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Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida;

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Mostrando postagens com marcador geopolitica do poder mundial. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador geopolitica do poder mundial. Mostrar todas as postagens

sábado, 12 de agosto de 2017

The Rise of the East: and the perils of new conflicts - Gideon Rachman

Novo livro, de acordo com o Zeitgeist:

Easternisation

War and Peace in the Asian Century

Easternisation by Gideon Rachman
Buy this eBook
US$ 28.19
Selected as a Book of the Year by Evening Standard

The West’s domination of world politics is coming to a close. The flow of wealth and power is turning from West to East and a new era of global instability has begun.
Easternisation is the defining trend of our age – the growing wealth of Asian nations is transforming the international balance of power. This shift to the East is shaping the lives of people all over the world, the fate of nations and the great questions of war and peace.
A troubled but rising China is now challenging America’s supremacy, and the ambitions of other Asian powers – including Japan, North Korea, India and Pakistan – have the potential to shake the whole world. Meanwhile the West is struggling with economic malaise and political populism, the Arab world is in turmoil and Russia longs to reclaim its status as a great power.
We are at a turning point in history: but Easternisation has many decades to run. Gideon Rachman offers a road map to the turbulent process that will define the international politics of the twenty-first century.
Random House; August 2016
320 pages; ISBN 9781473521162
Read online, or download in secure EPUB
Title: Easternisation
Author: Gideon Rachman

segunda-feira, 12 de dezembro de 2016

War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft - Robert D. Blackwill, Jennifer M. Harris (book review)

Creio já ter exposto minha "tese", mais anunciada do que explicada até aqui -- ainda que eu tenha um pequeno trabalho sobre ela -- segundo a qual a longa Guerra Fria, que durou aproximadamente de 1946-47 até 1989-91, que era um enfrentamento disfarçado entre os dois grandes império geopolíticos do pós-guerra, EUA e URSS, está sendo substituída, ou melhor, sucedida por uma longa guerra fria econômica, ou geoeconômica, na qual os EUA já entram perdedores.
Atenção, não foram os EUA que sairam vencedores da primeira guerra fria, a geopolítica, foi a URSS que desapareceu por total ineficiência econômica, ela se auto-implodiu, porque não soube combinar a tradicional equação econômica entre manteiga e canhões: ela fez muitos canhões e esqueceu a manteiga, ou seja, em lugar de oferecer meias de nylon para suas mulheres, só tinha mísseis balísticos a oferecer.
Agora, os EUA, como talvez o livro abaixo (que ainda não conheço) revele, vão ser "implodidos" por sua ineficiência relativa em vários setores, e a China vai vencer essa "guerra fria econômica" pois aplica a "tecnologia correta" adaptada à nova geoeconomia.
Atenção: a China não vai ser vencedora absoluta: ela apenas vai prosperar durante algum tempo, mais para o seu próprio povo do que propriamente para o mundo, mas creio que seu papel vai ser positivo no plano econômico, ainda que seja detestável no plano moral, democrático, de direitos humanos.
Pois bem, vou desenvolver a minha tese depois.
Por enquanto fiquem com esta resenha.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

H-Net
Greetings Paulo Almeida,
New items have been posted in H-Diplo.

Table of Contents

Fettweis on Blackwill and Harris, 'War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft' [review]
by System Administrator

Robert D. Blackwill, Jennifer M. Harris. War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft. Belknap Press, 2016. viii + 366 pages. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-73721-1.

Reviewed by Christopher J. Fettweis (Tulane University)
Published on H-Diplo (December, 2016)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach

The United States is falling behind, warn Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris in War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft. For more than a generation, America has paid insufficient attention to its potential economic advantages as it formulated its foreign policy. While its chief rivals deploy new economic tools in innovative ways, the United States continues to rely far too heavily on military and diplomatic powers of persuasion.

War by Other Means is a discussion of the evolution of “geoeconomics,” or the use of economic tools in pursuit of political objectives. The overall message of their book is that the United States trails its potential competitors in the use of such tools, and will be at a substantial geopolitical disadvantage until its geoeconomic thinking is adjusted. If its theme can be summarized in one sentence, it would be this: “U.S. foreign policy must be reshaped to address a world in which economic concerns often outweigh traditional military imperatives and where geoeconomic approaches are often the surest means of advancing American national interests” (p. 226).

The book reviews a wide range of geoeconomic tools, some of which are not typically included in works on the subject. More traditional instruments are there, including sanctions and aid, but the authors also include monetary policy, the “cybersphere,” investment policy, trade and--perhaps most interestingly--energy policy as well. With the recent rise in US fossil-fuel supply due to the shale and fracking revolutions, “the United States will be uniquely positioned among the major powers to define and benefit from these developments” (p. 214). If we can update our thinking to match new realities, that is.

The topic has taken on an entirely new importance in the twenty-first century, for several reasons. First, the authors suggest that many other countries, including some of the chief rivals of the United States, have integrated geoeconomics into their foreign policy, often as a “tool of first resort” (p. 128). Second, a host of new (or newly significant) geoeconomic tools are available to states today, including state-owned enterprises (SOEs), sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), and so-called smart sanctions. The book contains some mind-boggling statistics about SWFs in particular: current estimates suggest that these funds manage somewhere between three and six trillion dollars, which is about twice as much as is contained in all the world’s hedge funds (pp. 54-55). And they are almost exclusively operated by countries outside of the West. Only Norway has a SWF that is among the world’s ten largest.

The third reason for the rise of geoeconomics is the effect that globalization has had on international economics. Today’s highly integrated, interdependent markets provide new opportunities for states to engage in manipulation and statecraft. Finally, the rising economic clout of China in particular has increased the salience of geoeconomics. Not only are some of America’s rivals inclined to employ their economic power in the service of the state, they are more capable of doing so thanks to years of sustained growth. As a result, their efforts to integrate geoeconomics into statecraft are, on balance, finding success.

All this adds up to problems for Washington. For a variety of reasons, the authors argue, the United States has been reluctant to deploy geoeconomic instruments of persuasion. Policymakers and economists in the United States still tend to perceive the world through rather antiquated, positive-sum frameworks. Additionally, a consistent lack of post-Cold War presidential leadership, alongside bureaucratic inertia and inefficiency, has hampered Washington’s ability to employ geoeconomic tools. Other countries make no effort to hide their mercantilist tendencies, and since many of them are far more autocratic than the United States, they need not worry about popular or bureaucratic interference with their decisions. They are able to put geoeconomics to work efficiently, consistently and--in some instances--quite brazenly. Furthermore, when State Department and other officials contemplate using economic tools, they almost always turn toward sanctions, and overlook the other potential options. Washington lacks imagination, in other words, at least when compared to the Chinese and the Russians.

The book contains many examples of modern geoeconomics in action. For instance, it points out that the Chinese have invested an enormous amount of time and effort to refine their cyber capabilities, which they often employ in a directly geoeconomic fashion. While a great deal of traditional espionage occurs in the cybersphere, Beijing has also supported efforts to steal civilian technology and business secrets, in ways that would be unimaginable for a Western country. The scale of the problem is staggering: by one estimate, cyber attacks account for 15 percent of global internet traffic. Over Chinese holidays, that number drops to 6.5 percent (p. 60). The cost of protecting against, and then responding to, such attacks is reckoned to be around $400 billion annually, a quarter of which is borne by the United States (p. 64). “It is difficult to imagine,” Blackwill and Harris write, “that Washington could ever replicate in peacetime the cyber instruments so pervasively used by other countries” (p. 192).

Why, then, does the United States lag behind so many of its competitors in geoeconomic statecraft? Although the authors explain that there are some arenas in which the United States does engage well, such as with the relatively new smart sanctions, in general Washington rarely considers putting its economy in the service of its national interests. Here the book is less convincing, and does not take into account some of the reasons why the United States might be reluctant to engage in geoeconomic competition, and why this reluctance might be justified.

First, perhaps policymakers in Washington are a bit more concerned with the potential costs of geoeconomic tools. While China and Russia might be able to use their economic clout to pursue rather narrow interests, the United States has a far larger stake in the open economic system it had a large hand in creating. Although Blackwill and Harris claim that their recommendations are consistent with liberal economic theory, and note that classical liberals like Adam Smith and Richard Cobden were not in favor of a complete lasses-faire approach (pp. 30-32), many applications of geoeconomics amount to exercises in pure economic nationalism. Such a shift would not come without cost. Prosperity is after all one of the very few uncontroversial national interests of the United States, and to the extent that geoeconomic approaches put that prosperity at risk in pursuit of other interests, their wisdom can be called into question.

For example, the authors lament Washington’s reluctance to manipulate its fiscal and monetary policy for its own ends. Nowhere is the gap between it and its rivals larger, they argue. They assume that the geopolitical advantages that could accrue from nationalized financial statecraft--to further weaken Iran during a currency crisis in 2013, for example--would outweigh the damage that could be done if global markets lost faith in the financial acumen of the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve. Perhaps policymakers in Washington are not naïve to prefer erring on the side of caution, deciding that potential negative ramifications for the world economy--which is something that US policymakers have to take into account far more than those of other countries--outweigh whatever geopolitical benefits might accrue from tinkering with monetary policy.

The authors anticipate this critique. “Criticisms of geoeconomic approaches,” they argue, “often fall into the trap of judging geoeconomic outcomes by economic ends rather than geopolitical ones” (p. 190). The Trans-Pacific Partnership ought to be judged on its geopolitical as well as economic merits, for instance. It needs to be passed not so much for its potential benefits for the US economy, but because it might cost China upwards of $100 billion a year (p. 190). But should economics be seen as, first and foremost, an arena of great-power competition? What are the costs to national prosperity that employing its tools can produce, and are they outweighed by the benefits to national security? Throughout the book the authors assert that economics should not be interpreted as a positive-sum game where all actors can benefit, but as a zero-sum one with only winners and losers. They often borrow the rhetoric of security competition, referring at times to “geoeconomic throw weight” (p. 149) and asserting that geoeconomics  is emerging as a “favored form of geopolitical combat” (p. 18). What Blackwill and Harris are essentially recommending--although they deny it--is that United States should be willing to abandon its commitment to liberal economics when appropriate, and exert national control over various aspects of the economy. The suggestion that our commitment to open markets and free trade should be interpreted through the frame of national interest assumes that open markets and free trade are not in themselves a national interest. So while their recommendations to think more strategically about economic tools are often sensible and wise, they are a bit glib about the risks of geoeconomic statecraft, and the potential unintended consequences of its application.

The authors also tend to overstate their case a bit when it comes to the unwillingness of the United States to employ geoeconomic tools. They remark over and over that although presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower were able to use economic power to their advantage at times--by formulating the Marshall Plan, for instance, and during the Suez crisis--such efforts essentially ended with the war in Vietnam. The last twenty years of the Cold War, in their telling, were a creative wasteland, where US leaders seemed to forget economic means altogether. “It is noteworthy,” they explain, “that Western grand strategy toward the Soviet Union had virtually no serious geoeconomic element in the years following the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 and America’s subsequent involvement in the Vietnam War” (p. 253). This is a rather puzzling conclusion to reach, especially given the central place that the Reagan administration gave to economic aspects of its competition with the Soviets. One need not be convinced by Peter Schweizer’s Victory (1994) to come away persuaded that many officials in the administration believed that the Cold War would be won with a plan to outspend the Soviets, encouraging them to keep up in ways that would ultimately cause their collapse. The military build-up of the 1980s had what Blackwill and Harris would consider a geoeconomic component to it which they completely overlook, skipping the Reagan years altogether in their historical narrative. They would have made a much better case by saying that the de-emphasis of geoeconomics began with the collapse of the Soviet Union, not South Vietnam, because it is not the case that geoeconomic statecraft was ever absent from US Cold War grand strategy.

Finally, as always, it is worth remembering the insights of Robert Jervis. Forty years ago, he argued that one of the most common misperceptions in international politics is the tendency to see the behavior of others as “more centralized, planned, and coordinated than it is.”[1] The assertions in War by Other Means regarding the organizational advantages of authoritarian rivals over the democratic United States echo those made during the Cold War, when the Soviets were thought by many to have the advantage of being able to operate more freely, unburdened by internal checks and balances or public opinion. So while this is not to say that such arguments are wrong, since surely some central control does make geoeconomic policymaking easier, there are also dangers in assuming that the other side is monolithic and strategic. What Blackwill and Harris see as carefully planned geoeconomics could very well be the outcome of internal dissent, disagreement, and satisficing. It is natural, according to Jervis, for decision makers to “overestimate the degree to which their opposite numbers have the information and power to impose their desires on all parts of their own governments.”[2] It is natural for analysts to do so as well.

The book ends with a series of rather vapid “policy prescriptions.” Although none is unwise a priori, they all are underexplained, and are a lot easier to write than to put into practice. “Funds should be shifted from the Pentagon to be used to promote U.S. national interests through geoeconomic instruments,” the authors suggest, without explanation (p. 228). Other puzzling recommendations are to “reinforce economic foundations for democracy and peace in the Middle East and North Africa,” “meet the test of climate change,” “blunt the threat of state-sponsored cyberattacks,” “adopt new rules of engagement with Congress” and--most puzzlingly--“increase university teaching around geoeconomics” (pp. 239, 237, 237, 249). But these vague and unhelpful recommendations do not detract from the book’s importance. It is meant to be a warning, a tocsin, rather than a solution. Blackwill and Harris aim to point out problems, leaving their solutions largely to others. And they largely succeed in doing so.

War by Other Means is an important and interesting contribution to US statecraft in the unipolar world. Geoeconomics is in large part the tool of the weak, who have limited geopolitical and military alternatives. It is natural for the strong to believe that they have little reason to turn to what they see as lesser forms of persuasion. Unipolar powers in particular can be expected to grow overreliant on geopolitical tools, and might easily overlook evolutions in other forms of power. Blackwill and Harris make a good case that this in fact is what has happened in the United States. Surely it would behoove US policymakers to consider more deeply the efforts of their rivals to achieve their goals using economic means, and to determine when those tools are appropriate for their use as well. Geoeconomic statecraft could certainly be better employed to help the United States achieve its goals, as long as its attendant costs and risks are kept firmly in mind.

Notes

[1]. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1976), 319.

[2]. Ibid., 324.

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=47497

Citation: Christopher J. Fettweis. Review of Blackwill, Robert D.; Harris, Jennifer M., War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. December, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=47497

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

terça-feira, 6 de dezembro de 2016

Mister Trump parece facilitar as coisas para a China na America Latina - Oliver Stuenkel

Oliver Stuenkel deve fazer uma palestra no IPRI (Funag, Brasília), que estou dirigindo, no próximo dia 13/12, quando deve falar, justamente sobre a possível "sinização" do Brasil, da América Latina, do mundo (o que vier antes...).
Vou informar mais detalhadamente.
Este artigo parece preparar o terreno para o debate.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Web Exclusive

How Trump Benefits China in Latin America

Growing Chinese engagement in the region will test Latin America's ability to adapt.
Xi jinping
Anderson Riedel (flickr - Michel Temer) November 7, 2013 CC by 2.0

The timing was perfect, and the symbolism could not have been stronger. A mere week after Donald Trump’s upset victory stunned the world, Xi Jinping traveled to Lima for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit and projected China as a bastion of stability, predictability and openness. With the U.S. increasingly skeptical of globalization, Xi promised that China would stand up for free trade. Faced with an emerging global leadership vacuum, Beijing was quick to recognize a window of opportunity. Compared with the abrasive U.S. president-elect, the Chinese president, with his avuncular charm, seemed to have a soothing effect on the gathering in the Peruvian capital.
No region in the world will remain unaffected by the unprecedented combination of the United States as a source of uncertainty and China as a potential stabilizer. The consequences for Latin America, however, are particularly important, as the recent political shift in the region has led to a growing consensus that greater openness to trade is a prerequisite to economic recovery. While trade negotiators in Brasília and Buenos Aires may have hoped for a deal with Europe or the United States, Beijing increasingly looks like the only partner offering a meaningful opportunity, building on already existing free-trade agreements with Costa Rica, Peru and Chile. Similarly, when it comes to attracting investors to modernize the region’s rotten infrastructure, no country offers as much as the Middle Kingdom. China, free to promote alternative trade deals now that Trump promised he would pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), faces a world of opportunities in Latin America.
This trend may be accelerated if U.S. policy toward the region resembles that of former President George W. Bush. During his presidency, more pressing short-term priorities elsewhere (such as the “war on terror”) caused Washington to largely turn away from Latin America, allowing China to boost its influence. Much suggests a similar scenario will materialize again over the next four years. Chinese trade with Latin America has grown more than 20-fold over the past fifteen years. Xi announced that Chinese companies will invest a quarter of a trillion dollars in the region over the next decade, diversifying from traditional industries such as mining, oil and gas to areas like finance, agriculture and infrastructure (energy, airports, ports and roads).
Yet for Latin America, Beijing’s growing engagement is a mixed blessing. As China increasingly focuses on value-added goods, it now purchases fewer commodities from Latin America but sells more to the region, causing Latin America’s trade deficit with China to increase. Countries like Brazil face a risk of deindustrialization and face direct competition as they seek to export to its neighborhood. Chinese imports are affecting, among others, industrial machinery, textiles, footwear and clothing, while copper, iron, oil and soybeans account for the greatest share of the region’s exports to China. Many new projects that China may finance (such as the Trans-Amazonian Railway from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean) would help integrate the region, but also enhance Latin America’s dependence on China, in addition to posing threats to the environment and creating relatively few jobs.
Lack of preparedness
China’s growing influence is remarkable, but it should not come as a surprise. Brazil's former Foreign Minister Azeredo da Silveira argued as early as 1974 that China "had consolidated itself as an emerging power," urging then-President Ernesto Geisel to normalize diplomatic relations with the country. And yet, particularly in Brazil, the lack of preparedness and knowledge about China on most policy-making levels is remarkable. During debates in Brasília, comments often reveal a worrying degree of ignorance of Chinese affairs. Yet governments are not the only ones to blame. Thinkers both left and right of the ideological spectrum are often stuck in a 20th century Western-centric worldview, still regarding the United States as the source of most good and evil. The left still regards U.S. meddling in the region as the most urgent concern at a time when Chinese clout in capitals like Caracas now exceeds Washington’s influence even in countries that are seen as pro-U.S., such as Colombia. Mostly through the China Development Bank, Beijing now lends far more to the region than the World Bank.
Oblivious to these trends, it is not uncommon to witness dinner party debates among left-of-center Brazilian intellectuals about whether the Lava Jato corruption investigation and former President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment are actually schemes by the FBI to destroy Petrobras (as a professor at USP, a leading university, recently argued in a newspaper interview).
All the while, Brazil’s Foreign Minister José Serra is said to have only a vague understanding of Asia, and was recently unable to name the members of the BRICS grouping during an interview. Add to that the absence of sinologists and Brazilian foreign correspondents based in China, the result is a disturbing unpreparedness for an increasingly Asia-centric world.
Designing a regional strategy
What is to be done? For starters, while Peru, Chile and others have already begun to adapt to new realities, foreign ministries in the region should coordinate their positions regarding China better to avoid competing for Chinese largesse, which will lead to a race to the bottom. That involves discussing and possibly aligning legislation regarding Chinese investments, transnational environmental rules for Chinese-financed projects that cross borders, and cohesive policies regarding bigger questions such as China’s role in the World Trade Organization.
This discussion should also include a broad debate, all ideological passions aside, about how the emerging global competition between Washington and Beijing can be used to the region’s advantage. That requires being as knowledgeable about domestic affairs in Beijing as in Washington, which, given the opacity of China, requires a far greater diplomatic presence than most countries possess today.
Considering the influence China already has on Latin American economics and politics (for example, the current situation in Venezuela is impossible to understand without making sense of China’s role as a lender), the lack of a regional debate over how to grapple with the implications of multipolarity is remarkable. The longer policy makers in the region wait, the smaller their capacity to learn to operate in the new environment.
--
Stuenkel is a contributing columnist for Americas Quarterly and teaches International Relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo. He is the author of The BRICS and the Future of Global Order (2015) and the Post-Western World (2016).
Any opinions expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of Americas Quarterly or its publishers.

terça-feira, 24 de maio de 2016

A America Latina na geopolitica mundial - artigo Paulo Roberto de Almeida (revista do CEDIN)

Meu artigo mais recente publicado:


1225. “A América Latina na geopolítica mundial: perspectivas históricas e situação contemporânea do Cone Sul”, Revista Eletrônica de Direito Internacional do CEDIN (Belo Horizonte: CEDIN, vol. 17, 2016, ISSN: 1981-9439; p. 342-367; link para a revista: http://www.cedin.com.br/publicacoes/revista-eletronica/#Volume_17; link para o artigo: http://www.cedin.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Vo-Paulo-Roberto-Almeida_A-Am%C3%A9rica-Latina-na-geopol%C3%ADtica-mundial-perspectivas-hist%C3%B3ricas-e-situa%C3%A7%C3%A3o-contempor%C3%A2nea-do-Cone-Sul-OK.pdf). Relação de Originais n. 2933.

 Trecho inicial: 


A América Latina na geopolítica mundial: perspectivas históricas e situação contemporânea do Cone Sul
Latin America and the world geopolitical framework: historical perspectives and the contemporary context of the Southern Cone

Paulo Roberto de Almeida





Resumo: Ensaio de caráter histórico e também analítico-prospectivo sobre os processos de desenvolvimento econômico e de inserção econômica internacional dos países latino-americanos do Cone Sul, com destaque para os ensaios de integração comercial, em escala sub-regional, ou plurilateral. Evidencia-se o relativo isolamento da região dos mercados e dos intercâmbios mais dinâmicos da economia mundial contemporânea, ao terem os países da América Latina privilegiado processos nacionais de desenvolvimento econômico e social, com pouca abertura aos fluxos e cadeias produtivas e comerciais englobando outras regiões, ainda que alguns países – a Aliança do Pacífico, por exemplo, formada por México, Colômbia, Peru e Chile – tenham buscado inserir-se nos novos exercícios de abertura econômica, de liberalização comercial e de integração produtiva, que se deslocam paulatinamente do Atlântico norte para a bacia do Pacífico.
Palavras-chave: economia mundial; integração econômica; comércio internacional; Cone Sul da América Latina.

Abstract: Historical and analytical essay on the economic development and the world economic integration of the Southern Cone Latin-American countries, with emphasis on the attempts at commercial integration, at sub-regional level, or in the plurilateral context. There is a clear pattern of a relative insulation of those countries from the most dynamic flows and markets of the world economy, as Latin American Southern Cone relayed mostly on national developmental processes, with very few opening towards those flows and value chains that encompasses other regions, albeit some countries – those of the Pacific Alliance, that is Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile – have endorsed those new exercises of economic opening and trade liberalization, moving preferentially from the north Atlantic toward the Pacific basin.
Key words: world economy; economic integration; international trade; Latin American Southern Cone.



1. A sucessão de preeminências na economia mundial e a América Latina
Existem duas maneiras de analisar a questão da sucessão de hegemonias políticas e econômicas no sistema internacional e a posição da América Latina nesse contexto: uma pelo lado histórico ou sistêmico, ou seja, pelas tendências estruturais de longo prazo, a outra pelos dados da conjuntura, que são naturalmente caracterizadas por flutuações na economia mundial e por dinamismos diferenciados entre as principais economias planetárias. A América Latina, a despeito de estar situada numa posição relativamente excêntrica em relação às grandes disputas hegemônicas mundiais, sempre sofreu a influência ou o impacto dos grandes conflitos internacionais, ainda que sua condição de região periférica esteve sempre vinculada aos poderes do Atlântico norte, Europa ocidental, desde cinco séculos, e Estados Unidos da América, desde o final do século 19, e com maior ênfase a partir da Segunda Guerra Mundial.
Na primeira vertente, a do contexto histórico, podemos falar de uma lenta sucessão de hegemonias econômicas e militares – e o lado estratégico sempre depende da dinâmica econômica dos países ou impérios – e uma acomodação sucessiva entre centros mais dinâmicos e outros em declínio relativo. Por vezes existem choques globais, como os ocorridos com as grandes guerras nacionais do período napoleônico, ou os dois grandes conflitos globais do século 20, que de certa forma já sinalizaram para o fim da grande dominação europeia sobre o mundo, depois de cinco séculos, aproximadamente, de predominância absoluta sobre vários continentes. Esses grandes conflitos são relativamente raros, e de toda forma, a emergência da arma atômica ao final do último grande conflito global já sinaliza para sua inviabilidade prática, restando, portanto, analisar os dados relativos às tendências latentes, sempre existem, à substituição de hegemonias pelo lento acumular de mudanças econômicas, geralmente tecnológicas, mas também comerciais e financeiras.


Ler a íntegra no  link  da revista: http://www.cedin.com.br/publicacoes/revista-eletronica/#Volume_17; ou no link para o artigo: http://www.cedin.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Vo-Paulo-Roberto-Almeida_A-Am%C3%A9rica-Latina-na-geopol%C3%ADtica-mundial-perspectivas-hist%C3%B3ricas-e-situa%C3%A7%C3%A3o-contempor%C3%A2nea-do-Cone-Sul-OK.pdf).

sábado, 16 de abril de 2016

Book discussion: Mandelbaum and USA in post-Cold War World (Cato)


Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post–Cold War Era
Book Forum
Cato Institute - Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Washington, DC, 12:00PM - 1:30PM

Featuring the author Michael Mandelbaum, Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University; with comments by Keir Lieber, Associate Professor, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University; and Brad Stapleton, Visiting Research Fellow, Cato Institute. Moderated by John Mueller, Senior Research Scientist, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Ohio State University, and Senior Fellow, Cato Institute.

Please join us as Michael Mandelbaum—prominent columnist and author, and a leading foreign-policy thinker—discusses his new book, Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post–Cold War Era. In this definitive work, Mandelbaum critically assesses American military interventions since the end of the Cold War and the deeply flawed post–Cold War efforts to promote American values and American institutions throughout the world. Each intervention was designed to transform local economic and political systems, and each, argues Mandelbaum, failed. It is, he writes, “the story of good, sometimes noble, and thoroughly American intentions coming up against the deeply embedded, often harsh, and profoundly un-American realities of places far from the United States.” In these encounters, he concludes, “the realities prevailed.” We hope you will be able to join us for what will be a provocative and highly illuminating event.

REGISTER     or Watch online Apr 20