Last year, to mark the end of the Obama administration, LobeLog spoke with foreign policy analysts Andrew Bacevich, of Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies, and John Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago. […] LobeLog spoke again with Bacevich and Mearsheimer to get their impressions of Donald Trump’s foreign policy and the state of the world at large. This is part two of our interview. In part one, we discussed the Trump foreign policy one year into his administration. In part two we discuss the main challenges facing America internationally and the potential for change in U.S. foreign policy […]
Bacevich: I don’t understand the durability of that claim given the actual consequences of trying to implement it, particularly over the last few years. Just focus on the Middle East. What have we learned since Ronald Reagan’s de factointervention on behalf of Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War? What has the political establishment learned since then from our various interventions in that region? I think we’ve learned nothing, and therefore we continue to blunder on. This most recent announcement of maintaining U.S. troops in Syria: for how long? It suggests yet another open-ended military commitment, and yet it elicits only yawns from the media and the American people […]
Mearsheimer: The fact that we’re moving toward a multipolar world, where China and Russia are rival great powers, is cause for great concern. The potential for great-power war between the United States and China is not to be underestimated. In a unipolar world there is no possibility of great-power war—the most dangerous form of war one can imagine—because there is only one great power. But we’re now moving into a world where you have an increasingly powerful and assertive China, which will create a variety of circumstances where the United States and China might bump up against each other and end up in a shooting war. I’m not saying this is likely, but the potential is there, and thus managing the security competition between China and the United States, as well as between China and its neighbors like Japan, is going to be very tricky. We’re moving into a more dangerous world for sure. Läs intervjun