To compete and thrive in the 21st century, democracies, and the United States in particular, must develop new national security and economic strategies that address the geopolitics of information. In the 20th century, market capitalist democracies geared infrastructure, energy, trade, and even social policy to protect and advance that era’s key source of power—manufacturing. In this century, democracies must better account for information geopolitics across all dimensions of domestic policy and national strategy.
A large literature on U.S. foreign policy takes for granted that America's alliances entangle the United States into military conflicts that it might otherwise avoid. Yet proponents of this argument have presented very little evidence that this entanglement mechanism has actually played a significant role in U.S. foreign policy. The speaker looks for such evidence in all post-1945 U.S. military conflicts and finds hardly any. U.S. entanglement is rare, he argues, because (1) the United States, as a superpower, is capable of flouting its commitments with relative impunity, (2) U.S. alliance agreements are vague and contingent commitments, and (3) these alliances help the United States deter potential aggressors and restrain allies from initiating or escalating conflicts that might threaten U.S. interests.
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