http://www.outquib.com/debates/view/does-might-make-right-america-s-global-role What should the role of the U.S. be in moderation of international conflicts and in the deterrence of nations that might pose military threat? en-us Sun, 16 Dec 2007 21:56:26 GMT America http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://www.outquib.com/debates/posts/view/697
Reply to post ]]> Tue, 4 Mar 2008 11:39:55 GMT http://www.outquib.com/debates/posts/view/697 http://www.outquib.com/debates/posts/view/175
It is clear that the United States has an ETHICAL obligation to intervene in such instances but do you actually believe that the United States has anything tangible to gain from their intervention? Your explanations ignore the domestic repercussions of policing the world. Our military is already stretched to the brink with our current commitments, and intervening elsewhere would not be able to be fulfilled. The problem with your reasoning is that even if the United States should be interventionist, it is not possible under the status quo.

How do you propose the United States function alone, without the help of other superpowers, in policing the world?

Reply to post ]]> Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:05:01 GMT http://www.outquib.com/debates/posts/view/175 http://www.outquib.com/debates/posts/view/171
What appears to underlie your position (and your disposition) is a notion that you appear to hold of manifest cultural differences, i.e. the possibility of a Different Morality. The prescription which proceeds logically from that presumption, of course, is that one must respect cultural differences.

Moral seriousness, however, has never involved Politeness. Your 'Good natured-man' is a frivolous and insouciant sort of subhuman; nothing more. Thus Hazlitt:

'A person of this kind has no feeling of anger or detestation, when you tell him of the devastation of a province, or the massacre of the inhabitants of a town, or the enslaving of a people. But if his dinner is spoilt by a lump of soot falling down the chimney, he is thrown into the utmost confusion, and can hardly regain himself for the whole day.'

One should always insist upon the superiority of Athens to Jerusalem, and this indeed is one of the proofs: All thought, for Greece, was Agonized, i.e. presented in competition with itself. Whether there is an ethics that is 'apodictically certain' (as Uncle Manny would have us believe) does not concern me; it is merely the potency of your Ethic, of your Metaphysic, that matters in this world. America has every right to inflict itself upon the rest of the world, to subsume it all under its own 'Will to Lycurgus,' the Law it gives to itself and then to its Sphere. Our enemies seek to do nothing less; we should meet them on our terms.

It is a very glib and stupid assumption to make: 'different culture, different morality.' There is no such thing; either one possesses an Erotics of Morality (as Shelley adumbrates in the prose Defense of Poetry), or one does not. Only anomalies (meaning sociopaths, not cannibals) lack access to that Erotics. The capacity to Feel is, as far as I can tell, universal; Culture and Religion can have the effect, merely, of attenuating that capacity; that, and only that, is a Cultural Difference.

Our respect for the 'International Community' (as, indeed, our Respect for Islam) needs to be abjured. The United Nations allows China and Russia (the two countries of the world which appear to think solitarily in Commercial terms, which have actively aided the Iranian and Syrian regimes, the genocide of Rwanda, the Fedayeen Saddam, etc. bloody etc.) to act as Peremptory Agents. Your 'International Community' is an historical Parody.


Reply to post ]]> Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:47:59 GMT http://www.outquib.com/debates/posts/view/171 http://www.outquib.com/debates/posts/view/129
Currently the focus is, as it should be, on the Middle East. The difficulty in this region results from the long standing hatred held between people of Jewish and Islamic faiths. In my opinion, participating in the creation of Israel after World War II committed America to helping improve international relations in the region. We must now aid in the founding of a Palestinian state, forcing Israel to concede some of its demands (i.e. relinquishing part of Jerusalem for a Palestinian capital city). It is unrealistic to hope for total peace in the Middle East, but maybe it is possible for a settlement that could lead to vast reduction in military hostility and divide the Holy Land fairly between the regions (possibly similarly to the way Cyprus is divided between a Greek and Turkish side as a result of a conflict between the two ethnicities.)

Reply to post ]]> Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:49:13 GMT http://www.outquib.com/debates/posts/view/129 http://www.outquib.com/debates/posts/view/122
Reply to post ]]> Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:58:52 GMT http://www.outquib.com/debates/posts/view/122 http://www.outquib.com/debates/posts/view/119
"Ever since the Munich agreement and Pearl Harbor, with only a brief interruption during the decade after the Tet offensive, there has been a consensus that if Americans did not draw their defense perimeter far forward and confront foreign troubles in their early stages, those troubles would come to them at home. But because the United States is now the only superpower and WMDs have become more accessible, American intervention in troubled areas is not so much a way to fend off such threats as it is what stirs them up."
--Richard K. Betts, "The New Threat of Mass Destruction", Foreign Affairs

...(credibility & consistency are part of the great responsibility that comes with great power too)


Reply to post ]]> Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:37:41 GMT http://www.outquib.com/debates/posts/view/119