Sorry this was so long in the coming, I've been busy.
brucemaster said:
That may be so (although it can never be substantiated) but the point of my argument is that the State at least should be primarily concerned with domestic problems. If it sees its primary goal as the defence of the nation from external threats then it will neglect domestic concerns i.e. health, education, crime and so on.
The yellow peril motivation for federation is the consensus opinion and strongly supported by primary evidence.
Why should the state concern itself primarily with domestic issues, the basis of the state is defence from the external. It always has been. It is also the constant you will find across the political spectrum (except communists and this is only when the army is suppressing their 'revolution' not exporting it...).
As to the example of terrorist attacks i would say that American involvement in the Middle East came before the terrorist threat. Thus the chicken came before the egg so to speak.
And what took America there? Strategic interest. The middle-east is oil rich which is important and also the key to several geopolitical choke points. For the former reason it is especially (and perhaps increasingly) important for the next 40 years, for the later it will always be important.
Given their strategic interest the US will not withdraw from the middle-east. Regardless of terror attacks.
As far as a root cause of the terror attacks though there are at least four primary causes:
1)Reaction against foreigners eg americans (in this instance).
2)Israel.
3)The arab states internal problems.
4)US policy.
i think it shows that by choosing to steer away from a focus on international politics a nation is far better off as it can focus on domestic issues. Of course if there are any external threats you have to deal with them but the nation should not primarily concern itself with national security to the detriment of domestic issues.
You do make a valid point, however we can't all be switzerland....
Now we are getting into the question of balancing national security spending against other spending. I would note here that as a percentage of GDP military spending is always far behind such things as welfare, except in times of war.
Your argument seems to assume that at the very instant we choose to trust someone in any way they will fuck us up somehow. Even if we approach international relations with an open mind then this will still happen if not all the time then at least on one occassion. This is simply unrealistic.
Qualify this statement, explain how the 'open-minded' approach will
never backfire.
We should not enter in to diplomacy with a reconceived notion of other nations. Instead we should reserve judgement until we have a thorough knowledge of the situation, the nations concerned and the issues that arise and then we can make a judgement that will affect our future dealings with a nation.
If we simply enter in to international relations with a pre-conceived notion of distrusting other nations we do ourselves no favours as it merely perpetuates distrust amongst other nations.
As to your second point, quite simply, yes. Im not saying reserve judgement, I'm saying that one must consider all the facts and circumstances etc. surrounding a situation before jumping to conclusions about certaing things.
You seem to think that we dont make informed decisions, we have intelligence agencies and DFAT to provide information on demand.
You have still failed to explain why our default approach should be cynicism/distrust. The trojans for instance should have been a little less open minded about a certain huge wooden horse.
Also what about situation requiring snap decision and not allowing the time for lengthy analysis?
So distrust is the rational thing to do yet cooperation is the beneficial thing to do???
Distrust is the rational approach in a prisoners dilemma which is a non-co-operative game. Both players will seek to maximise their relative gains. However from our view from the ivory tower of such proceedings we can see that the absolute gains are higher if they co-operate.
In nuclear war co-operation is beneficial as this means no nuclear war, however in say business non-co-operation is preferable (for the consumer) as this prevents oligarchies and keeps the prices down.
Yet you have missed the point entirely, you advocate a foreign policy of competition that stresses the survival/dominance of the strong over the weak and seem to support the idea of an eventually victorious lone state.
This idea is directly comparable to Hitler's ideas on the master race and struggle.
You misconstrue:
I do not advocate international relations of competition; I advocate neo-liberal globalisation doing away with IR, I do however present a competitive IR as the way things are and the paradigm we must operate under.
I do not believe one state will emerge, I was using that example as a hypothetical extreme to illustrate my point earlier.
Not at all. Consider a neighbourhood where everyone is friends with each other and frequently socialises, yet they all still live their separate lives and live in their own houses.
Very nice. A good sound-byte that puts it out there at the common mans level. I like it.
So despite advocating this very idea of the singular State for a large part of this thread you now admit it has certain practical fallacies?
It was never my argument i was merely summarising your own.
I never argued in favour of a singular state, I was infact asking you to differentiate between a singular state through war and a singular state through world government. Infact only a couple of lines after this you quote me as saying that a singular state will not emerge because smaller states will co-operate against it, furthermore much of my game-theory argument deals with this issue.
Equality straw man argument.
This is an obvious straw man because you are taking two seperate issues and applying my stance on one to the other. And suggesting my differing stances are contradictory when they are not.
Let us take your starting point; my statement that yes the international system could perhaps be viewed in terms of Darwinistic competition. And that given this it was clearly not a competition of equals, no two states are the same, they have different abilities, strengths, weaknesses etc. It is blatantly obvious that individual states are not equal.
Then you quote me in reference to a single-states dominance being counterbalanced by a collection of smaller states which returns an equilibrium to the power-balance.
The problem here is that in the first instance I was talking about individual states and in the second alliances had come into play. My positions are far from contradictory as they are actually complimentary, that is to say darwinistic competition forces multiple small weak states to align togther against a large powerful ones. Simple strength of numbers versus brute force, we can draw examples from the animal world if need be.
To expand slightly on my later point about re-balancing the power balance, this is a simple position that the constant competition between states will always see a balance of sorts emerge. When one state becomes more powerful others will seek to become more powerful than it, so on and so forth the result being we constantly move around in a rough equilibrium.
However when there is no real equilbrium as in the case of our current hyper-power the USA they are far more likely to be interventionist, dictatorial powers on the world stage. However this will be short-lived as invariably the USA will decline and others will rise.
I beg to differ, not all left hand turns lead to communism...
Correct they all lead to capitalism, as having reached whatever communist/socialist utopia (dystopia) everyone turns around and says; this is shit its time to make a turn back to capitalism.
Transcendent a great example of the failure of a state that concerned itself domestically. To add to it I would point to Japan, who saw what happened in China and then engaged with the world and rapidly modernised to prevent the same fate befalling it.
