This week was really good. Besides class I also had a Chinese speech competition on Sunday and I ended up taking silver, so next fall I’ll be studying abroad at Nanjing University in China. I haven’t been back to China in a while, so I’m really happy about this opportunity.
I also really enjoyed my office hours meeting with PTJ and found the advice really helpful. One of my biggest challenges in the class has been feeling like there’s a lot that I just don’t know about, or don’t know enough about, and as a result I often feel like I lack the means to contribute to class conversations in a meaningful way. Much of my knowledge is limited to my own interests and personal background, and consequently much of my input is centered around those things. Moving forward I plan on focusing on these three things:
By excluding people from national policy, the implicit meaning is that they are not a part of that national consituency and are thus part of the “other”. This goes back to Tuesday’s discussion of “self” and “other”, as well as Hsia’s article on Taiwan. Miranda in her response to my Week Ten Blog brought up a lot of good points about the formation of national identity and how that has shaped American policy over time. She talked about America’s “defensive policy”, which got me thinking constructively about why, historically, that would be such a popular choice. (My main takeaway was that British colonialism and the victory of the American Revolution endowed in the US a deep reverence for “personal freedoms” which came to be synonymous with “American”; a defensive strategy is necessary to protect “freedom” and therefore protect “America”.) Truthfully, in the past, although I’ve thought race and gender studies are really interesting, I never really considered it as something that people actually do and get practical jobs from. Being in this class however, I find myself readily reaching for the constructivist approach, especially as it relates to some of my other classes and experiences. Moving forward I think it would be interesting to use constructivism to try and understand the formation of other countries, specifically in countries that were imperialized/colonized. On to Week Eleven!
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Regarding the blog topic for this week, the first thing that really stood out to me was the introduction for Bush’s 2006 National Security Strategy which said:
During Trump’s presidency, “American” has been a designation clearly reserved for American citizens, with even some naturalized citizens not being considered American enough. NSS 2017 supports this with its explicit use of American citizens, as opposed to NSS 2015 which used the vaguer term “American people”. In NSS 2015 this usage was used to further a more humanist and moralist sense of self which aligned American values with the well-being of the world and something that all other countries could benefit from. In this way, as discussed in “Fixing the Meaning of 9/11”, “self” become conflated with ideals of good and virtue, while “other” was used to denote bad. This moralist separation of “other” is consistent, and can be seen in NSC-68’s description of the Soviet Union as a fanatical slave state, as well as NSS 2017’s characterization jihadist terrorists as having “barbaric ideologies” (3). The Wolfers reading says that national security “indicates that the policy is designed to promote demands which are ascribed to the nation rather than individuals, sub-national groups or mankind as a whole” (481). By separating“who” and “what” within the categories of “self” and “other”, the US can get support for current policy by using the definitions most helpful to the present condition. Obama’s use of “American” focused more on general American ideals that other countries could also subscribe to, against globalized concerns like ebola and climate change. This worked to support Obama’s tactic of increased international bilateral cooperation. On the other hand, Trump makes “America” an exclusive ideal and group, which then supports his tactics of America working more by itself for itself. From NSC-68 to NSS 2017, American leadership was used as a strategy for obtaining security, as well as a definition for what security is. As NSS 2015 says, security is protecting “the leadership of United States ensuring the safety of American people in-land and overseas”. Leadership becomes a way of maintaining autonomy, and this is autonomy becomes synonymous with the freedom which America lists as one of its core defining values of self. In conclusion, similar to Elyssa, I think that the general framework for discussing national security has remained the same and is centered around general concepts of “us” and “them”, but that the interpretation of these concepts has changed over time and has been used for the justification of different means. |
KateHi, I'm Kate! I'm from Madison, WI and am planning on majoring in SIS focusing on East-Asia China. I like practicing kung fu, listening to music, and drinking bubble tea. Archives
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