THIS year’s survey of “world affairs” by the International Institute for Strategic Studies is a gloomy exercise. The London-based think tank, which specialises in security questions and has close ties with the US, reserves its sharpest criticism for Washington’s attempt to export democracy.
It expresses relief at the “passing of America’s revolutionary moment during which it aimed actively to change the status quo in unstable places”.
Foreign Editor's Briefing by Bronwen Maddox
THIS year’s survey of “world affairs” by the International Institute for Strategic Studies is a gloomy exercise. The London-based think tank, which specialises in security questions and has close ties with the US, reserves its sharpest criticism for Washington’s attempt to export democracy.
It expresses relief at the “passing of America’s revolutionary moment during which it aimed actively to change the status quo in unstable places”.
To replace the neo-conservative philosophy, it recommends a return to the Cold War tactics of deterrence and containment, particularly towards Iran.
Less usefully, it urges the US to “burnish its contemporary strategic anthropology” (try harder to understand Arabs and Muslims) and to nurture regional security deals with “skills that are more horticultural than architectural”.
But it ends with an essential message to the US’s critics that if they “rightly argue that America does not have the answers” then they have a “burden to offer some of their own”, lest its “enemies provide the more compelling arguments”.
