In his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Zbigniew Brzezinski provided us with some prescient insights into Southwest Asia’s “spreading and deepening quagmire.” He notes the dangers of further entanglement in an area, referred to in The Choice as “The Global Balkans.” He then outlines the mechanisms by which war would be provoked with Iran, visualizing “a downward slope” towards a wider clash with Islam in general, the variety of which Samuel Huntington envisioned in The Clash of Civilizations.
Note that the unintended consequences of our actions have been to empower Iran, elevating its aspirations to that of a regional hegemon. In terms of the structural analysis of realist theory this makes perfect sense. The Iraqi government had formerly served to balance Iran’s ambitions. And, as all states aspire to regional hegemony in order to maximize their security, this should have been easily predictable to anyone who had given this slightest attention to balance of power thinkers.
But of course our lovable administration had not been paying attention to these thinkers. Instead as Francis Fukuyama noted in America at the Crossroads, they attended to a relatively new wing of neo-conservatives, represented by Robert Kagan and William Kristol. John Hulsman here comments on these developments, noting that if the administration fully integrates the ideas of this new brand of neo-conservatives we will soon be fighting five wars simultaneously.
Note that the unintended consequences of our actions have been to empower Iran, elevating its aspirations to that of a regional hegemon. In terms of the structural analysis of realist theory this makes perfect sense. The Iraqi government had formerly served to balance Iran’s ambitions. And, as all states aspire to regional hegemony in order to maximize their security, this should have been easily predictable to anyone who had given this slightest attention to balance of power thinkers.
But of course our lovable administration had not been paying attention to these thinkers. Instead as Francis Fukuyama noted in America at the Crossroads, they attended to a relatively new wing of neo-conservatives, represented by Robert Kagan and William Kristol. John Hulsman here comments on these developments, noting that if the administration fully integrates the ideas of this new brand of neo-conservatives we will soon be fighting five wars simultaneously.
1 comment:
The above comment by Global Clash of Religions is a perfect example of troll behavior. I'm sure serious intellectuals out there can recognize this lazy minded bigotry as an affront to their own honest efforts at comprehending our world rationally. Such comments in the future will be ruthlessly deleted. I have not deleted this comment in order to have a good example of that which will be.
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