Excuse me, but when did I get to be blamed for all of the foreign policy ills of our idiot administration who I voted against twice? And when did this get so damned personal? I thought this was a debate about ideas… didn’t know I’d kicked over some sort of far-left teacart by daring to suggest that maybe Iran had done some bad things too…
Sorry, I’m me. Not Scylla, not Bush, not anyone else. I speak for myself.
As to your premise, of course it’s in our own national interest. I thought that was incredibly clear. And I never said we got to dictate what’s good for the rest of the world, but being the big dog on the street means we get to act in ways to defend ourselves. And that includes strategically from emerging threats like a nuclear Iran.
This is utter bunk. The only reason that it’s in any state’s “self-interest” to act altruistically is precisely because its own population is concerned with matters such as fairness and morality in international relations. You pointed out yourself that most people in this thread have been concerned primarily with moral questions over national self-interest. This should be a clue that any state or regime that wants to survive has to make issues of morality central to their policy – or at the very least to their presentation of policy. Most states simply cannot get away with openly cold-blooded and ruthless international policies because their own populations will not put up with it.
Can they to some extent disguise self-interest and make it appear a little less naked? Of course. But the very fact that states are compelled to do that shows how heavily restrained most states are in their actions by ethical considerations.
I agree completely with this premise, but I don’t see how it’s in disagreement with Martin Hyde’s premise. Our self-interest is driven by the desires of our population, which is mostly driven to do the right thing. Politicians realize this, and even if they don’t believe it themselves still know that to keep their jobs, they will act as their populations want them to.
You’re not remotely responding to anything I’ve posted, I’ve never made assertions like this. Where did I say the U.S. or any other power gets to dictate what is in the best interests of weaker states? The U.S. and any “great power” can dictate things to smaller states if the smaller state views it as being in their best interests to cave to the wishes of a superior state. During say, the height of the British Empire, a weaker state would accede to the wishes of the Empire because they realized to do otherwise would mean invasion and devastation, and it was not in the interests of the smaller state to be so invaded. Sometimes the smaller states decided that it was in their best interests to stand up against the Empire for a variety of reasons, sometimes it worked out, often times it didn’t.
During the Cold War, there were two super powers in the wake of World War II. States took sides, and acted in their self-interest to do so. How much of the UK’s long standing support of the United States has to do with the strong Anglo-American relationship, and how much of it has to do with the fact the UK views its position in the world as being better off as a junior partner to the U.S.?
Most of Western Europe, during the Cold War, was sided with the United States, it was a bipolar international system and each of the superpowers had its “junior partner” states. These partnerships broke up over time as the junior partners felt that they no longer served their self-interest. France started to move out of the shadow of the United States as it felt it was in France’s best interests to develop its own nuclear remedy against Moscow instead of living under the U.S. Likewise China (which was never that firmly in the Soviet sphere) gradually moved away from the USSR until, by the end of the Cold War they were outright antagonistic towards one another.
Talking about relative population figures is wholly meaningless and I’m honestly not sure what your point is there, power in the international world is based on a wide battery of criteria population not being the only one.
What is in a state’s self-interests is solely up to that state to determine (and how such things are done are a complex, contentious side issue not worth getting in to right now), no matter how powerful a superpower is, it cannot “decide” the interests of a smaller state. It can put a smaller state in the position of having to choose between kow towing or resisting, and often times in those positions smaller states will decide it is in their best interests not to resist the United States (or insert other super power.)
If you don’t like the fact that greater powers have “unfair” advantages in the game, then unfortunately there isn’t much you can do about it, that’s just the way things are. But the international system is ever changing. Me, and a lot of other experts (no, I’m not counting myself as an expert) in international relations who are way more knowledgeable on this stuff than I am currently believe the world is in a state of transition towards a multipolar system, many prominent thinkers in the field are predicting more and more major wars as this transition happens, and it isn’t an impossibility. You’re going to have a world with the rough powers being the United States, China, Europe (another complex issue is who is actually going to be in “Europe” for the purposes of this, not all European states are necessarily of one mind about working in concert as a major world power.) After that you have debate, with some arguing a resurgent Russia will be one of the major powers and a rising India.
Multipolar systems are always trying to move towards a unipolar world, states are always trying to achieve hegemony, you saw this in Europe from ~1200-1918 or so. You finally have a unipolar system when one power is so great that all of the lesser powers can’t really inhibit the hegemon in any meaningful ways. Unipolar systems likewise tend to degrade to multipolar systems over time as well, usually with disastrous results and great instability (see: Roman Empire.) This can happen because of forces outside the system itself (if talking about a non-global system), or it can happen because gradual changes either weaken the hegemon or strengthen the lesser states (or both.)
How much do you think the U.S. was motivated to help out in the wake of the great tsunami because of an altruistic population and how much do you think it was motivated by the fact that it could ill afford to make any more enemies on the international stage, and in fact could even use the tragedy as an opportunity to make new friends and strengthen old friendships?
I think it’d be hard to argue absolutely one way or the other, there’s two distinct ways to look at it and I know how I do, there’s other schools of thought on the matter and people will of course disagree.
Martin Hyde is presenting the state as a unitary solely self-interested actor who is concerned with ethics only to the extent that it enhances its international reputation. I am disputing that characterization on every level. Ethical considerations are at the core of international relations precisely because populations put those considerations high up in their priority list. i.e. to the extent that a country’s population wants to behave ethically, it will to some degree behave ethically. That I stipulate that individual politicians may be forced to take ethical considerations into account for purely self-interested reasons is not the same as the national self-interest that MH is talking about. These are apples and oranges.
Yeah, this is a classic debate, and your position isn’t invalid by any means, my position is just different. Considering both are established schools of thought on IR going back over 150 years, we’re not going to resolve it here and we’re starting to take the discussion away from Iran with extended asides, so it’s probably for the best we don’t pursue this particular debate since it doesn’t have much to do with the issues of whether or not Iran is a choir boy.
I believe that the two motivations combined. I wouldn’t bother to put a percentage on either.
But I’ll also dispute that this just subjective interpretation. There’s nothing subjective about it. It goes to the heart of what forces drive policy and who is in control of international policy within a given state. In your picture the population would have to have virtually no influence on policy and all policy would be driven by almost robotic mechanisms of self-interest. Perhaps you imagine a cabal of business or military leaders systematically dismissing any ethical considerations and the opinion of their own population when devising policy? Certainly there are times and situations when that is partially accurate, but there is never a time when that is entirely accurate. Ethical considerations will always play a large role in policy – and never purely because the state thinks it can “get something out of it.” It’s because ethics is a central and inescapable feature of human thought.
My position is that states are not in any way motivated by ethics, not that ethics do not have an affect on the decision making at all levels. As I said though, there’s a reason these are called “schools of thought” both realism and liberalism (which is the ethics-laden IR view you’re taking) have entrenched support in academia and geopolitical thought at large. I don’t mind a good old fashioned debate between the two competing theories, but it just feels like we’re moving totally off the track in this thread.
When in reality – and as uglybeech counters – most people are not only ready but demand a certain amount of morality from their Governments. Thus it isn’t true that the sole reason is self-interest, but rather a moral obligation with both their constituents and those afflicted by whatever catastrophe.
And a Government that acts solely on a self-serving basis as Hyde suggests, is a Government that is doomed to die. Witness the travails of BushCo.
Sure, iron-fisted rulers and empires have existed all throughout history, but the fact is I firmly believe that the smaller and more intertwined the world becomes (and it does so now on an almost daily basis) extreme nationalism, conquest and empire are going the way of the dinosaurs. Witness Iraq for a perfect example of repulsion of same.
By the same token, I also think the European social democratic model – in some form or another – is also going to ultimately be adopted globally over the American model of naked capitalism. The gap between the haves and the haves-nots has only increased (and greatly) over the past century – something’s gotta give. Even if there’s still more blood to be shed…
I don’t think this is particularly accurate. While Iran is obviously funding Hezbollah, and there are significant political and ideological links, calling Hezbollah “largely an Iranian proxy army” isn’t very accurate. Hezbollah is a grassroots Lebanese movement which mostly acts on its own, in what its own leadership sees as being in the best interest of Lebanese Shi’ites (regardless of how far they are from that mark in actuality). I’m sure Iran is quite happy with the activities of Hezbollah, but Hezbollah isn’t Iranian. You might as well call the RAF during the Battle of Britain an “American proxy air force” in virtue of Lend Lease.
Well, you’re confusing government (or a specific government administration) with the state, which is not an adept way to look at it. The state is comprised of people and the state’s day-to-day operations are run by a government. A government can act in a self-centered way or it can act in another way, without changing the underlying fact that the state itself acts out of self-interest.
Sometimes that means a government which is self-interested or sometimes not, it depends on a wide range of factors dealing with the internal workings of the state itself.
Why, yes, they should. I can’t see why turkish bureaucrats in Ankara would have any business ruling the turkish Kurdistan against the wishes of its population. Where does this right come from, except, as usual, from the principle “might makes right”?
Well, the problem is that of course Turkish bureaucrats will agree to no such thing, and will fight to keep Turkish Kurdistan under Turkish control. And since Turkey is much more powerful that the Turkish Kurds, or even all the Kurds, Turkey is going to keep control of Turkish Kurdistan for the forseeable future.
Since keeping the Turks pro-western is key to all sorts of western political goals, supporting the creation of Kurdistan is impossible for any government official to do publicly. Turkey, Syria, and Iran aren’t going to cede territory to form Kurdistan without a war. Iraq wouldn’t cede territory to form Kurdistan without a war either, but they’ve already got a war right now and might not have much choice, Iraqi Kurdistan is de facto independent right now, and so Iraqi Kurdistan is the only peaceful part of Iraq.
So what choice do we in the west have? We can’t force Turkey to cede Kurdistan, all we can do is anger them by pressing the issue. What we SHOULD do is work to help liberalize Turkey, then the issue of ceding Kurdistan can be handled politically like Quebec in Canada. But as of today there is no hope.
/shrug, obviously RedFury disagreed, I thought it prudent to not derail the thread but I won’t ignore someone who has brought something up that I’ve said which obviously warrants a response.