The Wilsonian Triad

As part of my promise to share more interesting information from my foreign policy/international studies course, here is an in-class response I had written last week– summarizing the ideals that have dominated U.S. and Western foreign policy.  All of the writing is my own work, but the information is from a variety of sources (all of which I do not claim to own.. etc [insert disclaimer here]).  I wrote this in 1-hr, so if it’s imperfect…well, you’ll know why.

Oh, and thanks to my professor for being an incredible teacher.

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In analyzing the significant political and economic changes in the past 150 years, it is very important to examine the most prevalent shifts in our global system: the rise from agrarian societies to vastly and rapidly industrialized nations, and the deeply and profound impacts of the fall of global capitalism — particularly relating to social stability.

The biggest contribution to the rise of capitalism and free markets was the industrial revolution.  The revolution included the developments of faster transportation (i.e. railroads), which extended communication.  The growth of industries expanded and created a new system where humans became a commodity–machines that were considered assets to the industry.  This rapid growth and automation of humanity led to one of the most destructive wars and the first modern war: World War I.

Fought to the death, WWI was so absurdly devastating that leaders–particularly President Woodrow Wilson–sought to prevent such modern catastrophes to ever occur again.  This led to the “Liberal Theory of History” and the subsequent Bretton Woods Order: theories that both advocated democracy, free markets–which would provide economic and political stability– in order to achieve universal peace (the Wilsonian Triad).

What followed the devastation of WWI and later reaffirmed these ideas was one of the largest financial failures of laissez faire capitalism: The Great Depression.   During the Great Depression, unemployment skyrocketed and severe economic instability fed public unrest.  The insecurity within markets led to people thirsty for change and revolution, and even led to the growth of the German Nazi Party–whose country experienced extreme hyperinflation and economic instability.  As part of his fourteen points of peace, Wilson sought to create the League of Nations and build relationships among the WWI-ravaged European countries, but when WWII broke out, this institution collapsed and Wilson’s dream for the “war to end all wars” collapsed with it.

Nevertheless, as another war waged in Europe and the U.S. “saved the day” by bombing Nagasaki and Hiroshima and by helping rebuild Europe via the Marshall Plan, the ideas of maintaining free markets and democracy in the world continued to dominate American policy.  With institutions like the IMF and the World Bank to regulate exchange rates and fund reconstruction efforts, the “New World Order” was pushed upon the 21st century as the best political and economic alternative to achieving prosperity and peace.  The idea was that free markets –with a decent amount of Keynesian reform and some government control–could move forward to yield wealth in places where it can be most beneficial.  When countries traded, had comparative advantage, and reached a theoretical level of “no waste,” everyone would be employed, satisfied, and less likely to cause uproarious events such as revolutions.  Furthermore, a democracy where the political system is created “for the people, by the people” also adds to the idea of socioeconomic stability and that democratic liberal-market nations would not wage wars.

Interestingly enough, as these three main ideas of peace, democracy, and free markets took hold of the modern world, many “new” democracies emerged to challenge these theories.  In the case of Martin Jacques’s book When China Rules the World, Jacques describes an asianized form of democracy yielding prosperity in the Asian Tigers — especially Japan.  The Anglo-American form of democracy, which is supposed to be the only and best form in achieving peace, is not the system that has taken shape in modern Asia.

So, if democracy and free markets lead to both peace and modernity, what makes of the East and Southeast Asian cases? Singapore has survived and prospered under autocratic and free-market ideals, while Japan has prospered under a bureaucratic, “top-to-bottom” system.

Today, as globalization in economics and politics intertwine the East and the West, the ideas of free markets, democracy, and peace are ever more contested.  With a market-socialist periphery country such as China rising to meet the hegemonic standards of Europe and the U.S., the world will need to pay close attention to the developments of the 21st century.  It took the Great Depression, two extremely disconnecting world wars, and rampant political turmoil in the world to yield the modern liberal market, Bretton Woods, and U.N. system that we have today…What will it take for another revolutionary change or reform to occur in the global socioeconomic system?  It appears only time will tell–or the advocates of the Wilsonian Triad will not let that happen.

Dead in the Family

The next Sookie Stackhouse installment is finally here!

I got my book in the mail this weekend… and finished it in 48 hours.  As usual, it was a GREAT read, and I’m depressed all over again that I’ll have to wait a whole other year for the next installment. To deal with my re-withdrawal symptoms, I’ve thought about getting into watching True Blood (the HBO adaption of Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse books) but I just can’t bring myself to watch it.  I guess I’m just such a loyalist when it comes to books: if the movie/tv series is not close to the plot of the novel, I have an extremely hard time enjoying it.  Who knows? Maybe one of these days I’ll snap and cave into the HBO pressure.

Anyway, loved it loved it LOVED it!  I might just reread the whole series this summer.

Dragon’s Lair

With time constraints and too much material to narrow-down and compile into short blog posts, I have yet to share with you the many intriguing lectures my foreign policy/international studies professor has given.  However, with recent developments in the attempted Times Square ‘terrorist attack’ and the BP oil spill, I thought sharing this small excerpt from Michael Mandelbaum’s book The Ideas that Conquered the World would be most appropriate and interesting.

Excerpt from chapter 7 – “Dragon’s Lair.”

“The terrible events of September 11, 2001 evoked memories of another deadly assault on the United States sixty years earlier: The Japanese attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.  In the magnitude of their historical impact the two events differed dramatically.  The first was part of the bloodiest and most destructive war in human history, the outcome of which reordered the world and altered America’s place in it.  The consequences of the second were far more modest, but did bear some resemblance to those of the first: The American public rallied in support of a foreign war–this one in Afghanistan.

There is another instructive parallel between December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001.  Both attacks shocked the United States and the world, yet forewarnings were abundant in each case. The United States was sharply at odds with Japan over Japanese policies in Asia, and Tokyo had made plain that it regarded the oil embargo that Washington had imposed earlier that year, in response to the continuing Japanese occupation of China, as a severe provocation.

Similarly, the terrorist group responsible for the September 11 attacks, Al Qaeda, had claimed responsibility for three previous attacks on Americans outside the United States: against American soldiers in Somalia in October 1993; against American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998; and against the USS Cole, an American naval vessel anchored outside Aden, the capital of Yemen, on October 12, 2000.

The attacks of September 11 should not have shocked the world as they did for yet another reason.  The personnel, the resources, and the motivation for them all came from a part of the world well recognized as the source of the greatest post-Cold War threats to the world’s core: the largely Muslim part of Eurasia stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.

On early European maps, unexplored parts of the world thought to be dangerous were marked by the Latin warning “Cave, hic dragones“–Beware, here are dragons.   At the outset of twenty-first century, the region deserving of that phrase was the Middle East.  But unlike the European mariners of centuries before, the countries of the core knew precisely what dangers lurked there, though they could not easily avoid them.”

[Into the next section, "Oil"]

“…For part of the modern period the Western core had controlled much of the region, through imperial rule or mandates established by international bodies such as the League of Nations.  Borders were often drawn arbitrarily, laying the basis for the familiar kind of post-Cold War instability in which dissatisfied minorities chafe at the political arrangements with which they have been saddled.  But the Middle East was different from the rest of the periphery in one immensely consequential way.  What made it important was its oil….

During the Cold War, oil gave the countries of the Middle East a measure of independence from and indeed leverage against the United States and the Soviet Union, despite the intervention of both superpower s in the political and military affairs of the region.  It gave Middle Eastern rulers the means to appease or repress discontented groups without having to rely on the generosity of the core powers, and it made the Middle East more significant to the core tha nany other region in the world’s periphery, so significant that the core powers were prepared to go to war to protect their interests there.

The signifance of oil was very much a feature of the modern age.  It owed its value to the industrial revolution… Oil came to be known as “black gold” and like gold it was a kind of universal currency…Oil was also known as “the blood of the earth,” and it was almost as vital to the arteries of industrial economies as is blood to the human body.  A better comparison of this kind, however, was with oxygen, something just as important but externally supplied.  Oil, like oxygen, could be cut off, imposing the economic equivalent of suffocation. Economic strangulation, the withholding of supplies of oil from the Persian Gulf region, was the great strategic danger to the Western liberal core during the Cold War; it remained a danger, although a less acute one, after the Cold War’s end.

The West faced two associated dangers: that these reserves would come under the control of people who would place unacceptable conditions on their continued flow to the West, thereby subjecting the West to blackmail, and that those who controlled the oil would accumulate great wealth from its sale that would underwrite political and military power that they would turn against the West itself.”

Very, very interesting book.  I’ll try to share another interesting excerpt soon.  Makes you think though, doesn’t it?