In “Kagan urges the U.S. to “lean forward,” (February 13), Adam Thorp, unfortunately omits to review perhaps the most relevant question of the event: Kagan’s particular ideological special interests and his related conflicts of interest. His foreign policy construct is more accurately defined by serial war and destabilization (postured clinically as “leaning” or of other euphemisms), as such conflict defines Middle East sociology and its multi-party state-based (and Western-backed) policies of cultural contention, ethnic purgation and ambitions of resource appropriation and hegemony, which is in its fullest flower as the GWOT, or the global war on terror, arguably Kagan’s ideological raison d’être.
Both his particular brand of cultural solidarity, as well as the related institutionalization of such ideology within the University, may be a basis for more serious reflection, including the legitimacy of the CPOST/UPOST and the University’s related obligation to more carefully sustain the “Chicago School” which, one could be forgiven, appears to be conditionally for sale. As for the Dean’s Fund for Student Life which sponsored the speaker, one might more accurately regard it as one for student indoctrination.
The so-called CPOST (the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism) casts a dark shadow over the integrity of the entire Chicago School. It is a platform of perhaps the most troubling kind of academic, logical and otherwise cognitive fallacy as it co-mingles special interest viewpoints on Middle East and defense policy, with domestic security and civil liberty measures.
In such a compromised emotional environment, and over related public (and foreign) policy issues that are now deeply institutionalized in authoritarian hierarchy such as Kagan represents, an understandable post hoc or false presumption fallacy is easy to understand. The sequencing and grouping of certain dramatic events over the past decade–ranging from rogue state terror to war, territorial claims, security surveillance to constitutional revision–along with serial synthetic conflict (ISIS for example), have been repetitively reported and framed as prima facie and causal.
As for the future of U.S. (American sovereign) foreign policy, it may begin to regain its clarity and equilibrium by an initial healthy exercise of ideological defiance against its feigned external allies and their domestic agencies, perhaps even taking its communicative cue from Mrs. Kagan’s (Nuland’s) now infamously artful and diplomatic expressivity.
As for Kagan, one might urge him to “lean over.”
—Matt Andersson, Class of 2016 (MBA)
