Sunday, January 14, 2018

Anatomy Of Failure (by Harlan Ullman)


This is a good, critiqued, book talk.  The view is from 30,000 feet.   And in that sense, the points that Ullman and his commenters make are "...duh..."  The problem is implementation.  In the first place, foreign and military policy aren't made in a vacuum--they are (and always have been) intertwined with domestic politics.  In the second place, thoughtful experts who finally get a shot at conducting foreign affairs always find that solutions that look obvious from the outside are hard to implement from the inside.

The speakers make some good points about conducting foreign and military policy in a post-Cold War environment.  But Ullman (at least, if not others) accept the U.S.'s responsibility for running, or at least leading, an international empire.  There's not much "leading from behind" here.  Ullman seems to believe that an Obama approach is, by its nature, abdication of U.S. responsibility.  His quarrel with George W. Bush is not that he led "from the front," but that he chose the wrong policy options.

Anyway.  The discussion is thought-provoking.  Maybe it's not so much a guide for senior policy makers as a guide for citizens who want to evaluate the policies of political candidates.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?438330-2/anatomy-failure

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