Three good stories from the excellent website The Globalist.
-America's neoconservatives: all muscle, no history?. The United States is unique in having a powerful domestic constituency that favors the use of force — or the threat to use force — as the solution of choice to most security challenges. This “all carrot, no stick” approach is puzzling and worrying to many observers. Thomas Wright examines America’s ideological hawks and their post-Iraq future.
-Resurrecting Empire. Some members of the U.S. coalition in Iraq argue that the insurgency there is merely an aberration. But to gloss over resistance of Western subjugation that occurred throughout the Middle East in the past is to ignore a key lesson in history. Author Rashid Khalidi explores how the history of Western domination in the region has conditioned its people to resist outside control.
-Sweden's Long Climb. Conventional wisdom in the US says that social democracy is incompatible with innovation and economic growth and it promotes laziness. One of the keys to understanding modern Sweden is that the country — for a very long time, longer than is widely known — remained very poor. Its economy finally took off in the 19th century, then boomed in the 20th... Rather like the Japanese a little later, having imported innovations, the Swedes began to produce their own.
1 comment:
Thanks for posting this, this looks like an interesting site that I had never seen before.
I read the 'Resurrecting Empire' article and have read similar ones like it. While I don't disagree with the premise I wonder why we never hear arguments from the other direction. For example, you never read "After eight centuries of occupation by the Moors, the Spanish developed a passionate scorn for foreign occupation." Or how about, "While memories of WW I live on in Turkey, a much deeper memory of the sack of Constantinople and the destruction of the Eastern Roman Empire burns in the hearts of Europeans."
Just wondering...
Post a Comment