-punching for the political-academic elite.

I certainly hope the people who should get them, who have the most they are capable of contributing, are tooting their own horns--and I would think all of us would be rooting for them as well, no? The question is whether the individuals in question would have anything to offer.

Actually, that's the question that determines whether or not we should be rooting for them. I want a future Democratic administration to have a modest, realist foreign policy and to force a just settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by putting all necessary pressure on Israel. The likes of Slaughter and Ikenberry aren't going to get us there.