Rob Farley had me on “Foreign Entanglements” yesterday. I’m in “mellow mode,” but at least we have hats!
- Heather Hurlburt looks at what the election says about US foreign-policy debates. Problem: something like 5% of the electorate gave a &!@ about national security when it came time to vote.
- Joshua Foust considers a “Chinese Kyrgyzstan.”
- Raffaello Pantucci and Alexandros Petersen examine Chinese policy in Afghanistan.
- Dan Trombly reflects on “perpetual war.”
- William Savedoff on impact evaluation of foreign aid. Have I mentioned how much it grates when someone refers to a blog post as a “blog”?
- Jonathan Lima-Matthews, perhaps recognizing that the topic is link bait, discusses applying to graduate school at e-International Relations.
- Charlie Stross forecasts the year 2512.
- Congrats to Mike Tierney and the rest of the crew for getting an enormous grant to support their aid-mapping project.
Just got to about 26:24 of the bloggingheads discussion and — yay! — you mention Jeanne Kirkpatrick “Dictatorships and Double Standards”. I was thinking to myself when you were talking about Neoconservatism 3.0, hmm surely in some way this goes back to Kirkpatrick and then about 20 seconds later you mentioned it. True, her thing in that piece was authoritarianism v totalitarianism, not authoritarianism v democracy, but part of her reasoning, iirc, was that authoritarian states cd evolve into democracies, totalitarian ones couldn’t. Whatever one thinks of that as an empirical matter (and i thought the article was prob. 90 percent rubbish when i read it in the late 70s or early 80s (yes, revealing my age here)), it can be applied by politically motivated analysts to perhaps almost any situation. E.g., label China not only ‘authoritarian’ but ‘crypto-totalitarian’ in the sense that it cannot evolve politically b.c blah, blah, blah…[insert whatever reasons you feel like]. Whereas Burma for example has *already* shown signs of evolution in a democratic direction. Etc. It’s sad really to see how dumb articles never die, they just receive new leases on life (or that particular dumb article, at any rate). (prob. won’t finish watching video right now — my day has been made ;)]
David Adesnik and Mike McFaul had a piece on the Journal of Democracy in which they argued that developments in the 1980s and 1990s vindicated Kirkpatrick, at least with respect to the ability of the US to democratize clients later on. But that’s a great point about the distinction being slippery.