Archives for October 2004

has published a post with an extended quote from his own article in The Atlantic this summer that very clearly makes the distinction between the two foreign policy stances at play in this election. I wonder if John Robb has a reaction to this. Unfortunately for me I haven’t been following his site closely enough of late.

My own view is that non-state actors and others outside the state system were some of the prime movers, though often hidden, behind most if not all of the battles of the latter period of the Cold War. The fighting occurred within the context of the state system, with one side or the other jockeying for control of one of the dozens of proxies for either the US or the Soviet Union, but that doesn’t mean it was just an extension of earlier state-centric battles. Just because groups were coopted by one side or the other doesn’t obviate the fact that there were a lot of non-state actors of great – primary -significance. Iran-Contra, Afghanistan in the Soviet era, the rise of narco-terrorists in Columbia and elsewhere in Central America – all of these involved non-state actors and weren’t primarily about a state per se but much more diffuse control and power issues. You might say I agree with the Democratic vision as expressed in the article and would take the analysis even further.