Nye / Rice / Burns The World Turned Upside Down

Maintaining American Leadership in a Dangerous Age
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5439-2333-9
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Aspen Policy Books is a series of annual publications on the United States' most pressing foreign policy and national security issues. In 2017, the Aspen Strategy Group examined the future of the liberal world order. The papers in this volume outline the history and importance the system of institutions and normative values that have underpinned the international system since the end of WWII. They also highlight some of the key threats to this order that have emerged over the past several years and endeavor to provide practical recommendations for meeting these challenges.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nye, Joseph

Rice, Condoleezza

Burns, Nicholas

Zelikow, Philip

Froman, Michael

Car,

Price, Jonathon

Bitounis, Leah

Leseproben

The Ninth Annual Ernest May Memorial Lecture The Idealism of What Works Philip Zelikow Professor University of Virginia Editor’s Note: Philip Zelikow presented the annual Ernest R. May Memorial Lecture at the Aspen Strategy Group’s August 2017 Summer Workshop in Aspen, Colorado. The following are his remarks delivered at the meeting. The Ernest May Memorial Lecture is named for Ernest May, an international relations historian and Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government professor, who passed away in 2009. ASG developed the lecture series to honor Professor May’s celebrated lectures. I start with a Tale of Two Prophets. This tale comes from that terrible and glorious decade, the 1940s. The two prophets predicted the future of freedom. My first prophet was a man named James Burnham. In 1941 Burnham was thirty-five years old. From a wealthy family—railroad money—he was a star student at Princeton, then on to Balliol College, Oxford. Burnham was an avowed communist. He joined with Trotsky during the 1930s. By 1941 Burnham had moved on as he published his first great book of prophecy, called The Managerial Revolution. The book made him a celebrity. It was widely discussed on both sides of the Atlantic. Burnham’s vision of the future is one where the old ideologies, like socialism, have been left behind. The rulers are really beyond all that. They are the managerial elite, the technocrats, the scientists, and the bureaucrats who manage the all-powerful enterprises and agencies. You know this vision. You have seen it so often at the movies. It is the vision in all those science fiction dystopias. You know, with the gilded masterminds ruling all from their swank towers and conference rooms. It’s a quite contemporary vision. For instance, it is not far at all from the way I think the rulers of China imagine themselves and their future. In this and other writings Burnham held up Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany as the pure exemplars of these emerging managerial states. They were showing the way to the future. By comparison, FDR’s New Deal was a primitive version. And he thought it would lose. Burnham’s views were not so unusual among the leading thinkers of the 1940s, like Joseph Schumpeter or Karl Polanyi. All were pessimistic about the future of free societies, including Friedrich Hayek, who really believed that once-free countries were on the “road to serfdom.” But Burnham took the logic further. Just after the Second World War ended my other prophet decided to answer Burnham. You know him as George Orwell. Eric Blair, who used George Orwell as his pen name, was about Burnham’s age. Their backgrounds were very different. Orwell was English. Poor. Orwell’s lungs were pretty rotten and he would not live long. Orwell was a democratic socialist who came to loathe Soviet communism. He had volunteered to fight in Spain, was shot through the throat. Didn’t stop his writing. Orwell was profoundly disturbed by Burnham’s vision of the emerging “managerial state.” All too convincing. Yet he also noticed how, when Burnham described the new superstates and their demigod rulers, Burnham exhibited “a sort of fascinated admiration.” Orwell wrote: For Burnham, “Communism may be wicked, but at any rate it is big: it is a terrible, all-devouring monster which one fights against but which one cannot help admiring.” To Orwell, Burnham’s mystical picture of “terrifying, irresistible power” amounted to “an act of homage, and even of self-abasement.”1 Burnham had predicted Nazi victory. Later, Burnham had predicted the Soviet conquest of all Eurasia. By 1947 Burnham was calling for the US to launch a preventive nuclear war against the Soviet Union to head off the coming disaster. Orwell saw a pattern. Such views seemed symptoms of “a major mental disease, and its roots,” he argued, “lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.” Orwell thought that “power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.” Orwell had another critique. He deplored, “[t]he tendency of writers like Burnham, whose key concept is ‘realism,’ is to overrate the part played in human affairs by sheer force.” Orwell went on: “I do not say that he is wrong all the time….But somehow his picture of the world is always slightly distorted.” Finally, Orwell thought Burnham overestimated the resilience of the managerial state model and underestimated the qualities of open and civilized societies. Burnham’s vision did not allow enough play for “the fact that certain rules of conduct have to be observed if human society is to hold together at all.”2 Having written these critical essays, Orwell then tried to make his case against Burnham in another way. This anti-Burnham argument became a novel. The novel called 1984. That book came out in 1949. Orwell died the next year. By that time, Burnham had become a consultant to the CIA, advising its new office for covert action. That was the capacity in which Burnham met the young William F. Buckley. Burnham mentored Buckley. It was with Buckley that Burnham became one of the original editors of the National Review and a major conservative commentator. In 1983 President Reagan awarded Burnham the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Not that Burnham’s core vision had changed. In 1964 he published another book of prophecy. This was entitled Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. The Soviet Union and its allies had the will to power. Liberalism and its defenders did not. “The primary issue before Western civilization today, and before its member nations, is survival.” (Sound familiar?) And it was liberalism, Burnham argued, with its self-criticism and lack of commitment, that would pull our civilization down from within. Suicide. So was Burnham wrong? Was Orwell right? This is a first-class historical question. Burnham’s ideal of the “managerial state” is so alive today. State the questions another way. Do open societies really work better than closed ones? Is a more open and civilized world really safer and better for Americans? If we think yes, then what is the best way to prove that point? My answer comes in three parts. The first is about how to express our core values. American leaders tend to describe their global aims as the promotion of the right values. Notice that these are values in how other countries are governed. President Obama’s call for an “international order of laws and institutions” had the objective of winning a clash of domestic governance models around the world. This clash he called “authoritarianism versus liberalism.” Yet look at how many values he felt “liberalism” had to include. For Obama the “road of true democracy” included a commitment to “liberty, equality, justice, and fairness” and curbing the “excesses of capitalism.”3 What about our current president? Last month he urged his listeners to be ready to fight to the death for the “values” of the West. He named two: “individual freedom and sovereignty.” A week later two of his chief aides, Gary Cohn and H.R. McMaster, doubled down on the theme that America was promoting, with its friends, the values that “drive progress throughout the world.” They too had a laundry list. They omitted “sovereignty.” But then, narrowing the list only to the “most important,” they listed “[T]he dignity of every person…equality of women…innovation…freedom of speech and of religion…and free and fair markets.”4 By contrast, the antiliberal core values seem simple. The antiliberals are for authority…and against anarchy and disorder. And they are for community…and against the subversive, disruptive outsider. There are of course many ways to define a “community.” Tribal…religious…political…professional. It is a source of identity, of common norms of behavior, of shared ways of life. Devotees of freedom and liberalism do not dwell as much on “community.” Except to urge that everybody be included. And treated fairly. But beliefs about “community” have always been vital to human societies. In many ways, the last 200 years have been battles about how local communities try to adapt or fight back against growing global pressures—especially economic and cultural, but often political and even military. So much of the divide between antiliberals or liberals is cultural. Little has to do with “policy” preferences. Mass politics are defined around magnetic poles of cultural attraction. If Americans engage this culture war on a global scale, I plead for modesty and simplicity....