zenpundit.com

THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN HISTORY OVER AT THE AMERICAN FUTURE

Marc Shulman has a couple of interesting posts up; the first on how professional historians rate George W. Bush and another from Oxblog on a realist critique of an American president. I won’t spoil the second post by naming the critiquer but he was in my view not a realist but one of the biggest fools who ever posed as an American statesman. Had his views prevailed in foreign policy the world might have become a very grim place.

For those interested in the first topic, HNN has had a similar discussion recently where their survey revealed 81 % of professional historians rated George W. Bush a “failure “ – thus demonstrating once again the political gulf between a radical left to liberal academic world and the rest of America is substantial.

In the old days – roughly my grandfather’s time – the unwritten rule for historical writing was not to tackle subjects any closer to the historian than approximately before the French Revolution. This rule began to break down during WWII when Pieter Geyl wrote his seminal Napoleon, For and Against while living in Nazi occupied Holland, which drew daringly obvious parallels to current events. After the war, journalist William Shirer shattered all historical shibboleths in 1960 by publishing his monumental The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Shirer’s book suffered the flaws expected from an author with too much proximity to his subject both in terms of experience ( he covered Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler as a reporter) and time but in doing so he launched a vast field of research for historians and political scientists alike.

Today, historians comment openly and frequently on current events – I’m a prime example having been trained as an academic historian though that’s not my occupation – overall I think this is a good thing because historians bring both an unusual body of context knowledge to the table as well as ( hopefully) rigorous analytical methodology. I have a number of historians like Judith Klinghoffer, Juan Cole and the Cliopatriarchs and cognate scholars like Milt Rosenberg, Thomas Barnett and The Volokh Conspiracy on my blogroll for this very reason – their professional insight that journalists and pundits typically lack.

That being said, academics make a terrible misjudgement by misrepresenting their instant analysis of contemporary events on their blogs or in op-ed pieces as sound scholarship, particularly historical scholarship. It isn’t. It’s informed, expert opinion and interesting to be sure, compared to lightweight ruminating by airhead anchors in the MSM but the methodology, documents and peer review simply are not there. The official declassified state papers for American foreign policy – The Foreign Relations of the United States series- is only just now opening up the Nixon-Ford years to scrutiny. There is much left for this period in the National Archives, at the CIA, at Defense and at presidential libraries to be declassified – to say nothing of the Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush II administrations.

There are a lot of assumptions about modern presidencies culled from memoirs, interviews, leaks and flat-out urban legends that have grown through repetition into conventional wisdom. Some of it is pure nonsense that will eventually be brutally debunked – like Eisenhower’s former image as a genial, out-of-touch, caretaker that concealed the reality of a ruthless and determined Chief executive, deeply influenced by his WWII supreme command experience, who kept an ironfisted control over foreign affairs and intelligence policy.

Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton will look different to our children than to us. So will George W. Bush. Their view will likely be much closer to the truth than our own.

FOR ALL THOSE INTERESTED IN PNM THEORY – AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT BY DR. THOMAS BARNETT

(For the direct link go here🙂

” When C-SPAN broadcasts the latest iteration of my brief tomorrow night at 8pm EST (followed by the live, call-in show), I and my team expect to see this site flooded with hits, just as it was last time the network put me on.

But it will be even more a flood, I hope, than last time, because this time C-SPAN will be showing both my website URL and my email address. For each I gave them the thomaspmbarnett.com coordinates rather than my war college stuff. Why?

I killed all my web presence at the college a while back when I was subtly threatened with charges of conflict of interest by people there with potential to hurt me. I had had webmaster rights at the college for a very long time, going all the way back to Y2K. I was, in fact, the first professor granted such rights to post his material. The problem had become, of course, the success that was PNM. In a world where the usual first run of an academic book is in the high hundreds or low thousands, selling over 50k volumes puts you under a lot of scrutiny.

So rather than have my NWC online presence come under attack, I simply killed it, and started pushing all my PNM-related correspondence, no matter who was the source, in the direction of thomaspmbarnett.com, the site that bore the brunt of the scrutiny the last time C-SPAN broadcast the brief and this time will hopefully attract all the attention lest I be accused once again of abusing any standing I might have with the government.

This time, however, we have a different plan in place, and you’ll see the outlines of that plan on the front page of this site starting tomorrow.

In short, I am diversifying. While the college is pushing me to make my work exclusively naval in nature, I want my interactions with the wider world—the everything else—to not suffer in this process (assuming I choose to remain at the college despite the narrowing of my work there), so I need to make thomaspmbarnett.com better at conducting that larger dialogue with that outside world.

How will this be achieved? Tomorrow you’ll see the front page of my site divided into a series of clustered links that represent the various avenues I see myself and others pursuing in terms of a broadband dialogue with the world on the multitude of subjects presented in PNM. So besides the usual clusters on my writings, the book itself, and me the person, you’ll see explicit links to three new avenues of activity for me:

1) my public speaking function, conducted through the Leigh Bureau;



2) a newsletter based on the blog and my writings in general, called the Rule Set Reset; and



3) a consultancy for non-governmental clients (non-federal, that is) where I come together with a quartet of colleagues, both old and new, in an LLC called The New Rule Sets Project.



Let me explain that last bit a bit more:

? Who constitutes NRSP? Me and four of my hand-selected fellow change agents in a collaborative and strategic effort.

? What will this company be about? It will provide structure, process and capacity to develop, refine, and share my message with more nodes than I can reach on my own (frankly, I need several more me’s to keep up with things now!).

? Where will this space be found? www.newrulesets.com.

? When will it appear? Sometime in the next 24 hours, by the grace of God and my webmaster Critt.

? Why am I doing this? This is one of the many paths to my ultimate purpose that I am pursuing.

That’s the quick preview. For more information, you need to visit the sites and pages associated with each endeavor.

Where will all these new avenues take me? I have no idea. The everything else and the everyone else will decide that. My goal in all of this is the same goal I’ve always had—a future worth creating. “

BRIEF COMMENT:

Readers will note that I already have a blogroll link to the New Rule Set Project that I put up during the initial construction phase by Critt Jarvis that has since been taken down and redirects the visitor to Tom’s weblog. The preliminary graphics though were excellent – conveying a clear visual “message” even though little text was available at the time. ( Oh, the things I would do here at Zenpundit if I had a fraction of real technical skills ! ) When the NRSP site goes ” live ” again I will try to immediately correct my link here is there have been any changes in address.

I will also have further commentary on the project itself and it’s implications for PNM theory after I watch the C-Span broadcast of the interview with Dr. Barnett tomorrow evening.

PERLE’S (of) WISDOM

I seldom have the time or patience these days to watch much television but this morning I was puttering with my coffee and I turned on ABC’s This Week program and was pleasantly surprised that they had two heavyweights, Fareed Zakaria and Richard Perle, discussing Iraq’s upcoming election with George Will.

Will, who turned critical on Iraq some time ago, sought to make the case ( a little intellectual preemption here by Dr. Will) that unlike El Salvador’s election under fire twenty years ago – which I believe Will at the time hailed as a decisive turning point – the election in Iraq would change little. (This of course, begs the question of why the Iraqi insurgency then is so desperate to prevent voters from going to the polls but no one pointed that out on the show).

Zakaria correctly and immediately responded that an elected Iraqi government would have real legitimacy and that would make it more effective internationally and in terms of dealing with the insurgents. Zakaria also criticized the Bush administration for not engaging the international community, in particular KSA, Egypt and even Syria, in working toward a successful outcome to the election and contrasted that with how Afghanistan’s election was handled diplomatically.

Richard Perle then observed of those Arab countries ( I am paraphrasing) ” That’s because they are on the other side “.

Think what you may of Richard Perle and neoconservatism’s prescriptions for grand strategy but he certainly can discern the heart of the matter. The only governments that have an interest in seeing Iraq’s election come off as a success are those of the United States, Britain, Israel and Iran and all for different reasons. Even the provisional Allawi regime, since it is likely to lose at the polls, is better off with chaos ensuing on election day because that would give the regime a new lease on life to cancel the results as tainted and try again in six months or a year.

As a practical matter, Germany, France, the UN kleptocracy and possibly China would like to see the elections fail in order to further rein in America and discourage future ” unilateral” regime change adventures on the Iraq model. They want a veto over future Leviathan activity in order to safeguard their own Gap interests. An undemocratic but stable Iraq that will cut special, exclusive, deals with them on oil concessions is vastly preferred to a democratic Iraq that will adopt a market mechanism on oil.

More important however is the clash of Rule-Sets going on here. By insisting on real elections in Iraq the United States is upending an important Rule-Set that under international law the legitimacy of a recognized government to exercise sovereignty has nothing to do with that nation’s internal affairs. This is more radical a proposition for the diplomatic set than it seems at first glance.

The de facto connection between democracy and legitimacy is a longstanding international trend than goes back for decades and accelerated circa 1989 but the United States has amplified this trend into an emerging Rule-Set principle that ultimately threatens the existence of all undemocratic regimes. The justifications of tyrants, UN resolutions, mystical appeals to the authority of God or the Nation or the Race or the Working Class- none of these things can sanctify power with the respect that transforms it into authority. Legitimacy, we are saying, rests only with ” the consent of the governed”.

Iraq’s Arab neighbors will be the first to feel the effects if the election succeeds but they will not be the last.

BLOGCRASTINATION

Next week should see some blogging in earnest but right now I’ve got a couple of projects of higher importance and some pesky social duties tonight, one of which is writing out Christmas cards for my female co-workers. Why you may ask ?

First, they are a pleasant, attractive and fun bunch and I consider many of them to be my friends. Secondly, knowing me as well as they do, I’ve already received a few ” early-birds” on my desk this week as a symbolic reminder to get my act together and make sure I give them some cards. Frankly, it’s a small price to pay to make certain that the tsunami of collective Christmas female rage is directed at some other unfortunate carrier of the Y chromosome.

And no, I don’t give any cards to the guys. In general, none of the men, myself included, really care if they get a card or not. Plus, I’d rather not be on a Christmas card basis with my male co-workers – I think they feel the same way. In fact, if one of us were so foolish as to try to start that kind of a tradition we’d accept his card with a wan grimace and then discuss amongst ourselves when we first noticed his latent homosexual tendencies.

VICTORIA’S SECRET BENEATH THE CHADOR

You can call it ” connectivity” or ” westoxification” but when even Islamist regimes can’t reap benefits from the Core without inadvertantly increasing choice for their own people their ideology is doomed.