By David Pan · Friday, February 13, 2009 This talk was presented at the 2009 Telos Conference.
As we consider U.S. foreign policy for the next several years, there seems to be a growing consensus that the United States will have to adjust to a less unilateral role in maintaining world order and that we will be living in a more multipolar world. This is the conclusion of Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, recently published by the National Intelligence Council. But this report’s view that such a multipolar world will lead to both an end of ideology and a return to the kind of balance of power politics of the nineteenth century overlooks major ideological differences between different cultures that will likely become more prominent in global politics. To understand why, we should consider both the motivations of recent U.S. engagements with the rest of the world and the ideological implications of shifting power constellations in the future.
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By David Pan · Thursday, June 12, 2008 Though it is still premature to speak of a victory in Iraq, there seems to be no question that the tide of the war has turned against al-Qaeda and Muqtada al-Sadr’s militias and toward the Iraqi government. As Kimberly Kagan and Frederick W. Kagan remark, “where the U.S. was unequivocally losing in Iraq at the end of 2006, we are just as unequivocally winning today.” This turn of events in the last 18 months, and particularly since March, confirms the wisdom of the U.S. military’s turn to a classic counterinsurgency approach to the war, involving a focus on protecting the civilian population and building close relationships with local groups. Their ability to effect this turnaround so quickly is a tribute to their flexibility and resourcefulness in shifting their basic stance. But it is also an indication about some of the ideological realities in Iraq.
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By David Pan · Saturday, March 22, 2008 Though different enemies have come and gone, the ideological underpinnings of U.S. foreign policy have remained fairly consistent from the Vietnam War to the present War in Iraq. The goal of this foreign policy has been to defend liberal democracy against its opponents, but this goal has been undermined both in Vietnam and in Iraq by the neoconservative belief that the aspiration to democracy is universal because everyone is interested in freedom. This argument neglects the fact that the U.S. is not promoting democracy per se, but a particular form of democracy dominated by liberal principles of government. Because liberal democracy consists of a set of procedures like elections and legislative decision-making, neoconservatives assume that it is a universal and rational form of government that can be implemented anywhere and anytime in order to create human freedom. But procedures such as elections and legislatures are not in fact a part of a universal aspiration toward freedom but make up a set of specific traditions and rituals. The establishment of liberal democracy consequently is not simply a matter of allowing a natural development to occur in the absence of violence, but consists in the establishment of a certain form of political representation and liberal procedures.
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