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Guess What?
The rest of the world is not just like us--and isn't going to be.
small dead animals: Guess What?
No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn
In Blind Oracles, his study of the role of intellectuals in formulating and implementing U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, historian Bruce Kuklick equated these scholars with the “primitive shaman” who performs “feats of ventriloquy.”
We tend to celebrate foreign-policy intellectuals as thinkers who try to transform grand ideas into actual policies. In reality, their function has usually been to offer members of the foreign-policy establishment rationalizations—in the form of “grand strategies” and “doctrines,” or the occasional magazine article or op-ed—for doing what they were going to do anyway.
Not unlike marketing experts, successful foreign-policy intellectuals are quick to detect a new trend, attach a sexy label to it (“Red Menace,” “Islamofascism”), and propose to their clients a brand strategy that answers to the perceived need (“containment,” “détente,” “counterinsurgency”).
In No One’s World, foreign-policy intellectual Charles Kupchan—a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations—tackles the trend commonly referred to as “American decline” or “declinism,” against the backdrop of the Iraq War, the financial crisis, and the economic rise of China.
more
We Are Not All Westerners Now | The American Conservative
Guess What?
The rest of the world is not just like us--and isn't going to be.
small dead animals: Guess What?
No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn
In Blind Oracles, his study of the role of intellectuals in formulating and implementing U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, historian Bruce Kuklick equated these scholars with the “primitive shaman” who performs “feats of ventriloquy.”
We tend to celebrate foreign-policy intellectuals as thinkers who try to transform grand ideas into actual policies. In reality, their function has usually been to offer members of the foreign-policy establishment rationalizations—in the form of “grand strategies” and “doctrines,” or the occasional magazine article or op-ed—for doing what they were going to do anyway.
Not unlike marketing experts, successful foreign-policy intellectuals are quick to detect a new trend, attach a sexy label to it (“Red Menace,” “Islamofascism”), and propose to their clients a brand strategy that answers to the perceived need (“containment,” “détente,” “counterinsurgency”).
In No One’s World, foreign-policy intellectual Charles Kupchan—a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations—tackles the trend commonly referred to as “American decline” or “declinism,” against the backdrop of the Iraq War, the financial crisis, and the economic rise of China.
more
We Are Not All Westerners Now | The American Conservative