Bird’s Eye: Janus’ other face looks forward into the future. Sometimes useful, or retrospectively amusing to hear what pundits predicts, (like they all saw the Arab Spring, and OWS coming eh?) Walt, Fisk, and Cole are all insightful analysts, and here’s how they see the future shaping up – or at least the key issues that need to be addressed in it. (Juan Cole says much more on each of his points: we cut to bring you an outline.)
* Wishful Thinking Stephen M. Walt Foreign Policy
A realistic foreign policy seeks to deal with the world as it is, shorn of political illusions…. Above all, realists warn against basing policy on wishful thinking, on the assumption that all will go as we want it to. Yet the pages of history are littered with episodes where leaders made decisions on the basis of false hopes, idealistic delusions, and blind faith…. As evidence, here are my “Top 10 Examples of Wishful Thinking in Contemporary U.S. Foreign Policy.”
…7. Anti-Americanism Can Be Cured By Skillful “Public Diplomacy”
Ever since 9/11, there’s been a tendency to assume that anti-Americanism in the world was mostly due to poor marketing, and that it would decline if we just came up with a better sales pitch. So the Bush administration appointed a former advertising executive to work on polishing America’s “brand” (without success). This response is understandable, because Americans (and some other countries) don’t want to admit that a lot of the opposition they face isn’t due to a misunderstanding about what they stand for or what they are doing. On the contrary, opposition has arisen because other societies do understand what we are doing, and they don’t like it anymore than we would if someone were doing the same thing to us.
To be sure, President Obama is more popular in many parts of the world than President Bush was (admittedly a low bar to clear), but in the areas where opposition to U.S. policy is most apparent (i.e., most of the Middle East), he has had little positive impact. Bottom line: To believe that you can fool people into liking policies that are contrary to their interests is a pernicious form of wishful thinking, because it discourages us from asking whether it is the policies themselves that ought to change.
* Bankers Are The Dictators Of The West Robert Fisk The Independent (Thanks, Gabe!)
Let’s kick off with the “Arab Spring” – in itself a grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle East – and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western capitals. We’ve been deluged with reports of how the poor or the disadvantaged in the West have “taken a leaf” out of the “Arab spring” book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been “inspired” by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and – up to a point – Libya. But this is nonsense.
The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore protests against “democratic” Western governments, so desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries….
And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against “governments”. What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people’s power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of “experts” from America’s top universities and “think tanks”, who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.
* Top 5 Foreign Policy Challenges for US, 2012Juan Cole Informed Comment
My list of challenges last year this time more or less nailed it, especially my concerns about the Mubarak era ending in Egypt. Many of the dangers to which I pointed still exist, of course, but a whole host of new difficulties has emerged.
5. The compromise reached in Yemen is unacceptable to many reformers. Although Ali Abdullah Saieh says he is stepping down in favor of his vice president, he seems likely to remain the power behind the throne.
4. Pakistan’s politics is crisis-prone, but this year governance reached new lows of efficiency. The possibility that president Asaf Ali Zardari attempted to reach out to the US military for help with curbing his own officer corps, dubbed “Memogate” in Islamabad, has made relations between the civilian government and the military “frosty.”
3. The crisis in Syria remains grave. It can only end in one of three ways: The regime succeeds in repressing the reform movement, 2) the reform movement comes to power, or 3) the regime makes enough changes to allow a slow transition away from one-party authoritarianism.
2. The elections in Egypt are producing a parliament strongly dominated by representatives of political Islam, whether the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafis. The Muslim Brotherhood is making it clear that they want to submit the 1979 Camp David Peace treaty to a national referendum.
1. Iran presents the greatest challenges to Washington policy, mainly because Washington insists on building up Iran as a threat…..
