PEP ARMS CONTROL PROGRAM CONTINUES
By Jason Sibert
This week marks the second week of instruction for Peace Economy Project Arms Control Fellow Katie Graham.
Graham worked for St. Louis Approves, a non-profit working for ranked choice votes in St. Louis, and she also worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Graham currently works for Missouri Senate Candidate Megan Green.
The second week of the PEP Arms Control Fellow program concentrated on the foreign policy school called liberalism. Liberalism puts a lot of faith in the ability of countries to work together to establish international law, or laws that individual nation-states follow on arms control, environmental protections, and many other activities calling for restraints on the behavior of nation-states.
Liberal thought can do much to help us strike arms control deals with other countries because it sees law as the natural order of a system of nation-states, all countries must do is work out the details. Former President Woodrow Wilson is usually mentioned as an advocate of the liberal school of foreign policy. He had a plan for a League of Nations after World War I that would prevent future world wars. Our country didn’t enter the League of Nations and we were plunged into another World War in the 1940’s. The League of Nations faded away in 1947. Of course, the United Nations was born in the years after World War II.
Realism, seen rightly as the opposite of the school of liberalism, views states as simply pursuing their own self-interest, regardless of the type of states involved. This means that international law is little more than something established between nation-states and is broken when the common interest is broken. There is a hybrid school of international relations called liberal realism – originated by Hedley Bull – that sees international law as a useful tool, but the trick is identifying the common interest between the states involved. However, realism has an advantage in that the states the world share a common bond (self-interest) and this bond can be used to cut arms control deals and create a world with fewer weapons.
Working with Katie Graham and other arms control fellows is rewarding because all current and past fellows have been fascinated by the material covered. The type of information taught is something not commonly discussed by average citizens who have little time in their lives to contemplate such things. The PEP Arms Control Fellow program provides information and a viewpoint that is an alternative to those in the political system that see military strikes as the answer to foreign policy problems. Providing an alternative viewpoint is what makes the arms control fellow program so special!
Jason Sibert is the executive director of the Peace Economy Project
