Post by Tenzer Strategics

This 182nd long essay on Nicolas Tenzer's international politics journal, Tenzer Strategics—a bit more than just a blog, as one of his friends recently told him—is an attempt to explore the very nature of geostrategy—a term he prefers to “geopolitics.” It joins other articles published in the same venue that explore the theoretical foundations enabling us to better understand the nature of international relations. Yet it is far from being a purely intellectual exercise. The starting point that seems to the author to be essential remains, time and again, crime and radical evil—the ultimate significance of which many leaders struggle to grasp. The first part aims to address the fundamental flaw in classical geopolitics, which, in a certain sense, reasons much like Augustinian theology based on original sin. It effectively makes crime the insurmountable matrix of international relations, to the point of excluding it from analysis and denying its significance and explanatory value in the conduct of certain regimes. Nicolas's second part may seem more traditional. However, it thoroughly reevaluates the value of interdisciplinarity in the study of international relations. The aim here is not only to demonstrate its necessity but also to tackle it in a specific way, using a two-step method, in the analysis of the relationships between peoples and states. It is thus shown that many democratic governments have committed the error of both failing to appreciate the specificity of each event—particularly the most monstrous ones—while refusing to situate them within the long arc of history. Nor have they recognized how some of these events—the Russian war against Ukraine, the destruction of the Syrian people by Assad and his allies, and the undermining of international law—had, in a sense, been made possible, or even set in motion, quite some time ago. The third part is a reflection on the radicalization of the international scene. It has often been overshadowed by broad, sweeping concepts—the rise of China, the misleading analogy with the Cold War, the crises in Africa, etc.—which have prevented an understanding of what was actually at work. There has been a sort of chiasm between the proliferation of multilateral regulatory systems and the unraveling of norms in reality. Without grasping the radical nature of these developments, political leaders are doomed to take only peripheral action. https://lnkd.in/e9a5BViv