[lbo-talk] The Daily Schadenfreude: Zakaria not original!

[Ismail Lagardien]

I will never defend Zakaria. I have had too many encounters with his followers and fellow travelers of the neo-conservative, realist/neo-realist scholars in International Relations. Zakaria belongs to the same intellectual tradition (apologists for US military dominance of the world), as Mearsheimer, Walt and other "Realists" who would have us believe that "the international system" is something out there, disembedded from the social world and that the US, the Pentagon and its intellectual underpinnings has nothing to do, or cannot be held accountable or responsible for war because "that is just the way the world works". 

I started writing a book, before I left academia a year ago, in which I argue, in the Critical tradition, that theories are not neutral that, as Robert Cox so pithily argued, they can and should be situated in particular social and historical contexts. What the realists/neo-realists and even the liberal internationalists like John Ikenberry have justified US violence against "others" as necessary, and resort to what I described as "self-absolution" when the US goes to war, but accuses all other forces as evil, destructive etc. 

Zakaria was a Janissary, of the worst kind; all he did, to make it big in the establishment, was reproduce mainstream/orthodoxy ideas he learned from his adviser - Samuel Huntington.
 

Ismail Lagardien

Nihil humani a me alienum puto