Obviously we need a United Federation of Planets to decide global policy.

I know you talk a lot about the Green Lantern theory of warfare. This whole Concert of Democracies thing is the Star Trek theory of foreign relations.

Hey, who else is in this book club? Are people like Slaughter and Daalder going to show up to start lecturing us again?

Heh. Yglesias? Ummmmmmm...who left the door unlocked??!!??!! :-P

Welcome back dude...any new insights on France's economy?

Of course the D's can't seem to get foreign policy right. They seem to want to craft policy based on the R's idea that preemptive unilateral military action is at times preferable to diplomacy and that the UN is now so antiquated that it is completely ineffective and therefore a new "organization" is needed. I reject this premise. I have always felt the best course is to do the hard work to reform and improve the UN. The only way to be a "world leader" is to engage the rest of the world and not just the countries who will agree with us. It is a shame that the America Abroad gang unilaterally buggered off when people here didn't see things the AA way.

I haven't read the book, but I don't get precisely what Matt is saying about unilateral/multilateral preemptive military action without U.N. approval. I agree that a "Concert of Democracies" is a bad idea, and I was against the Iraq invasion. I also think military action without U.N. approval is generally a bad idea, and should be used only as a last resort. But to rule it out entirely is insane. I would certainly support it if it was the only way to keep Iran from getting Nukes, Russia and China wouldn't go along, and it seemed militarily feasible at a "reasonable" cost. I'm all for aiming for international law to replace anarchy, but you can't act as if it exists before it does.

The big problem with any internationalism is that it runs smack into the religion of American exceptionalism:

If an institution never prevents the US from doing whatever we want, it will have no international legitimacy.
but...
If an institution ever prevents the US from doing whatever we want, we will raise a mighty whine that deafens the universe and ignore it.

There's no way to square that circle. I mean, we can't even be bothered to adhere to the terms of our bilateral treaties if they inconvenience us; why would we behave differently in a multilateral institution?

Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay have written of an “Alliance of Democracies,” Daalder and James Goldgeier have advocated a “Global NATO,” and John Ikenberry and Ann-Marie Slaughter,

Why aren't any of this people in on this discussion? Were they not invited or were they busy? ... Mr. Golis?

Hi Matt,

Welcome back to TPM Cafe. I still haven't been able to get my hands on your book up here in New Hampshire. I guess the hay wagons and milk trucks that make up John Wiley's northern New England distribution system haven't arrived yet.

There is one issue I have had with a lot of liberal foreign policy thinking over the past several years, and since I don't have your book yet maybe you can tell us if this is something you address. The problem is that much of this thinking is a bit too philosophical. (I say this as a former academic philosophy professor.) Liberals these days tend to focus a bit too much for my taste on broad systems of foreign policy thinking, on abstract ideals, on constructivist outlines of ideally just and ordered societies, and on ways or styles of doing foreign policy in a sort of abstract, ahistorical, theoretical setting. But they often don't give nearly enough attention to the concrete, complicated, ugly, dirty, historical contingencies in which we actually find ourselves; or on the nitty-gritty details of the application of informed instrumental reason to the achievement of goals that have been described in something more than airy, idealized terms.

Saying that it would be great to have stronger international institutions is one thing. But it is quite another to put forward a detailed, practical road map for getting from our current situation of resurgent nationalism in large states; weakened international institutions; financial and resource insecurity; poorly regulated corporatocratic and state capitalist competition; dysfunctional and failed small states; grotesque economic inequality and unhinged weapons proliferation to a strong, functioning international system. Do you have an actual plan, Matt?

One challenge we face is the mindset of elites. Once upon a time in the twentieth century, the thinking of the foreign policy elite in America and Europe, and global intellectuals in general, was dominated by vigorously internationalist thinking. Internationalism was also much more popular, I believe, among the general public. That includes the East Bloc, which had its own socialist form of internationalism. But decades of McCarthyism, Hooverism, fragmenting international systems and resurgent conservative thought have severely damaged the internationalist cause. The uncompromising, xenophobic, paranoid sovereignty mania that used to be the province of John Birchers is now much more mainstream. It is hard to get credible people to give public expression to serious, full-bodied internationalism, and foreign policy proposals and discourse usually have to be couched in highly nationalistic and provincial terms.

Here's what we need to study: What kind of world do we live in now, in 2008? What are the chief challenges facing different regions in the world right now? What is it that really needs to be done? What precisely ought we try to achieve in the immediate term, the short term, the long term and the very long time? Even assuming we can build strong international institutions, what should we be trying to accomplish with them? What are we going to cooperate over? What kinds of governance can we and should collectively exert over the global economy? And whatever we aim at, how do we get there?

I just picked up Michael Klare's new book. I like Klare, because he tends to avoid merely theoretical debates, and focuses on the urgent matters at hand, and we see the present time in similar ways. My own view of the present time is that we live in an increasingly small and crowded world, driven by powerful, heavily armed states and their corporate stakeholders competing for control over, and the ability to profit from, vital global resources and markets. At the same time, we face growing threats to an incredibly over-stressed global environment, and to global food and water systems. And we have deeply unbalanced global class system with growing numbers of partially urbanized, underemployed, slum-confined have-nots, many with access to arms.

I hate being so pessimistic, but I see the world poised for another century of major state-level war, and also revolutionary violence. And I don't see people doing a lot to rectify this situation. Despite the foreshadowing provided by Iraq, there is a lot of complacency, I fear, among the current generation of Americans, especially young people. They seem to believe we are part of a generally organized and peace-minded community of large states, with only some mopping up to do regarding "rogue states", "failed states" and non-state outlaw groups.

But there is plenty of roguishness to go around. The whole situation reminds me of western world in the first years of the twentieth century. People then, to, thought they represented the civilized portion of the world, that they lived in an orderly system of rational and economically interdependent states, and that they mainly needed to concern themselves with their "civilizing missions" and "white man's burden" among the uncivilized corners of the world - the failed states and never-were states of their time. They thought their very interdependence and high level of civilization made war unthinkable. Within a few years, they were slaughtering each other in the most horrific and astonishing manner on the fields of Europe. And that was just a foretaste of the greater slaughter to come in mid-century. They tried building an international order through the League of Nations. But that effort collapsed.