I haven’t gotten far into my Walter Lippmann but one of the themes he strikes is the problem of an educated citizenry. Whereas liberal theory of democracy (particularly of the Progressive Era, but continues to date) holds that the citizenry needs to be educated in areas of public importance, Lippman points out that being knowledgeable, much less an expert, in every field of public interest is impossible. What we need is some mechanism in the public sphere to make sense, not only of vast bodies of facts, histories, and cultures, but also to prioritize the citizenry’s knowledge.
No where does this problem strike me as graver than in the realm of foreign policy. Understandably, the Middle East and, secondarily, East Asia, have come to occupy our attention. By which I mean the attention of this administration, the attention of Congress, the attention of the educated classes who discuss policy, and the attention of the news media. There are a couple of exceptions (Darfur, for instance), but in general, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Southeast Asia only pop up in our consciousness when a small crisis emerges to force them there. On one hand this makes sense (we can’t follow everything at once), on the other hand it may be short sighted (we may be underestimating the long-term global importance of these regions)
For that reason, I really appreciated a guest post at Democracy Arsenal, from the pen of Latin American security expert Adam Isacson. He notes how "If you want to read English-language news about what’s going on in the region, you’ve usually got to turn to the ‘World Roundup’ of wire-story excerpts on page A27 of your paper." But what I particularly liked was his point that our missteps in the Middle East seem predicated on losing touch with our problematic history in Latin America:
Latin Americanists know all about unilateral interventions, pre-emption, “regime change,” botched counter-insurgency efforts, torture allegations, nation-building schemes, proxy wars, empty rhetoric about democracy and charges of imperial behavior. It’s been going on for a century or more.
Mind you, I’d be curious to hear how imperialism in Latin America differs from imperialism in the Middle East - how oil politics are different from those of global capital. And of course, there are vast cultural differences between a predominantly Catholic region and an almost entirely Muslim region. Still, I think the "clash of civilizations" school tends to play up the cultural differences at the expense of seeing similarities between two phases of U.S. foreign policy. If you don’t believe me, go to Adam’s post and take the quiz.
All this reminds me that I really should read John Judis’s book on empire.
No comments have been added to this post yet.