Senate Foreign Relations Committee votes to give President Obama the power to launch

[aowen]

Originally Posted by Daldolma [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

You seem upset.

I'm going to take a moment here to laugh at the names you just dropped. Thanks for running me through the biggest names in political philosophy. Yeah man, I should totally read Machiavelli, Hagel [sic], Marx, and Morgenthau. Where'd you hear about them!? I'm still working on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby, but they're up next! I just heard of this new guy you should totally check out -- Faulkner, I think it was? That guy's a genius! He's going places.

And yeah, unfortunately, my stupid point is true. It's clearly the guiding policy of US foreign policy, and US foreign policy has pretty much shaped the world for the past 65 years. Dang.

And that last statement there, oh paragon of political knowledge, is literally the most famous quote from Thucydides' Melian dialogue. Seeing as how Thucydides is generally regarded as the father of political realism, maybe you should give him a spin.

And for the 6th or 7th time, this isn't a moral opinion. I'm not endorsing the morality of it; I'm commenting on its veracity.

Well first, if you had read any of them, I assume you wouldn't sound so ignorant of the theory. If your only goal is to reconcile US FP with realism, that's not too hard. I think it's a pretty pointless thing to do, because everyone agrees US FP is realist. If that's your argument, you've just vomited all over what could be a good debate. The point that carries more salience is whether it is the right choice for foreign policy, and if it allows for a full understanding of the dynamics of the international sphere. Answer: No, it doesn't.

I have given all realists a spin, Thucydides included, that's how I know I disagree with what they posit. However, while Thucydides is good foundational reading, it is also severely dated and unable to address many of the contemporary issues. I like how you completely ignored all of the people I mentioned that are contemporary IR theorists and chose to defer to ones everyone should have read to engage in a debate about IR, but you clearly didn't. On top of that, you clearly haven't read other theories, otherwise you'd know how they differ, and incorporate realism into new theories attempting to better explain and understand IR. Read Ethics in International Relations by Mervyn Frost, or pretty much any essay by Habermas, and you'd realize how far the scope goes outside of realism and shut the fuck up, but I somehow don't think you will.