(The author sometimes says stuff like “US elites were too ideologically committed to globalization”, but I don’t think he provides great alternative policies.)
Afaik the 1990-2008 period featured government and military elites worldwide struggling to pivot to a post-Cold war era, which was extremely OOD for many leading institutions of statecraft (which for centuries constructed around the conflicts of the European wars then world wars then cold war).
During the 90′s and 2000′s, lots of writing and thinking was done about ways the world’s militaries and intelligence agencies, fundamentally low-trust adversarial orgs, could continue to exist without intent to bump each other off. Counter-terrorism was possibly one thing that was settled on, but it’s pretty well established that global trade ties were deliberately used as a peacebuilding tactic, notably to stabilize the US-China relationship (this started to fall apart after the 2008 recession brought anticipation of American economic/institutional decline scenarios to the forefront of geopolitics).
The thinking of period might not be very impressive to us, but foreign policy people mostly aren’t intellectuals and for generations had been selected based on office politics where the office revolved around defeating the adversary, so for many of them them it felt like a really big shift in perspective and self-image, sort of like a Renaissance. Then US-Russia-China conflict swung right back and got people thinking about peacebuilding as a ploy to gain advantage, rather than sane civilizational development. The rejection of e.g. US-China economic integration policies had to be aggressive because many elites (and people who care about economic growth) tend to support globalization, whereas many government and especially Natsec elites remember that period as naive.
Afaik the 1990-2008 period featured government and military elites worldwide struggling to pivot to a post-Cold war era, which was extremely OOD for many leading institutions of statecraft (which for centuries constructed around the conflicts of the European wars then world wars then cold war).
During the 90′s and 2000′s, lots of writing and thinking was done about ways the world’s militaries and intelligence agencies, fundamentally low-trust adversarial orgs, could continue to exist without intent to bump each other off. Counter-terrorism was possibly one thing that was settled on, but it’s pretty well established that global trade ties were deliberately used as a peacebuilding tactic, notably to stabilize the US-China relationship (this started to fall apart after the 2008 recession brought anticipation of American economic/institutional decline scenarios to the forefront of geopolitics).
The thinking of period might not be very impressive to us, but foreign policy people mostly aren’t intellectuals and for generations had been selected based on office politics where the office revolved around defeating the adversary, so for many of them them it felt like a really big shift in perspective and self-image, sort of like a Renaissance. Then US-Russia-China conflict swung right back and got people thinking about peacebuilding as a ploy to gain advantage, rather than sane civilizational development. The rejection of e.g. US-China economic integration policies had to be aggressive because many elites (and people who care about economic growth) tend to support globalization, whereas many government and especially Natsec elites remember that period as naive.