A Question of Sovereignty

[Baron Max]

... How does it address the examples I gave you where they were interfering and not giving direct aid relief. Go and look at the examples I gave and address them.

Address your 20/20 hindsight???? Yeah, sure, but how could anyone have known how something might or might not have turned out? See?

Your hindsight is a really good, Lucy, but it doesn't address the real issue .....how can a government ever know what the future might be because of any of it's actions?

Lucy, if you want to show us all how fuckin' great you are, why not start right now and make a sticky thread .....and forecast all of the future results of all of the actions by all of the governments in the world?

20/20 hindsight is pretty good ....but let's see some 20/20 foresight, Lucy!

Baron Max

 

[Mrs.Lucysnow]

No Baron address the history. I know you lot don't seem to know too much about history but perhaps you can look at my examples and try. Show a little acumen for a change, a little knowledge. You haven't addressed one objective point so far my furry old beer filled curmudgeon

I have to take a nap. I'll check with you later.

 

[Saven]

It may be their own country.. but it's ALL of ours planet. They don't have the right to torture or kill whoever they like, as long as it is happening here on Earth.

 

[Mrs.Lucysnow]

It may be their own country.. but it's ALL of ours planet. They don't have the right to torture or kill whoever they like, as long as it is happening here on Earth.

That's so cute, you think the 'earth' belongs to you.


You see Baron you guys are already isolated.

 

[Oli]

The United States, although now virtually synonymous with science and technology, is not central to the discussion since in comparison with Europe, it was isolated enough during the period of its industrialisation, virtually to be able to dispense with foreign policy. One consequence (still to be detected) was an ingrained tendency to regard the problems of foreign relations as sudden developments - usually unwelcome - which, however, could be 'fixed' by an appropriate and quick reaction. From the presidency of Andrew Jackson until after the Second World War American opinion rejected the traditional European notion that foreign policy was a matter of continuous engagement with other powers in order to defend the international interests of the state and that its essential aim was to reach accommodation through rational argument. The objectives and practices of diplomacy were damned as either Machiavellian or trivial. The crusading element in American policy-making requires that conflicts are won, not that differences are accommodated; exercises in game theory replace rational negotiation.

Maurice Pearson.
The Knowledgeable State: Diplomacy, War and Technology since 1830.

 

[Mrs.Lucysnow]

Thanks Oli for the excerpt.

'The crusading element in American policy-making requires that conflicts are won, not that differences are accommodated;..'

Now I know why discussions on sciforums often mirrors this.

No but seriously, why do they not reform this tactic as it creates more problems than solutions? Or maybe they like the idea of creating chaos for other nations? Maybe they benefit from instability? But it doesn't look like it, everything now seems to be damage control. In many respects China's attitude to foreign engagement is much more straight forward, its exhange of resources and with no clauses, its a non-interference in foreign domestic issues

This download is an interesting paper on the internationals engagement, or lack thereof with Burma and the results on domestic policy.

http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/publications/papers/view/-/id/49

 

[Oli]

Thanks Oli for the excerpt.

Pure fluke: I just started reading that book yesterday and that paragraph leapt off the page at me.

No but seriously, why do they not reform this tactic as it creates more problems than solutions?

Is it not a side-effect of the "youth" of the US?
It didn't grow up with neighbours the way, say France, did, with a centuries-long history of conflict and accommodation.
America hasn't had to learn "diplomacy" the way European countries have: once the US took off it was large and isolated enough to have little more than its own internal problems and/ or fewer belligerent neighbours on an equal military footing.
And then by the time the US moved onto the world stage in earnest it was sufficiently strong to continue with its own methodologies - and that continued use, in turn, contributes to the "no need to use the old-world" methods attitude.
Possibly.

 

[Saven]

That's so cute, you think the 'earth' belongs to you.


You see Baron you guys are already isolated.

The people you all are excusing from atrocities certainly think their countries "belong" to them, if they think that they have an inherent right to hurt other people because that's where they were born. I'm of the camp where either we all collectively own every part of the Earth, or no one owns it at all. The end result of those two perspectives is the same.