1/08/2022
Top 20 Predictions in 2022 Part 1 – 3
MIT’s economic historian Charles Kindleberger developed the well-known Hegemonic Stability Theory (HST) where a prevailing hegemon maintains stability in the world order in an otherwise anarchic international system.
He attributed the inter-war years 1929 – 1939 as the period where there was an international power vacuum in terms of the lack of a leading hegemon fulfilling the role of a global policeman, inevitably resulting in a treacherous period of untenable international instability.
The dismaying conclusion by many learned political scientists and others alike is that a hegemonic war eventually breaks out under such scenario to determine the next hegemon, be it the original hegemon or the rising power. This script seems to emanate since the time of Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War in ancient Greece between two powerful city states Athens and Sparta during 431 BC to 405 BC.
The KEY question is NOT:
Is it rational for the disequilibrium in the international system to be resolved via military conflicts?
The KEY question is:
Since the two atomic bombs dropped in 1945 over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, can the world afford for the disequilibrium in the international system to be resolved via military conflicts to determine the next hegemon to maintain a stable world order?
Would there be any hegemon left standing after another hegemonic war?
Is it rational (in conducting foreign policies) to go by the narrative of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War or Thucydides Trap (TT) and Charles Kindleberger’s HST or Kindleberger’s Trap (KT)?
Would a hegemonic war resolve anything (in the end)?
As chess pieces are being moved (globally) step by step, piece by piece, is the world inching closer towards the unthinkable by accident or otherwise?
When events get out of control, is it very real that the unthinkable taking place has a non-zero probability?
What makes political leadership assumes military conflicts rather than cooperation &/ or peaceful coexistence would restore disequilibrium in the world order?
IRRATIONAL GROUPTHINK?
Leo 81
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The field of foreign policy can be streamlined into several dimensions:
1. Orientations;
2. National Roles;
3. Goals;
4. Actions;
5. Instruments;
6. Outputs;
7. Law and world opinion;
8. Ethics;
9. Conflict and resolution;
10. Collaboration and cooperation
For dimension (5), instruments of foreign policy includes:
A. Diplomacy;
B. Propaganda;
C. Economic measures;
D. Covert clandestine operations;
E. Overt direct military actions;
F. Political measures;
G. Weapons as deterrence;
H. Arms control;
I. War
Contest between big powers often entails multi-faceted foreign policy instruments and multi-year time span.
The Cold War between the US and Soviet Union spanned about half a century from after World War Two till the late 1980s/ early 1990s.
Often one course of actions is to isolate and weaken an adversary till it disintegrates or implodes internally.
In modern economics, there are many ways to stage an opponent and cause economic collapse via internal and external channels. It can be through arms race to bleed the adversary. It can be through economic and financial measures such as timing interest rates and exchange rates movements to inflict maximum damage to an opponent's economy. It can also be protectionistic measures on multiple fronts including technology.
Another typical course of actions is to impoverish an opponent's ally economically via a plethora of instruments to achieve the objective of isolating the opponent militarily, economically in terms of disruption or total cut of in supply of essential raw materials such as energy and natural resources.
In short, win a war without firing a single shot, a strategy originated from ancient military art of war famously known in Chinese as:
"不战而屈人之兵"。
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