Regions and Powers IV

Let us continue through the regional security complexes of the globe with the authors of REGIONS AND POWERS as our guides.

The Middle East is an RSC. Buzan and Waever divide it into three parts (subcomplexes) -- from east to west these are: the Persian Gulf, the Levant, and the Maghreb. The Maghreb -- Libya, Tunisia, Morocco etc. -- seems to these authors' rather uninteresting, although it figures of necessity in ideological movements of pan-Arab or pan-Islamic coloration. The Persian Gulf and the Levant are, as one might expect from students of international security, quite fascinating to our authors.

I will offer three quotes on the Middle East from this book.

p. 198, "Having itself exposed the weakness of Britain and France in 1956, thus hastening their departure from the region, the United States was drawn into the vacuum. To the extent that Soviet successes had linked communism and Arab radicalism in US thinking, Israel's resounding success in the 1967 established its usefulness to the US as a local ally capable of defeating Soviet clients."

p. 199, "The arrival of Islamic fundamentalists, as most spectacularly in Iran in 1979, favored neither [superpower] even though the Soviets had the pleasure of seeing the United States lose one of its key allies in the Gulf. Both superpowers tried to meddle in the domestic politics of the region, but neither achieved anything approaching durable control over either the domestic or the regional security dynamics of the Middle East."

p. 201, We've backed up a bit in time here and are now speaking of the years preceding the fall of the Shah, "There were also some security links between Pakistan and both Iran and Saudi Arabia, reinforced by shared linkages to the United States at the global level, but these linkages were never of such an extent even to begin to blur the boundary between the essentially distinct security dynamics of these two regions [the Persian Gulf and South Asia]. The one relationship that might have merged the security dynamics ... an alliance between India and Israel against Pakistan's project for an 'Islamic bomb,' never amounted to more than rumour."

These three observations from the Cold War period have a common theme. They all tend to show that even through that period of a bilateral showdown between two nuclear superpowers, an analysis focused solely on that Big Picture would have missed key points about what was going on. Israel established itself as a useful ally for the US as a side effect of a war fought simply to ensure its own survival. Likewise, any pleasure the Soviets got out of the overthrow of the Shah and the subsequent occupation of the US embassy was incidental, both to the outcome of the cold war and to what was going on and continues to go on in Iran.

Likewise on the third point, Big Picture theorists might want to see a Pakistan nuke as part of a Clash of Civilizations between the US and Islam. But it isn't. And South Asia continues to be a security region insulated from the Middle East. The factual bases for a contrary view turns out to be nothing more than rumour.

What about the attacks on September 11, 2001? Didn't they inspire a lot of "clash of civilizations" talk? And wasn't bin Laden in fact reaching out well beyond the Persian Gulf, or even the broader Middle East, to kill Americans at home?

Yes it did and yes he did. But these authors remind us that bin Laden was tightly focused on the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, his home, and "secondarily, the relationship between the US and certain Arab regimes." He was attacking the US in New York and northern Virginia because that's where the softer targets were. His goals were region specific. So, here too, a bottom-up approach to understanding is indispensable.

The actions of bin Laden were never "closely linked the the faltering peace process between Israel and the Palestinians." Even that was further away from home than he was inclined to look as to the definition of his goals, Buzan and Waever say.

There is no such sin as gluttony as regards food for thought.

A Story About Coleridge

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John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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