Follow Up With The Liberty Pen
Below are my comments on my general foreign policy vision, however, I encourage all to read the Liberty Pen's response as well as I think it is extremely well thought through and eloquent.
"I consider myself largely a "realist." I find myself drawn to the timeless insights of Thucydides as well as modern scholars of international relations such as Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger.
However, while I would say I definitely lean in that direction, I find it difficult to completely accept the framework of balance of power that is implicit within classical and even neo-realism. While this concept is considered nearly sacrosanct for many, I think it is depressing. To believe that man must always live under the shadow cast by transitory alignments of power does not seem to me to be all that enobling, and I believe that nobility is something that all true statesman should aspire to.
While I believe the below quote from Kissinger's doctoral thesis encapsulates my overall vision of what a good statesman should be, I reserve the right to hope for something less ephemeral than what we have seen in previous eras dominated by these so-called balances of power.
"But the claims of the prophet are sometimes as dissolving as those of the conqueror. For the claims of the prophet are a counsel of perfection, and perfection implies uniformity. Utopias are not achieved except by a process of leveling and dislocation which must erode all patterns of obligation. These are the two great symbols of the attacks on the legitimate order: the Conqueror and the Prophet, the quest for universality and for eternity, for the peace of impotence and the peace of bliss.
But the statesman must remain forever suspicious of these efforts, not because he enjoys the pettiness of manipulation, but because he must be prepared for the worst contingency."
As for being isolationist, I am not. I believe that a desire to return to some idyllic image of the past borders on being a type of utopianism. The world has grown too interconnected with both opportunities, and more importantly, threats. When one lives in a world where a handful of men with access to the right technology can kill the number of people that used to take a full-scale army, we cannot be sanguine and wait to react after the fact. To this extent, I am not an opponent of the concept of preemption. While I believe one must be prudent in the deploying of force, as frivolous uses of military power undeniably degrade its potential, neither do I think we can afford to always wait until definitive proof is available.As for the neoconservatives, I feel they largely attempted a noble project in Iraq, but they failed due to an inability to recognize the limitations of attemtpting to impose radical changes within a cultural milieu that they largely did not understand. To that end, they, not entirely unlike Marxists, became enraptured by utopianism. If a neoconservative was, as Irving Kristol famously asserted, a "liberal mugged by reality", I would have to say that I am something of a neoconservative mugged by reality as it relates to international relations. I do not hold onto their illusions and realize the eternal validity of much of what classical realism offers. However, I have to aspire and hope for others to aspire as well, to something higher than sacrificing upon the altar of power which seems so much of what realism passes for."
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