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Showing posts with the label "conventional apologias"

Peter Gowan's Review of John Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

A page from imperialist domination and continuity 
 Peter Gowan's review of John Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is a rebuttal of key assumptions in Mearsheimer's thinking. A few things have changed since the book and the review ( Iraq and the economic crisis of 2008-09 ), but the fundamentals and the continuity of the U.S. hegemony, though not absolute and not without setbacks, remain. I have chosen something general and mainly related to the Middle East. "Unlike right-thinking liberals ... John Mearsheimer attributes no distinctive moral or political value to its [US's] role in the world at large." John Mearsheimer, has for some time now been an iconoclastic voice in America’s complacent foreign-policy elite—one who, not by accident, has spent his career in scholarly work in universities, rather than serving as a functionary in the national-security bureaucracies whence conventional apologias for Washington’s role