Sunday, May 19, 2013

Sunday Globe Special: Waltz's Wisdom

It's a bit different than Weiss's wisdom:

"Kenneth N. Waltz, 88; scholar suggested Iran get nuclear arms" by Douglas Martin  |  New York Times, May 19, 2013

NEW YORK — Kenneth N. Waltz, a preeminent thinker on international relations who was known for his contrarian, debate-provoking ideas, not least his view that stability in the Middle East might be better served if Iran had a nuclear weapon, died on May 12 in Manhattan. He was 88....

Then he's an anti-semite, right?

Leslie H. Gelb, emeritus president of the Council on Foreign Relations, characterized Mr. Waltz as one of five ‘‘giants’’ who shaped the study of international relations as a discrete discipline, the others being Hans Morgenthau, Henry A. Kissinger, Samuel P. Huntington, and Zbigniew Brzezinski....

Wow, that's some crew of globe-kickers there. Kissinger, the war-criminal of Asia; Huntington, the coiner of the false cover called the clash of civilizations; and Brzezinski, one of the creators of "Al-CIA-Duh" who dismisses their 9/11 impact compared to the fall of the Soviet Empire.

One of Mr. Waltz’s propositions was that wars are not caused simply by human aggression or bad governments but by the anarchic, dog-eat-dog nature of international relations. Each nation-state, he said, will push as far as it can to advance its own self-interests.

He used as an example the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he said freed the United States to become a bully because it no longer had an opponent in its own weight class.

Don't look now, but the China-Russia alliance looks like an 800-pound gorilla. 

In this new ‘‘unipolar’’ world, the United States ‘‘abuses its power, singling out poor, weak countries — that’s what we specialize in — and beating them up,’’ he said in 2011 in an oral history interview at the University of California, Berkeley.

And now he is dead.

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Of course, this is not to argue the world was better off with the two powers fighting proxy wars. It certainly didn't work out to well for the rest of the planet.