Sublime

The contemporary approach to international affairs too often assumes, either explicitly or implicitly, that the correctness of one’s views from a moral or ethical perspective precludes the need to engage with the more distasteful and fundamental question of relative power with respect to a geopolitical opponent, and specifically which party has a

As recipients of US foreign aid, it was in their best interest to appear to be supporting the US in its war effort.

there is the aspiration to value neutrality and the claim to manipulative power. Both of these, we can now perceive, derive from the history of the way in which the realm of fact and the realm of value were distinguished by the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Twentieth-century social life turns out in key part to be the

policies.

So why not? Why not choose ease and bask in the adulation of the world as we serially renounce, withdraw and concede? Because, while globalization has produced in some the illusion that human nature has changed, it has not. The international arena remains a Hobbesian state of nature in which countries naturally strive for power. If we voluntarily