Courting Science: Securing the Foundation for a Second American Century - Softcover

Coletta, Damon V.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080479894X ISBN 13: 9780804798945

Verlag: STANFORD SECURITY STUDIES, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

In Courting Science, Damon Coletta offers a novel explanation for the decline of American leadership in world affairs. Whether the American Century ends sooner rather than later may depend on America's capacity for self-reflection and, ultimately, self-restraint when it comes to science, technology, and engineering. Democracy's affinity for advanced technology has to be balanced against scientific research and progress as a global enterprise. In an era of rising challengers to America's lead in the international order and an increasingly globalized civil society, a "Scientific State" has a better chance of extending its dominance. In order to draw closer to this ideal, though, the United States will have to reconsider its grand strategy. It must have a strategy that scrutinizes how tightly it constrains, how narrowly it directs, and how far it trusts American scientists. If given the opportunity, scientists have the potential to lead a second American Century through domestic science and technology policy, international diplomacy, and transnational networks for global governance.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Damon V. Coletta is Professor of Political Science at the United States Air Force Academy. He is Editor of Space and Defense, the journal of the Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies.

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Courting Science

Securing the Foundation for a Second American Century

By Damon V. Coletta

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9894-5

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
1. A Second American Century, 
2. Science and the Hegemon: Speaking Truth to Power, 
3. Power, Polarity, and Hegemony in the Twenty-first Century, 
4. Science and the American State: Mobilizing Democracy, 
5. Science and Diplomacy: U.S. Hegemony and the Rise of the Rest, 
6. Science and Global Governance at the Final Frontier, 
7. Science, Grand Strategy, and Prospects for American Influence, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

A Second American Century

Toward the end of his influential War and Change in World Politics (1981), Robert Gilpin famously claimed that Thucydides, by virtue of his deep insight into the causes and consequences of the Peloponnesian War, would, if properly briefed about critical technologies and lead actors on the world stage, render a similarly penetrating history of contemporary international rivalries. On its face, the assertion that nothing much has changed over twenty-five centuries sounds absurd, but Gilpin's idea has not lost its luster. It speaks to a central and controversial ambition for universality in both the study and practice of International Relations.

Yet, something important has changed in the last half-century: the centrality of science and technology (S&T) for creating power in international affairs. Thucydides wrote about the implications of geography, population, democratic culture, and ship-building technology for the balance of power in ancient Greece. Many of his insights do hold in modern times, but in comparison with the factors on Thucydides' original list, science really is different. While crucial for cultivating national capability, science encompasses more than techne or a library of useful facts about Nature. Science is also a method of inquiry, a practice of cosmopolitan high culture, a human activity that cannot be cornered or harnessed entirely by any single government.

Thucydides wisely remained vague about whether divine or cosmic justice intervened in the power competition among states. He detailed, in protagonists' arguments for war and in his battle descriptions, which miscalculations, which misapprehensions of physical force, led to spectacular Athenian defeat in Sicily, the beginning of the end of Athenian influence. Curiously, though, Thucydides moved Sicily from its actual position in the chronological stream of events so close to Athens' barbaric destruction of tiny Melos, and so close to the end of Athenian hegemony, while Athens would fight on for years; readers were left to wonder whether Athenian injustice ultimately frustrated Athenian imperialism. When Professor Gilpin conjured Thucydides in the 1980s, he may have intended to invoke classic balance-of-power realism, but humanist critics who read Thucydides as literature would sense an opportunity to mine a more complex portrayal of hegemonic decline.

Twenty-five centuries later, science and technology have attained a stature in human affairs on the same scale with cosmic justice, only less vague. If the United States now hopes to extend its international influence and fashion a second American Century, it will have to come to terms with relatively new sources of power that operate largely outside Thucydides' history. This book argues that the United States has not done so, mainly because it conflates scientific advancement with technological development — science and technology (S&T) are hopelessly jumbled together in the rush of national policy-making. Among the consequences of this U.S. myopia are distortion of the national effort to remain the world's leading technological power and the hastening of American hegemonic decline.

Thirty years ago, Gilpin's claim for universal International Relations Theory rested on the notion that the ancients understood raison d'état and that actions of the most powerful states set basic parameters for societies caught in the international milieu — whether they remained at peace, how they prospered, and whose justice inscribed their laws and mores. Having insight as to why states acted as they did admitted one to a special fellowship spanning thousands of years. Members of this circle included not only Thucydides, Machiavelli, and contemporary realists but also statesmen who went beyond studying the world and strived to shape it: Pericles of Athens, Richelieu of France, Metternich of Austria, and Kissinger of the United States. If they could all belong to the same club, if states, after all the changes in circumstance, were still states, then perhaps international politics was more of a trade — and statecraft more of a profession — than heroic biographies implied. Almost anyone who studied the cases systematically would see for themselves the governing principles, the near universal theories of political power, which shaped great questions of any age.

Contemporary opponents of realism seek to explain why the international system defies Gilpin's claim, why it is no longer what it once was, and why today's great states are fundamentally different from the creatures that fought for dominance of ancient Greece. Robert Keohane's and Joseph Nye's (1989) complex interdependence comes to mind because it so carefully dissects and reconfigures the basic assumptions of Gilpin and other realists. States are not solitary key actors determining important international outcomes; military force is not the ultima ratio in high politics; and a state's survival may be sufficiently secure to admit other national objectives as primary.

If actors, instruments, and goals of international politics can change so much, the way is open for a host of new possibilities. Policies of the capitalist class, rather than the Great Powers, may decide questions of war and peace. State motivations may not be predictable across time if democratic regimes weigh options differently from autocrats. The meaning of anarchy and the motivation for Great Power intervention on the seas and in lesser developed regions can change according to shifts in a global discourse. Given the potential confusion, it is tempting, though by no means agreed among scholars, to do as Gilpin did in War and Change: place realism first, then see what sort of adjustments explain important international outcomes that do not fit the original pattern. Appropriating Thucydides for our time may violate several social science criteria for reasonable counterfactuals, but Gilpin hit on something by snatching him up anyway. Contemporary theories for apprehending International Relations still do turn on how well Thucydides succeeded in applying his explanations for state behavior in the Aegean so many centuries ago. Thucydides' ideas, however, probed beyond states' differential capacity to wage war. The West's first international historian examined the wasting effect of Great Power war on civilization, which is to say, the Hellenic world's communion with the divine through human art and science.

Science and International Realism

Intriguingly, a younger, iconoclastic Robert Gilpin, well before War and Change, conducted groundbreaking research on why Thucydides would not be able to sift details and reveal underlying order in contemporary politics. Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War became a classic work of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD SECURITY STUDIES
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 080479894X
• ISBN 13: 9780804798945
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 248
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande