Desert island pick

OP-ED: What the presidential choice could mean, By Martin Wolf, Financial Times, September 2 2008

Flat-out brilliant bit by Wolf, with whom I had the pleasure of spending some time last summer on that Australian resort island.

Stuck on a desert island and able to follow only one writer on globalization in all its complexity (to include security), I would pick him in an instant.

(Thanks: Jarrod Myrick)

Comments

[Fred Zimmerman]

Is it really as clear as Wolf suggests (in his last paragraph) that talking is the better strategy for dealing with civilizations whose unifying theme, as he notes, is their disdain for Anglo-American civilization? And is it even clear that our version of "talking" is different, in the eyes of other civilizations, from conflict? Certainly that's what Putin seems to think. A classic objection to the Anglo-American version of liberal globalization is that it is inherently subversive -- if you will, "flattening" -- of other cultures. Can it even listen?

Perhaps the genius of the Anglo-American political system is that it ensures a continuous dynamic tension between the grand tendencies of conflict and cooperation ... in that light, the choice between McCain and Obama is simply an epiphenomenon.

A way to test this theory is to ask how many US troops there will be in Iraq in ten years. Personally, I think there will be no less than 50,000...

[Cadet Echo Boomer]

To argue that globalization also entails cultural "flattening," as you describe it, you must ignore the fact that most of globalization is now driven by non-Anglo-American nations. Who has embraced globalization as openly as India and China? And as a result, we now see not less, but more (much more), movies, music, food, coming here to the US.

Fast forward to an old core member like Japan, which if you have visited, couldn't be a more "modern" place. But you won't mistake Tokyo for New York or LA. It's a brand of modernity that is distinctly Japanese. We aren't talking about spreading mom and apple pie, were talking about spreading the idea that if you work hard and educate yourself, you have a decent prospect of getting rich, which is "glorious".

[Louis Heberlein]

Most Old Core and New Core global readers would see this article as an Anglo-American centric mindset. We should at least start to expand to an Indo-European perspective based on related cultural and historic experiences ... and one that understands that Asian core countries have different cultural and historical perspectives that don't have to be converted to either an Anglo-American or Indo-European way of thinking to be useful and significant.

Still, its useful to re-awake Anglo-American tribe thinking.