Amitai Etzioni Notes

A Duty to Assist?

Five shoppers at a Witchita, Kansas convenience store simply stepped over the body of 27 year-old LaShanda Calloway who lay on the floor bleeding severely. None stopped to ask if she was in need of assistance. None even bothered to call 911. Ms. Calloway died later that day at a Witchita hospital of injuries the result of a stabbing; she had been an innocent bystander, wounded in someone else’s fight.

A Review of Security First by Matthew Cole

Forget Iran and North Korea - Worry Instead About Russia and Pakistan - by Matthew Cole

Amitai Etzioni’s uneven but thoughtful book was clearly written as a policy position for the 2008 Presidential hopefuls. To his credit, he prescribes a new, forward-looking American foreign policy for all 18 candidates from both parties. One of Richard Posner’s top 100 American intellectuals, Mr. Etzioni stresses that he wears neither party’s ideological cloak, and instead seeks a policy that’s at once moral and practical.

Support the AK!

Turkey will hold elections on July 22. If I could vote, I would support the Justice and Development Party (AK) despite the fact that it alarms the secularists in Turkey and elsewhere. The reason that the AK deserves all our votes goes well beyond what is about to happen in this one nation. AK is a moderate Muslim party, made up of exactly the kind of Muslims we should be supporting as the best antidote to the extremists.

Lessons for North Korea: Disable, Don't Inspect

Few things irk my colleagues more than when someone tells them "I told you so," because it implies that they could not see around the corner. At the same time, pointing out that one was right in the past is one of the few ways to show that one may have a handle on what is next coming. Hence, with all due respect, the recent developments in North Korea -- if things continue to unfold as expected! -- support two major points I laid out in my recently published book, Security First: For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy.

Security First: a foreign policy master key

The campaign, so far, has not revealed a new overarching approach to replace the false promise of a global democratization age. Security First is a master key that opens all the major foreign policy doors:

Democracy is Not a Suicide Pact

SOME REALISTS argue that if the United States promotes democracy in places such as Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the opening up of these polities would lead to more Islamist states. Thus democratization would damage U.S. interests, installing even more oppressive regimes in the nations involved—regimes that will promote terrorism in other nations to boot. Some "un-realists" argue that the United States should accept such a risk because theocracies are like childhood diseases that nations may have to endure before they can grow up to become democratic.

Dear Al: Stop Being Coy

You made it. You are a global hero of the 'save the earth' movement, the Numero Uno of those who fight to promote the responsible treatment of the environment we all share and in which our children and their children will have to be able to breathe. Your criticism of Bush is scorching. And, most importantly, you may yet be called by the Democrats to save the day in 2008. So please, for your sake and ours, stop reinventing yourself and, above all, drop this unbecoming coyness.

On Puzzle Solving

I am sure every author has his own, often set, ways of stimulating his writing.  For me, playing classical music - as long as it contains no voices! - both helps drown out the background noise and spurs my thinking and composition.  The same is true about what might be called case studies.  I find abstractions unconvincint; in contrast their specific implications and applications, in specific places and time periods, in short case studies are illuminating.  Thus, to state that we owe it to Afghanistan and Iraq to reconstruct their countries after the ravages of war sounds right.  However, when I studied - and then dedicated a segment of Security First to describing - what reconstruction actually entailed on the ground, the absurdity of this claim stood out.  Afghanistan is in a very early state of economic development; practically everything it needs must be provided de novo.  To refer to 'reconstruction' here is like speaking about 'rebuilding' a city where there was barely a village.  Iraq's economy was allowed by Saddam to deteriorate.  To fix it would take huge amounts of resources and a decade or more, I found.  It is not obvious who will have to pick up the tab for all this.

Where is the voice? Watch these globalized tires

For years the debate about the ill consequences of globalization focused on lost jobs and the race to the bottom, in which American workers are expected to compete with workers whose employers work them long hours, pay little, and provide them no benefits. Now the issue is: whether the products that flood Americans markets from overseas are not outright dangerous? How do you like poison in your tooth paste? Lead in your kids’ toys? And tires that lack basic safety features? And—US companies that sell them as if they were reliable ones, and "forget" to inform authorities, when they are clearly unsafe at any speed?

Obama's Vacuous Foreign Policy

Barack Obama was given an opportunity to spell out his foreign policy in the pages of the most recent (July/August) issue of Foreign Affairs. It is a highly respected publication, read world-wide as a sort of voice of the American foreign policy establishment, leading Democrats included. Because the publication has allotted space for other presidential candidates to map out their foreign policies in upcoming issues, it is unlikely that Obama will have another chance to engage this particular forum before the election. So, what does the Senator have to offer?