Strategic theory offers an exact and coherent basis for investigating social phenomena. It is able to de-conflict the attempt to assess social activity designed to achieve goals from arbitrary moral valuations. It facilitates clarity of understanding, and is thereby, mind opening and intellectually liberating.
The real world is too complicated to be explained by absolute or relative gains alone. Both theories treat states as rational and unitary actors. Due to the diversity of interests, it is not easy to define a unitary national interest in some issues. Consequently, gains per se sometimes cannot be clearly stated.
In its autonomous region of Xinjiang China will decide upon its lasting and largely irreversible geopolitical trademark in entering the Global Balkans. Though it is narrow, the window of opportunity exists for China to take a credible leadership for regional peace and secure stable confidence.
The USA is not the only power with key interests in outer space, and will have to pander to other sensitivities in the future. Russia, China, the EU and commercial actors are prevalent in their discussions. We must ask the questions who are we defending from, and to whom are we going to deny the access of space?
The necessities of statecraft require some level of secrecy. Reagan abused this and the results were the Iran-Contra scandal. No President has used the office of the Executive in a more regal, imperial and ordained manner than Ronald Reagan. His use and abuse of the institution to pursue his own ideological doctrine raises the fundamental questionn of whether the concept of democracy is a viable one at all.
Beliefs do matter in foreign policy as decision-making rarely conforms to demanding rational choice models. The power of ideas in international relations highlights particular human weaknesses, which might help understand a number of seemingly inexplicable decisions. Beliefs, however, are only one part of a wider framework.
The Kosovo intervention was the first in history to be justified solely on the basis of human rights breaches by a sovereign state within its territory, which were judged to present threat to international order. The bottom line remains that Belgrade’s sovereignty over Kosovo was first breached and then completely removed by the international community.
Last week, in his regular religion column for the Louisville Courier Journal, journalist Peter Smith discussed the results of a recent survey about climate change. As per usual in the U.S. context, the survey asked whether particular people believed in global warming — as if the science on this question was not largely settled.
From afar, the protests in Arab countries seem broadly similar: economic factors – such as the global recession’s impact on migrant remittances, as well as rising food prices – are being cited as the impetus for the revolts. Yet while economic grievances are not irrelevant, the structural meta-narrative, just like the cultural one, is problematic.
Modern Iran represents one of the biggest waiting games of the world today. A beautiful, civilised, and hospitable country containing one of the nicer peoples on earth, and with a distinguished history to boast, has become one of the world’s most rejected nations ruled by those with standards and practices more suitable to the middle ages than the 21st Century.
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