http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/how_food_explains_the_world?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full

How Food Explains the World

From China's strategic pork reserve to a future where insects are the new white meat, 10 reasons we really are what we eat.

BY JOSHUA KEATING | MAY/JUNE 2011

They say you are what you eat. And that applies to countries and cultures as much as individuals. The food in our mouths defines us in far more fundamental and visceral terms than the gas in our tanks or the lines on a map. So it's not surprising that the most important questions of global politics often boil down to: What should we eat?

The Strategic Pork Reserve

China is a porcine superpower as well as a human one. The Middle Kingdom boasts more than 446 million pigs -- one for every three Chinese people and more than the next 43 countries combined. So when there's a major disruption in the pork supply it hits the economy hard; the "blue-ear pig" disease that forced Chinese farmers to slaughter millions of pigs in 2008, for example, drove the country's inflation rate to its highest level in a decade.

To prevent further disruptions, the Chinese government established a strategic pork reserve shortly afterward, keeping icy warehouses around the country stocked with frozen pork that can be released during times of shortage. The government was forced to add to the reserve -- taking pigs off the market -- in the spring of 2010 when a glut led to prices collapsing.

PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images

Cornering the Chocolate Market

Labeled "Chocfinger" and "Willy Wonka" in the media, British investor Anthony Ward has emerged over the last decade as the undisputed king of the global chocolate market. In 2002, Ward purchased more than 150,000 tons of cocoa, or around 5 percent of global production. He did it again in the summer of 2010, buying upwards of 240,000 tons -- enough to make about 5 billion chocolate bars -- to give him control of about 7 percent of global production. It was the largest delivery of cocoa on the London exchange in at least a decade, and Ward became the go-to source for chocolate manufacturers looking for beans. Other investors cried foul, claiming that Ward was driving up prices on a commodity that had already increased in value by more than 150 percent over the previous two and a half years.

Ward isn't just a mad chocolate fiend; he has also made a long-term bet that supply problems in West Africa will continue to push prices up. The demand for cocoa has risen about 3 percent annually over the last century and has spiked sharply during this year's political turmoil in Ivory Coast, which grows about 40 percent of the world's crop. It also turns out that demand for chocolate is countercyclical: Hershey's profits jumped 40 percent in 2009 during the global financial crisis.

KAMBOU SIA/AFP/Getty Images

Hummus Wars

A lesser-known and thankfully less destructive front of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the ongoing fight for bragging rights over who can produce the world's largest batch of hummus. Israel for years had held the world record with a 900-pound bowl of the popular chickpea-based dip. But Lebanon, which claims that Israel has appropriated a traditionally Lebanese dish, struck back with a 4,532-pound hummus plate in 2009. Israel retaliated just two months later when a crack group of Israeli chefs whipped up an 8,993-pound dish. Then, in 2010, Lebanon retook the crown with a 23,042-pound batch. (Apparently no one stopped to consider the Dead Sea-sized slice of pita bread it would take to eat all that dip.)

The fight doesn't appear likely to end anytime soon. Lebanese hummus producers have threatened to charge Israel with copyright violation, relying on the precedent of a European Court of Justice ruling that gave Greece exclusive rights to make feta cheese. The two sides have also fought bitterly over the world record for the largest vat of tabbouleh.

RAMZI HAIDAR/AFP/Getty Images

Bug Bites

The developed world's ever-increasing appetite for meat is turning into a genuine environmental catastrophe, as the raising of livestock to feed that appetite now generates up to 20 percent of the greenhouse gases driving global warming, according to the United Nations. Many environmentalists advocate vegetarianism -- or at least eating less meat -- as a solution. But the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is asking consumers to consider another option: eating insects.

An insect-based diet could provide just as much protein as meat (plus key vitamins and minerals) with far fewer emissions, the FAO says. And breeding insects such as locusts, crickets, and mealworms emits one-tenth the amount of methane that raising livestock does, scientists say.

The idea isn't as far-out as one might think. More than 1,000 insects are already known to be eaten in about 80 percent of the world's countries, though the idea remains a source of revulsion in the Western world. The FAO is putting its money where its mouth is, investing in insect-farming projects in Laos, where locusts and crickets are already popular delicacies. A world conference on insect eating is planned for 2013.

HOANG DINH NAM/AFP/Getty Images

The Doomsday Pepper Vault

Where should you go for a good meal after the apocalypse? Try Svalbard, a remote island archipelago more than 600 miles north of mainland Norway, where a unique facility has been built inside a mountain to safeguard the world's future food supply in case of catastrophe.

Officially opened in 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is built 426 feet under the mountain's surface. The $6.7 million facility will eventually store 4.5 million frozen seed samples from more than 100 countries. Many countries host their own food banks, but the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an international coalition dedicated to food security, decided to build the facility as a backup. The site was chosen for its remote location, low temperatures, and low level of seismic activity.

And if you were worried that your food would be bland in the post-apocalyptic future, fret no more. In 2010, a delegation of U.S. senators delivered a collection of North American chili peppers, including Wenk's Yellow Hots and San Juan Tsiles, to be preserved for all eternity.

Larsen, Hakon Mosvold/AFP/Getty Images

Colonel Sanders Imperialism

In the early days of Egypt's anti-government uprising this winter, some journalists attempted to label it the "Koshary Revolution" after Egypt's traditional dish of rice, lentils, macaroni, and fried onions. But Hosni Mubarak's embattled regime was hoping to tie the protesters to a more sinister foodstuff: Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Reports on state television described protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square munching on free buckets of KFC, seeing them as proof of subversive foreign influence, though independent journalists at the scene couldn't find a particularly high number of KFC eaters. The U.S. chain has about 100 restaurants in Egypt, compared with fewer than 60 for McDonald's, but the price of a meal, which can be up to three days' wages, makes it a rare delicacy for most Egyptians. There were also reports of the government paying its thugs with chicken dinners, and street vendors jokingly began shouting "Kentucky" to hawk everything from popcorn to falafel.

Surprisingly, this wasn't the first time that KFC has been cast as the enemy in the Muslim world. In 2006, Pakistani rioters burned down a KFC in response to the Danish Mohammed cartoons controversy. This followed another -- and seemingly even more random -- burning of a KFC one year earlier by a mob angered by a suicide bombing at a mosque in Karachi.

Arif Ali/AFP/Getty Images

Superfood of the Incas … Stolen by Yuppies

The trendiest new staple at your local Whole Foods is probably quinoa, an Andean grain so high in minerals, protein, and amino acids that the FAO says it can be substituted for mother's milk. Quinoa was introduced to the North American market three decades ago, but since 2000 it has really taken off, with the price jumping nearly sevenfold. That's great news for the Bolivian farmers who produce the vast majority of the world's supply, but it may be bad news for the country's health. With their country now exporting around 90 percent of its quinoa crop, many Bolivians simply can't afford it anymore. Domestic quinoa consumption has fallen 34 percent in the last five years, and health officials fear a rise in obesity rates as Bolivians abandon the highly nutritious grain they've enjoyed since the time of the Incas and switch to imported staples like rice and white bread. President Evo Morales's government has even designated quinoa as "strategic" foodstuff and included it in a subsidized food parcel for pregnant women. But more drastic measures may be needed to keep up with the insatiable demand of Western foodies. Let's hope for Egypt's sake that the Whole Foods set doesn't develop a taste for koshary anytime soon.

AIZAR RALDES/AFP/Getty Images

The Gold (Cabbage) Rush

South Koreans take their national staple, kimchi, very seriously. There's a museum dedicated to the fermented cabbage dish in Seoul, and servings of it were shot into space along with the country's first astronaut. So in the fall of 2010, when kimchi prices began soaring because of poor weather conditions and a bad cabbage harvest, Koreans predictably freaked out.

As prices increased nearly fourfold -- it normally costs $4 to $5 for a meal -- consumers began referring to the dish as geum-chi, the Korean word for gold, and demanded the government take action. Pundits lambasted President Lee Myung-bak for suggesting that Koreans try eating cheaper North American cabbage. To head off potential unrest -- or even a kimchi revolution -- the Seoul city government began a kimchi bailout program, assuming 30 percent of the cost of an emergency supply of cabbage it purchased from rural farmers. The national government also grudgingly reduced tariffs on imported Chinese cabbage, betting, successfully, that more cabbage would bring prices back down. Fear of Chinese dominance over their national food supply, it turned out, didn't trump Koreans' love of spicy vegetables.

JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/Getty Images

Canada's Hunt Country

There are few political statements more striking than plunging a carving knife into one of the world's cuddlier endangered species and eating its raw heart on camera. That's just what Canadian Governor-General Michaëlle Jean -- then Queen Elizabeth II's representative in the Canadian government -- did during a 2009 visit to indigenous communities in northern Canada, a few weeks after the European Union slapped a ban on Canadian seal products.

Indigenous Canadians are legally permitted to hunt a small number of seals per year, as they have for centuries. But, more controversially, commercial fishermen are allowed to kill up to 280,000 seals per year. Seal meat is an increasingly popular delicacy in Montreal's chicest restaurants, and the issue has become a matter of national pride for Canada's Conservative government, which invited chefs to serve seal meat in the Canadian Parliament cafeteria in 2010 to protest the EU ban.

Scientists call animals like seals and whales -- which are controversially hunted in Japan and Iceland -- "charismatic megafauna" because their appearance and appeal to humans have become a survival advantage. But with the world's human population and food prices skyrocketing, cuteness may not be enough to save these animals for much longer.

Getty Images

R U Hungry?

It might seem inconceivable that people with no access to food would own cell phones, but as prices fall and phone ownership becomes more of a necessity of modern life, it's not as unheard of as one might think. This may be a sad reflection on the modern world, but it also provides aid agencies with a rare opportunity to help those in need.

In 2007, the U.N. World Food Program (WFP) began experimenting with cell-phone-based aid when it sent around 10,000 text messages to Iraqi refugees living in Syria, alerting them to a new food distribution program. In 2009, the wfp began a pilot program to deliver vouchers for food aid via cell phone to refugees living in Damascus. The agency initially targeted about 1,000 refugee families, who received a $22 voucher every two months that could be exchanged for staples like rice, wheat, and chickpeas at selected shops.

Surprisingly, though many families had difficulty keeping food on the table, the WFP reported that nearly all of the 130,000 refugees receiving food aid from the broader program owned a cell phone. The program was a success, and in late 2010, it was expanded to thousands more refugees living outside the capital. With more than 379 million cell-phone users as of 2009 in Africa, the world's poorest continent, the potential for growth is nearly limitless.

YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP/Getty Images

My "top ten" books every student of International Relations should read

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/09/my_top_ten_books_every_student_of_international_relations_should_read?wpisrc=obnetwork

My "top ten" books every student of International Relations should read

Posted By Stephen M. Walt Thursday, April 9, 2009 - 3:21 PM

Last week Tom Ricks offered us his "Top Ten list" of books any student of military history should read. The FP staff asked me to follow suit with some of my favorites from the world of international politics and foreign policy. What follows aren't necessarily the books I'd put on a graduate syllabus; instead, here are ten books that either had a big influence on my thinking, were a pleasure to read, or are of enduring value for someone trying to make sense of contemporary world politics. But I've just scratched the surface here, so I invite readers to contribute their own suggestions.

1). Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War.

An all-time classic, which I first read as a college sophomore. Not only did M, S & W provide an enduring typology of different theories of war (i.e., locating them either in the nature of man, the characteristics of states, or the anarchic international system), but Waltz offers incisive critiques of these three "images" (aka "levels of analysis.") Finding out that this book began life as Waltz's doctoral dissertation was a humbling moment in my own graduate career.

2). Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Combines biology and macro-history in a compelling fashion, explaining why small differences in climate, population, agronomy, and the like turned out to have far-reaching effects on the evolution of human societies and the long-term balance of power. An exhilarating read.

3). Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence.

He's a Nobel Prize winner now, so one expects a lot of smart ideas. Some of Schelling's ideas do not seem to have worked well in practice (cf. Robert Pape's Bombing to Win and Wallace Thies'sWhen Governments Collide) but more than anyone else, Schelling taught us all to think about military affairs in a genuinely strategic fashion. (The essays found in Schelling's Strategy of Conflict are more technical but equally insightful). And if only more scholars wrote as well.

4). James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.

This isn't really a book about international relations, but it's a fascinating exploration of the origins of great human follies (like Prussian "scientific forestry" or Stalinist collectivized agriculture). Scott pins the blame for these grotesque man-made disasters on centralized political authority (i.e., the absence of dissent) and "totalistic" ideologies that sought to impose uniformity and order in the name of some dubious pseudo-scientific blueprint. And it's a book that aspiring "nation-builders" and liberal interventionists should read as an antidote to their own ambitions. Reading Scott's work (to include his Weapons of the Weak and Domination and the Arts of Resistance) provided the intellectual launching pad for my book Taming American Power).

5). David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.

Stayed up all night reading this compelling account of a great national tragedy, and learned not to assume that the people in charge knew what they were doing. Still relevant today, no?

6). Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics.

I read this while tending bar at the Stanford Faculty Club in 1977 (the Stanford faculty weren't big drinkers so I had a lot of free time). Arguably still the best single guide to the ways that psychology can inform our understanding of world politics. Among other things, it convinced that I would never know as much history as Jervis does. I was right.

7). John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

Why do bad things happen to good peoples? Why do "good states" do lots of bad things? Mearsheimer tells you. Clearly written, controversial, and depressingly persuasive.

8). Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism.

The state is the dominant political form in the world today, and nationalism remains a powerful political force. This book will help you understand where it came from and why it endures.

9). Henry A. Kissinger, White House Years & Years of Upheaval.

Memoirs should always be read with a skeptical eye, and Kissinger's are no exception. But if you want some idea of what it is like to run a great power's foreign policy, this is a powerfully argued and often revealing account. And Kissinger's portraits of his colleagues and counterparts are often candid and full of insights. Just don't take it at face value.

10). Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation.

Where did the modern world come from, and what are the political, economic, and social changes that it wrought? Polanyi doesn't answer every question, but he's a good place to start.

So that's ten, but I can't resist tossing in a few others in passing: Geoffrey Blainey The Causes of War; Douglas North, Structure and Change in Economic History; Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer, Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population; Robert Gilpin,The Political Economy of International Relations; Steve Coll, Ghost Wars; T.C.W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars; R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution; Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World; Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War; Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies; Tony Smith, The Problem of Imperlalism; and Philip Knightley's The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth-Maker. And as I said, this just scratches the surface.

So what did I miss? Keep the bar high

Explaining American Foreign Policy: Obama’s Liberal Internationalism v. Bush’s Neoconservativism

Posted: 06 Apr 2010 12:02 PM PDT

by Julian Ku

Walter Russell Mead has an illuminating post on the liberal internationalist tendencies of the Obama Administration. Putting aside whether or not liberal internationalism is, as Mead puts it, ”a strategic mistake that leads a lot of people inside the administration and well beyond it to make consistently bad decisions about American foreign policy.”, I find his post fascinating for its classification of different approaches to foreign policy and international law. According to Mead, foreign policy decision makers in both the Bush and Obama administration are in favor of the promotion of liberal democracy and human rights. The real difference is how to do so: neoconservativism (Bush) tends to support unilateral or at least liberal coalitions acting alone whereas liberal internationalists (Obama) are deeply committed to international institutions and their legal processes. Anyway, something worth keeping in mind. I wonder if “liberal internationalism” will ultimately acquire the same kind of negative connotation that neoconservatism currently has.

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http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/04/01/liberal-internationalism-the-twilight-of-a-dream/

Posted on April 1st, 2010
Liberal Internationalism: The Twilight of a Dream
Posted In: 2010s, American History, Anglo-American Project, Fall of Europe, Global Warming, U.S. Foreign Policy

Yesterday I wrote about a pattern of choices in our foreign policy that may make sense individually but that overall project an image of weakness before our enemies, disloyalty to our friends.

Today I want to write about something bigger: a strategic mistake that leads a lot of people inside the administration and well beyond it to make consistently bad decisions about American foreign policy.

It is, like all truly great mistakes, a vision thing. “Where there is no vision the people perish,” says the Book of Proverbs (29:18). It’s even worse when the vision is wrong: when your light has turned to darkness. That, unfortunately, is where a lot of America’s Wilsonians are right now.

As I wrote in Special Providence, Wilsonians are the Trotskyites of the American revolutionary tradition. Just as the Trotskyites thought the Bolshevik revolution wasn’t safe unless communism conquered the whole world, American Wilsonians believe that the success and the security of the democratic American revolution at home depends on the triumph of democracy worldwide.

Wilsonians come in more than one flavor. Liberal internationalists (like Woodrow Wilson himself) believe simultaneously in the spread of democracy and the establishment of a world order that looks a lot like world government. (Sometimes they go all the way and think that the establishment of a single world government is the key to humanity’s future.) They believe, passionately, that only international law can save us from chaos, violence and, hopefully, war. A strong body of international law, enforced by international courts and obeyed by national governments is the way to make war less likely and less dreadful when it occurs; it can also deter torture, human rights violations and a whole host of other bad things.

Liberal internationalists want the world to become a more orderly and law abiding place. Ideally many would like the United Nations or some other international organization to evolve into something a little bit like a world government: the European Union on a global scale. But failing that, liberal internationalists would like to see better enforcement mechanisms for documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They would like the ‘laws of war’ to become ever more clearly codified and ever more effectively enforced. They look to the day when power shifts from national governments to international bureaucracies and institutions.

Neoconservatives, on the other hand, are Wilsonians who think, among other things, that the twin goals of democracy promotion and the development of global institutions can’t always be pursued simultaneously. With for example, two non-democratic powers on the Security Council, the goal of democracy promotion might sometimes come into conflict with the goal of making the UN the supreme arbiter of world politics. Otherwise you are saying that China and Russia can veto your efforts to promote freedom worldwide: you are giving the keys of the prison to the bad guys.

The Bush administration wrestled with the consequences of ne0conservative ideas; in the Obama administration it is liberal internationalists who are trying to steer history their way.

During the neoconservative years of the Bush administration, liberal internationalists were developing a new variation on their point of view. In the past, Wilsonian visions have been linked to the idea that the United States was a rising power. As America’s power and influence grew in the international system we had more ability to shape the flow of history; liberal internationalists wanted us to use this rising power to build a steadily more democratic and law-bound world. But what if America is in decline? What becomes of the Wilsonian project then?

Some liberal internationalists have come to see a more institutionalized and organized global polity as a strategy for dealing with what they see asAmerica’s relative decline in the twenty first century. While the United States is still strong, they argue, we should use our power and influence to promote global institutions and governance with agreed rules and procedures. That way the transition from an American world order to the coming post-American system can be made smoother, less dangerous and, from an American point of view, much more pleasant. Entranced by the aura of legitimacy surrounding these august institutions (and, to be fair, appreciative of the benefits provided by orderly methods for settling trade and other disputes), the rising new powers will continue to lead the world down the path the Americans laid down. Wilsonian, once an ideology of rising American power, becomes a strategy for smoothing America’s decline.

This idea is, I think, pretty influential among some of the people in the Obama administration. It may even have a place in the President’s thinking.

It could not be more wrong. The world is inexorably developing in directions that undermine the authority and efficacy of big international institutions, and American power (not, I think, doomed to decline) will increasingly have to operate outside of institutional frameworks, like it or not.

There are three big factors in world affairs that make the liberal internationalist path increasingly problematic going forward.

First, the decline of two of the three Trilateral powers (Europe and Japan; the United States is in a different category) means that we increasingly live in a post-Trilateral world, and that world is much less hospitable to institutions and ideas that are rooted in the Kantian visions that have been so influential in European and American history. Western concepts of bureaucratic institutions date back to the Roman Empire and the concept of law that guides them also has Roman roots. Angl0-Americans sometimes bristle at this with our own cultural preferences for common law and (we like to think) common sense approaches; nevertheless, Europeans and Americans both find the Kantian vision of a bureaucratic world state incorporating basic European cultural ideas about states and laws very natural. Outside the old West, these ideas and institutions don’t seem nearly as natural. Both because Europeans (and whites generally) are over-represented in the existing global institutions and because the institutions themselves evolved out of the era of western colonial dominance along western ideological and cultural patterns, the liberal internationalist vision has a limited appeal in countries like India and China. With non-Euro-American cultures becoming more capable of shaping the international system and more confident in their own values and histories, we cannot expect that Euro-American norms and cultural preferences will do anything but decline as factors in international life.

Second, the increasing complexity of international life combined with the world’s deep-seated cultural differences to make global institutions less and less useful for handling international business. There is a tremendous hunger for regional institutions around the world; Latin America, Africa and various parts of Asia are all trying to emulate the success of the European Union. But nobody likes the idea of having global institutions interfere with one’s local affairs. This makes sense. East Asians responded to their experience with the IMF during the 1997 financial crisis by taking a series of steps to ensure that the IMF would never again take charge of Asian economic policy during an economic crisis. Global institutions are seen as too much under the influence of outside powers and too little attuned to regional preferences and priorities. While the global financial institutions are (occasionally) effective as well as unpopular, the hapless United Nations is a terrible forum for almost all purposes. Only those who have no other option turn to it; UN peacekeepers are too often poorly led, poorly trained, poorly supported and poorly behaved. Africans dream of the day when Africa can manage its own security affairs without the blue helmets; as regional institutions develop in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the role of the UN is more likely to decline than to grow.

Third, the world economy is evolving in ways that undermine the ability of international institutions to manage it. Until and unless countries like China are ready to accept international oversight and constraints on their domestic economic policies (which will be roughly the 12th of Never), such institutions cannot hope to fill the macroeconomic role that Keynes, for example, hoped international institutions would play after World War Two. Ever since theBretton Woods institutions were established, the world economy has been slipping steadily out of their grasp.

Although specific international agreements affecting common problems will continue to be reached, the economic interests and concerns of the world’s countries are so different that the degree of common governance to which they will submit will remain small. Even within the eurozone we see thatGreece and Germany are unwilling and unable to coordinate their policies or agree on a common vision for how the economy should work; yet by world standards Greece and Germany are practically cultural and economic twins. As more emerging markets and countries are able to speak for themselves and advance their interests with confidence in the international political arena, we are going to see less consensus and less agreement on international rules of the road, not more. At bottom, this is the process that is making the Doha Round of international trade negotiations so slow to progress. As more interests are brought to the table with more conviction and more confidence, agreement gets harder to reach.

The United States may try to swim against this current, but it won’t have much success. The new dynamic in American foreign policy was clear at the Copenhagen climate summit last fall. The Europeans, dreaming of a global and institutional solution to the climate change issue, wanted formal negotiations leading to a binding treaty. It became unmistakably clear during 2009 that this was out of reach; in the end, President Obama stitched up an informal, backroom deal with Brazil, China, India and South Africa. The terms of the agreement were vague; the effect was to underline the difficulty of getting a global treaty rather than to make progress on hashing one out. The process-loving, Kantian Europeans weren’t even in the room.

In the future, American diplomacy will work better if we cut to the chase. Rather than chasing liberal internationalist mirages, we should focus on what we want and need, think about how we can get as much of it as possible at the best price — and go for it in the most efficient way possible.

This is by no means the end of Woodrow Wilson. The protection of human rights and the spread of democracy will not disappear from America’s list of objectives. It is not even the end of international institutions; global institutions will continue to exist and will always have a role, and regional institutions are likely to grow more important and more effective. But it does mean that the construction of a legal world order is going to look less and less feasible.

The shift might even be good news for embattled Wilsonians. To the degree that regional institutions are more effective than universal ones at building peace and promoting democratic development around the world, Wilsonian values could flourish — and the world could become a more peaceful, prosperous and happier place. Probably, however, some regions will be more successful than others at building strong and effective institutions. And because the regional institutions will be rooted in the values and political histories of different parts of the world, they will have very different sets of weaknesses and strengths.

All that is for the future. Of more immediate concern is the possibility that American foreign policy makers, unable or unwilling to give up on the old liberal internationalist vision, will waste the resources, energy and political capital of the United States pursuing an unworkable agenda. Perhaps worse, they will make the mistake of believing that the liberal international vision is more acceptable to countries like China and India than neoconservatism was. Generally speaking, Europeans like liberal internationalism and hate neoconservativism. In much of the rest of the world the similarities of these two ideologies seem more important than the differences. In both cases, China sees a threat to its political order at home and to its ambitions abroad. For Islamists, the two ideologies look like two different strategies to achieve the same goal: the subjugation of the Islamic world to a set of ideas rooted in Christian culture and, ultimately, faith. For much of Latin America, the question is how to assert an independent voice and presence in world affairs — and the conviction among many Latin leaders (and not just the Bolivarians) is that this requires limits on US influence in the hemisphere.

These days, liberal internationalism is a solution in search of a problem: it is an idea whose time has passed. Liberal Wilsonians must take a long hard look at a world that is not moving toward global governance in any serious way and think about how the values at the heart of the Wilsonian vision can be advanced in a new century.