The latest issue of Survival includes 'Debating Bush's Wars' (free access) with contributions from Peter Wehner, a former White House speech writer, the Brookings Institution's Philip H. Gordon whose article 'Winning the Right War' frames the debate as well as Dean and Professor of the Practice of Public Policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Kishore Mahbubani.
Always a provocative writer, Mahbubani claims that 'America, as a geopolitical actor, has stopped thinking and acting strategically.' I would dispute that US policymakers had ever abandoned means-ends rationality, if that's what Mahbubani means by thinking and acting strategically and the changes, however slow, to policy since November 2006 provide evidence of that.
However, Mahbubani's faith and optimism in the US also leads him to say that the current state of affairs can be fixed relatively easily, concluding that 'With a little less moralising and a lot more pragmatism, America may once again find itself on the winning side in the global political arena.' This is a little bit hard to square given how Mahbubani had criticized the US for Guantanamo and for underestimating how much this had damaged 'a precious national asset - moral authority in the eyes of billions of people'. Guantanamo represents the nihilism that is the victory of pragmatism in extremis.
Pragmatism may be an attractive slogan, appealing to what is practical, what works but it doesn't tell us works for what? For who? And as Prof Chua Beng Huat's Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore (1995, esp Ch 2-3) tells us, pragmatism may present itself as non-ideological but the reverse is often true - the 'ideology of pragmatism' often leading to dogma and dysfunctional outcomes.
If only things would revert to the lessons drawn from a somewhat selective understanding of the past: 'America succeeded in the Cold War by looking for potential allies and partners everywhere and by being ready to make the right political compromises to keep such partnerships.' Which seems to translate into: 'Let authoritarian regimes be. ;)' The flip side is that many these 'political compromises' turned sour; one of those being with a certain Mr Osama bin Laden in the days when the CIA supported the mujahideen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan .
Comments (1)
Kishore Mahbubani does not see world affairs through the prism of neo-colonial mindset, he depicts the reality as it stands. America violates international law with impunity, has used torture, detention with out due judicial process, has killed thousands of innocent people. America sees UN security council no more than an enforcer of its will and vested interest. How can the world respect such a mafia as the leader. America has trampled roughshod on the human fights of the long suffering people of Palistine, forced them to live im semi-slavery. How can anyone in his right mind respect America. To add insult to injusy, America talks about human rights, it is hypocricy at its best. Where ever there is America in the world, there is war and suffering. In order to live in peace, one has to make the region an Americ free zone.
Posted by Riaz Ahmad | November 24, 2008 2:01 AM