The Great Experiment

"This is a curious book because its author, Strobe Talbott, is a very old friend of mine and in some ways a similar sort of practitioner and theoretician of globalisation , in that after a long career writing for Time magazine he went to work for his old Oxford roommate Bill Clinton, and ended up the Deputy Secretary of State. As such he really understood the hidden back-story of modern politics, which always gets shoved out of view by the more familiar story of nation-states. So Strobe went back to the beginning, to the Greeks and the Romans, to show that there is a whole kind of alternative narrative of world history, which is of abortive efforts to form political organisations that operate above country level. He has done, at a much more academic rigorous level, what I sought to do at a kind of anecdotal personal level in my book, which is to say that this prism of looking at politics through the nation-state misses out a lot. It is not that you should ignore the nation-state, but going back a very long way people have realised that one should also be trying to look for forms of organisation which transcend the state. So whether it is trading arrangements or other treaty arrangements over many centuries, people have always been struggling for cooperative ways of working together which aren’t just limiting themselves to nations. But you can also look at it through the other end of the telescope, because, in fact, Britain, France and the U.S. for different reasons – the first two because they didn’t have the capabilities in a sustained way, and the U.S. because it has other commitments – actually weren’t willing to do this alone as countries. They were determined to do it through a global arrangement, the UN Security Council, and Obama spent much of the week leading up to the action insisting that the U.S. would only be part of it if the rest of the world was on board. It has had a reasonable start, but it is a resolution which, like so many UN resolutions, has found forms of words and phrases that people can agree on but it doesn’t necessarily reflect a coherent political strategy or even an operational military one. It is good as far as it goes and it serves its immediate objective, which was stopping Benghazi being turned into a Srebrenica. But what it didn’t offer was a strategy for the international community to give Libyans the right to choose their own government, so I expect they will have to circle round and come back to this again."