Renewing American Leadership

By Barack Obama

 

Source: Foreign Affairs, August 2007.

 

Summary: After Iraq, we may be tempted to turn inward. That would be a mistake. The American moment is not over, but it must be seized anew. We must bring the war to a responsible end and then renew our leadership — military, diplomatic, moral — to confront new threats and capitalize on new opportunities. America cannot meet this century’s challenges alone; the world cannot meet them without America.

 

Common Security For Our Common Humanity

At moments of great peril in the last century, American leaders such as Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy managed both to protect the American people and to expand opportunity for the next generation. What is more, they ensured that America, by deed and example, led and lifted the world — that we stood for and fought for the freedoms sought by billions of people beyond our borders.

As Roosevelt built the most formidable military the world had ever seen, his Four Freedoms gave purpose to our struggle against fascism. Truman championed a bold new architecture to respond to the Soviet threat — one that paired military strength with the Marshall Plan and helped secure the peace and well-being of nations around the world. As colonialism crumbled and the Soviet Union achieved effective nuclear parity, Kennedy modernized our military doctrine, strengthened our conventional forces, and created the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress. They used our strengths to show people everywhere America at its best.

Today, we are again called to provide visionary leadership. This century’s threats are at least as dangerous as and in some ways more complex than those we have confronted in the past. They come from weapons that can kill on a mass scale and from global terrorists who respond to alienation or perceived injustice with murderous nihilism. They come from rogue states allied to terrorists and from rising powers that could challenge both America and the international foundation of liberal democracy. They come from weak states that cannot control their territory or provide for their people. And they come from a warming planet that will spur new diseases, spawn more devastating natural disasters, and catalyze deadly conflicts.

To recognize the number and complexity of these threats is not to give way to pessimism. Rather, it is a call to action. These threats demand a new vision of leadership in the twenty-first century — a vision that draws from the past but is not bound by outdated thinking. The Bush administration responded to the unconventional attacks of 9/11 with conventional thinking of the past, largely viewing problems as state-based and principally amenable to military solutions. It was this tragically misguided view that led us into a war in Iraq that never should have been authorized and never should have been waged. In the wake of Iraq and Abu Ghraib, the world has lost trust in our purposes and our principles.

From Realism to Postmodernism and Beyond

By Steven E. Lobell

 

Book Review: Jennifer Sterling-Folker (eds.), Making Sense of International Relations Theory, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder, 2005.

 

Source: International Studies Review, Volume 09, Issue 02, Pages 319-321

 

Jennifer Sterling-Folker’s edited volume, Making Sense of International Relations Theory, contains a masterful discussion and application of the major theoretical approaches in international relations. The book contributes to our understanding of the similarities and differences in the core assumptions of eleven key perspectives in international relations and their variations. By applying varying strands of these approaches to a single case (Kosovo), the book also leaves readers with a tangible understanding of the major debates in the field of international relations. A detailed reading should leave the student not only with a thorough knowledge of the field of international relations (IR) but with a deep appreciation for its breadth and diversity.

The central question in Making Sense of International Relations Theory is “how should we study the subject matter of international relations”? For the student, the book is both familiar and unique in comparison with other textbooks. On the one hand, like a typical course reader, the volume is arranged according to the various approaches (see also Der Derian 1995; Doyle and Ikenberry 1997; Betts 2005; Art and Jervis 2007). Yet, Making Sense of International Relations Theory is broader than many existing readers, and it includes approaches that disagree sharply with each other. It includes both positivist and postpositivist approaches. Moreover, the distinction between the two is outlined in Chapter One and reinforced in the nested nature of the book; it is further discussed in Chapter Six on “Postmodern and Critical Theory Approaches.” The approaches covered are realism, liberalism, game theory, constructivism, postmodernism, critical theory, historical materialism, world systems theory, feminism, biopolitics, and the English school-which makes this volume more inclusive than recent appraisals of the field (see, for example, Carlsnaes, Risse, and Simmons 2002; Elman and Elman 2003). Sterling-Folker ably distinguishes the underlying ontological, epistemological, and methodological differences among these approaches. She is particularly clear regarding the distinction between positivist and postpositivist research agendas.

In a manner that is also reminiscent of a textbook, Sterling-Folker has penned overview chapters for each of the eleven approaches covered in the volume. These comprehensive overviews note the theoretical roots, outline the interdisciplinary nature of IR theory, and highlight the core assumptions of each approach (for example, liberalism) and their variations (in the case of liberalism, neoliberal institutionalism and public goods analysis). The reader who wants to delve deeper into the agent-structure debate or the theory of offensive realism, for example, can select texts from the annotated bibliography in the list of “further readings” at the end of each section. This format allows Sterling-Folker to highlight the similarities and differences in the core assumptions across various approaches, to sort out some of the confusion concerning a particular approach, to highlight disputes, and to clarify fallacies and misconceptions about the approaches.

Conversations With Kenneth Waltz: Theory and International Politics

This interview is part of the Institute’s “Conversations with History” series, and uses Internet technology to share with the public Berkeley’s distinction as a global forum for ideas.

 

Detail Conversations

Welcome to a Conversations with History. I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies. Our guest today is Kenneth Waltz, who was the Ford Professor of Political Science at Berkeley. He also taught at Swarthmore and Brandeis, and now is Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Professor Waltz is a former President of the American Political Science Association and a recipient of its James Madison Award for Distinguished Scholarly Contributions to Political Science. He's the author of numerous books including Man, the State, and War; Theory of International Politics; Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics; and, co-authored with Scott Sagan, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons.

Conversations With Ernst B. Haas: Science and Progress in International Relations

This interview is part of the Institute’s “Conversations with History” series, and uses Internet technology to share with the public Berkeley’s distinction as a global forum for ideas.

 

Details Conversations

Welcome to a Conversation with History. I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies. Our guest today is Ernst B. Haas, who is the Robson Research Professor of Government at UC Berkeley [Department of Political Science], where he has taught for 49 years. He is the author of numerous books, including most recently Nationalism, Liberalism, and Progress, When Knowledge is Power, and, in an earlier period, Beyond the Nation State, and The Uniting of Europe.