Can American military, diplomatic, and other government practitioners afford to remain aloof to the operating logics and superstructural assumptions permeating national policy and state interaction within the international system? This is perhaps a moral question without a clear answer. In a Western world where geopolitical realism is coming into vogue, do values have a place in policy or in strategy when expediency or success encounter normative barriers?
Beyond Strategic Empathy
The United States acts upon the world, but not within the world. The United States understands other state or non-state actors to be working towards the United States, or not at all. Most give little thought to the agency of America’s international peers, their worldview, and the complex system of attitudes and events that shape their foreign policy decisions. The United States must go further than rediscovering strategic empathy.