GLOBALIZATION AND WAR: ZENPUNDIT

The age of Globalization and War

by Mark Safranski

I can only begin by first thanking the contributors to the roundtable – Bruce Kesler, Doug Macdonald, Simon, Austin Bay, Sam Crane, Josh Manchester, RJ Rummel and Paul Kretkowski – for their time, their effort and the stimulating ideas that they have brought here to the readers. In particular, Josh and Bruce for their ideas and comments as I was in the process of attempting of putting this event together. Your help was most valuable.

I would also like to thank Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye for his tireless efforts in promoting the Roundtable on Globalization and War and his intelligent and perceptive comments on the guest-posts. And to extend my gratitude for the many blogs that linked including Dean’s World, Memeorandum, Winds of Change, The American Future, Coming Anarchy, TDAXP, Grim’s Hall,Regions of Mind, The Duck of Minerva, Live From The FDNF, Phatic Communion, The Small Wars Council, Prometheus6, The Dusty Attic, and last though never least, riting on the wall. You have all helped my readers connect to some very important ideas.

Ideas, which return us to the original premise of the roundtable:the age of globalization and war.

American leaders are encountering a geostrategic situation where the United States has preponderant and often overwhelming advantages in bringing hard power to bear relative to all other states but the environment in which that power is being used is changing rapidly because of globalization. There seems to be a sense of pervasive cognitive dissonance among the bipartisan American elite who continue to speak and act as if the rule-set of twenty years ago still held sway.

Globalization is turning international borders from barriers into mere filters that only marginally impede networking flows of capital, resources, people and knowledge so that it is more accurate to look at any act of war as disturbing a coherent system than as a clash between two isolated opponents. When Bruce Kesler points out that “There is no “foreign policy” separate from domestic policy” he is observing that the luxury that statesmen once had in a less democratic, pre-globalized time to cordon off foreign affairs from internal politics and economic policy is long gone. Politics does not stop at the water’s edge because a global network has no “edge” at which to stop.

War is an ancient art going to the far distant time when the development of language first permitted our stone age ancestors to try to plan an outcome for violent conflict with neighboring tribes. The rise of the state centralized decision-making and staked the claim for sole legitimacy for initiating acts of war; first by Westphalian monarchies and ultimately refined by the mass-production, mass-man, industrial-age, nation-state superpowers. The early Cold War represented the apogee of centralization in warfare as the world began falling into two great ideological camps led by the totalitarian USSR and the liberal democratic United States, to whom lesser ” great powers” ceded their sovereignty as to whether their people’s would endure WWIII or not.

That time too is gone.

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