The latest Global Financial Crisis that occurred in August 2007 in the United States is seen as one of the most devastating financial crises since the implementation of Neo-liberal economic policies.
The EU is not currently a military power, despite recent developments. Nor will it be without a standing army or a centralised command structure.
The unilateral projection of peace could become a potent political lever and a game changer in international relations, yet ‘peacefare’ and a ‘peace arsenal’, including confidence-building measures and a conflict-quelling capability, have seldom been looked into.
Security is constructed through processes of social interaction, but cannot be defined as existing only within the speech act. Hence, the definition of security in terms of a discourse-action sequence is problematic, inasmuch as it fails to recognise the complexity of the construction of security in global politics.
The policy of containment led directly to a radical change in the global positioning of the U.S. In the early period of Truman’s presidency U.S. armed forces were undergoing a large-scale programme of demobilisation, yet by its end in 1953 military and economic alliances were held with states in virtually every continent of the globe.
Postmodernism is “seeking out and challenging the endlessly unfolding relationship between knowledge and power, rejecting metanarratives and the Enlightenment project, and seeing ‘truth’ as a temporary social construction limited in time and space”. But do postmodernists have anything meaningful to say about the security challenges facing societies in the developing world?
“Splendid, I shall research on subversive war” declared Major J. C. Holland in 1938 and through his ideas were born the commandos, the deception industry, the escape services and eventually the greater part of the Special Operations Executive (SOE)[1]. The SOE was a new secret service organisation formed by the British Government to coordinate subversion, paramilitary and irregular warfare through foreign resistance movements in territories occupied by the enemy in the Second World War.
Revisionism, by focusing on the U.S.’s use of offensive military capabilities to confront the Soviet Union’s increase in threat, offers the most telling explanation.
Although the race for nuclear weapons created a very tense atmosphere during the Cold War, it was also an effective means to maintain stability because both superpowers had the incentive to avoid using their weapons knowing it would lead to their mutual destruction. Such conditions and incentives do not exist in either unipolar or multipolar systems. Bipolarity is therefore stable thanks to the balance of military power that exists between two superpowers.
Will Obama be able to satisfy the desires of the Israel lobby, his constituency, and the State of Israel sufficiently enough to avoid harming his reelection campaign?
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