Post-Bush Foreign Policy
By: Stephen CollierIn today’s Times David Brooks discusses a forum at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia on post-Bush foreign policy, which can be seen on video here. I have not had a chance to look at it in detail yet, and may report more when I do. Brooks sees a basic division in the participants, which he discussed through two exemplary figures. John Ikenberry presents what is curiously called a “milieu-based” approach (this seems to be Ikenberry’s word, not Brooks), where the U.S. works to strengthen international organizations that will work on problems like health care and poverty, as well as security. He seems to be proposing a kind of hybrid accommodation between population security and sovereign state security of the type seen after World War II. Robert Kagen, meanwhile, insists on the realist view of a “world of competing nations vying for power.” Classic sovereign state security. In any case, the videos seem very much worth watching as an index of where at least some of the more academically inclined foreign policy and security intellectuals are on these issues.