{"id":3731,"date":"2014-12-29T20:38:48","date_gmt":"2014-12-30T01:38:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=3731"},"modified":"2014-12-29T20:38:48","modified_gmt":"2014-12-30T01:38:48","slug":"epsilon-theory-salient-partners-the-clash-of-civilizations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=3731","title":{"rendered":"Epsilon Theory – Salient Partners | The Clash of Civilizations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Epsilon Theory – Salient Partners | The Clash of Civilizations<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Lots of quotes this week, particularly from my two favorite war criminals \u2013 Sam Huntington and Henry Kissinger. Everyone has heard of Kissinger, fewer of Huntington, who may have been even more of a hawk and law-and-order fetishist than Kissinger but never sufficiently escaped the ivory towers of Harvard to make a difference in Washington. Like me, Kissinger bolted academia at his first real opportunity for a better gig and never looked back, which is probably why I always found him to be so personally engaging and fun to be around. Sam Huntington \u2026 not so much.<\/p>\n

But Huntington\u2019s \u201cClash of Civilizations\u201d argument is not just provocative, curmudgeonly, and hawkish. It is, I think,\u00a0demonstrably more useful in making sense of the world than any competing theory,<\/em>\u00a0which is the highest praise any academic work can receive. Supplement Huntington\u2019s work with a healthy dose of Kissinger\u2019s writings on \u201cthe character of nations\u201d and you\u2019ve got a cogent and predictive intellectual framework for understanding the Big Picture of international politics. It\u2019s a lens for seeing the world differently \u2013 a lens constructed from history and, yes, game theory \u2013 and that\u2019s what makes this\u00a0a foundational topic for Epsilon Theory.<\/a><\/p>\n

Huntington and Kissinger were both realists (in the Thucydides and Bismarck sense of the word), as opposed to liberals (in the John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson sense of the word), which basically just means that they saw human political history as essentially cyclical and the human experience as essentially constant. Life is fundamentally \u201cnasty, brutish, and short\u201d, to quote Thomas Hobbes, and people band together in tribes, societies, and nation-states to do something about that. As such, we are constantly competing with other tribes, societies, and nation-states, and the patterns of that competition \u2013 patterns with names like \u201cbalance of power\u201d and \u201cempire\u201d and \u201chegemony\u201d \u2013 never really change across the centuries or from one continent to another. Sure, technology might provide some \u201cprogress\u201d in creature comforts and quality of life (thank goodness for modern dentistry!), but basically technology just provides mechanisms for these political patterns to occur faster and with more devastating effect than before.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/a>…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Epsilon Theory – Salient Partners | The Clash of Civilizations. Lots of quotes this week, particularly from my two favorite war criminals \u2013 Sam Huntington and Henry Kissinger. Everyone has heard of Kissinger, fewer of Huntington, who may have been even more of a hawk and law-and-order fetishist than Kissinger but never sufficiently escaped the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2255,355,1193,2256],"class_list":["post-3731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-clash-of-civilizations","tag-geopolitics-2","tag-henry-kissinger","tag-sam-huntington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3731"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3732,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3731\/revisions\/3732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}