International Relations I Believe That Research Proposal

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It has had the most success in stabilizing regions and winning concessions through idealistic policies. The reason for this is simple: ideas and money travel faster than bullets.

Diplomacy may not always deliver the immediate results that the use of force and intimidation may have, but information, ideas and money have much stronger, lasting results. The Cold War ended and Eastern Europe was pacified not because Reagan built more bombs (he didn't), but because Eastern Europeans longed for the freedoms and wealth enjoyed by their counterparts in the west.

The United States cannot be an isolationist nation, and indeed the division of isolationist/internationalist barely holds relevance today. Few nations are truly isolationist. The nature of global trade and travel has allowed for economic and ideological spread to penetrate the borders of all but the most determined nations. A United States filled with new immigrants and trading with the world cannot be isolationist, even if it decides to stop playing world police.

4. The tragedy of the commons refers to the fact that when a point of stability is reached, population is allowed to increase rapidly. This places a drain on the resources of the land, which negatively affects us all (Hardin, 1968). The tragedy is that we have reached a point where our desired goals (improved health care, access to clean water, relative peace) have also brought us population explosion and pollution on a destructive scale.

It is prophetic, perhaps, that Hardin used the metaphor of the herdsmen and the patch of grazing land. This ties directly into what happened in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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Medical and technical advances have allowed for longer human lives which in turn has given rise to a population explosion. We would normally view these developments as positive, but in effect the added strain of each incremental reduction in infant mortality or each incremental increase in life expectancy is that more resources are taken from the earth.

Eventually, we will have difficulty feeding ourselves, or finding access to fresh water. Our supply of fossil fuels will run out, our air will be dirtier and our environment more polluted. The strain of successfully surviving is causing us to have an increasingly difficult time surviving. We are destroying the resources on which we depend to survive, simply because those resources allow us to survive.

Our most difficult challenges in international relations in the future may not come from wars, but from the allocation of increasingly precious resources. Already our largest challenges are with respect to large-scale resources -- water basins, marine ecosystems, global warming (Ostrom et al., 1999).

The tragedy of the commons does not reflect the fate of the earth so much as the fate of man on the earth. If we cannot meet our needs from the earth, we will die off, but the earth itself will recover in our absence, albeit in a different form. Even in Hardin's example, this would hold true. The herdsmen would die off when their grazing land became arid, but without the herdsmen, the land would recover.

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