Robert Kagan has come out with a new essay that is decidedly less revolutionary than his earlier "Of Power and Paradise," which captured the mood of the 2003 transatlantic feud.In this new essay in Policy Review, Kagan comes to a realization about the nature of American power and world order that others have been arguing …
Tag: US foreign policy
Adrift in a sea of information
In this earlier post, I talked about how incapable the LDP and the Abe Cabinet are at coping with a messy, complicated media environment.I might as well have been discussing the US government's public diplomacy efforts.This problem has vexed me for some time. Joseph Nye's soft power concept is a useful way of thinking about …
Benign neglect for the alliance?
Upon further reflection, I wonder if the Asia team that the Bush administration has assembled — which I previously discussed here — for its final years in office might be a good thing for the US-Japan alliance.For too long, the alliance has been a cozy love fest. Even in rough patches, the alliance has been …
Idealism, realism, and US China policy
Over at Foreign Policy, China scholar David Lampton and journalist James Mann debate the argument presented in Mann's new book, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression. (The subtitle really says it all.) (Hat tip: China Digital Times)There is no love lost between Lampton and Mann in this debate, and its implications …
Alliance tension out in the open
The Asahi Shimbun's English edition printed a story today suggesting that US Secretary of State Rice told Japanese officials last month that resolving the abductions issue is not a precondition for the removal of North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.In previous posts such as this one, I suggested that Japan seems …
The global order election
As commentators assess the results of the first debate among the (declared) candidates for the Republican nomination for the 2008 US presidential election (check out the summary by Slate's John Dickerson), it is becoming increasingly clear what the central question of the 2008 election ought to be.Namely, how can the US, as the Washington Post's …
The hint of a worldview
Barack Obama has delivered his own "major foreign policy speech," at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. (Full text available here; NY Times article here.)This speech is not worth reading for its policy proposals, which are more or less standard Democratic boilerplate proposals. Rather, as Scott Paul writes at The Washington Note, this kind of …
The shape of months to come?
The Council on Foreign Relations links to a "major" foreign policy speech by former governor of Massachusetts and Republican candidate for president Mitt Romney, delivered at Texas A & M with former President George H.W. Bush in attendance.Numbers of times China mentioned?Zero.Number of times Asia mentioned?Zero.How a serious presidential candidate can deliver a foreign policy …
China in charge
The FT ran an article on Wednesday dissecting the process of releasing the frozen $25 million to North Korea. I was especially struck by this line:Several people familiar with the debate said Hank Paulson, Treasury secretary, agreed to overrule officials responsible for terrorism financing, who objected to the move, after Beijing warned that a failure …
The future of American power
I found this post by Suzanne Nossel at Democracy Arsenal fascinating, in that it is a fair, reasonable critique of the Iraq War that does not indict the very idea of the US using its power in support of its values abroad.I particularly like her points "the US Military has limits" and "military power can't …
Tobias S. Harris 