OUR AMAZING WEEKEND: Part 1. Friday-Grand Strategy

Friday: Grand Strategy with Henry Pederson




Our Academic Dean/History Teacher/ coolest person ever's son, Henry, came in to do a presentation about Grand Strategy. Henry worked at SEGL last year. The issues that we talked about don't usually come up until Grad School, he said.

He talked to us about strategy, especially Grand Strategy for the U.S with the question in mind, "Should the US have a grand strategy, and if so, what should it be?"

We talked about the Social Contract (a philosophical sort of thing that we've talked about before) and how the ethical job of a state is to protect the rights from which the social contract is based, and basically, protect the social contract.

With a Social Contract, you have to give up certain rights to gain certain rights. For example, you have to give up the right to murder in order to have the right to not be murdered. Being a part of the US, we are part of a Social Contract.

We talked about how it's not always what's ethical, but what's less wrong, and what is part of our social contract. For example, something he said that was really interesting is that he would submit to us that the US not getting involved with the Rwandan Genocide was the ethical thing to do. Rwanda's not in our social contract, but getting involved risks American lives, which are the ethical responsibility for the US to protect. I thought that was really interesting. Maybe it's ethical to not get involved based on the Social Contract, but is it right not to get involved? Which one's less wrong? Those are questions that went through my head.

We talked about the different theories of international relations, such as Idealism/liberalism, Constructivism, and Realism. I feel like I'm an Idealist by nature, but in reality I'm more of a constructivist.

Game:
We played this really cool game that taught me alot, even in the first couple of minutes.
It was a kind of war simulation game, and playing it made me understand war so much better. I'm not going to explain the details of it, but it was a great simulation game. Henry told us that for every $1.50 we made in the game, he would pay us twice that (or something like that). The last round we agreed to not kill anyone else (for the game) but the second round, something killed someone (I was the one who got killed actually :( ) That person started a chain of aggression, and only 3 out of the 16 of us got any money, as opposed to if we actually kept peace, we all would've got money.

The simulation made me think alot about Israel. and how The fear of being the victim turns you into the perpetrator ( I am definitely coining that). This was demonstrated by the last round of the game. One girl got "tanks" to protect herself because she thought she was going to be killed, but because of that fear she ended up being the perpetrator who started the aggression.

Again, The fear of being the victim turns you into the perpetrator. 


We were faced with questions like, should the US:
torture, if only one hour of torture could save 100,000 people?
use nukes?
intervene in a conflict?
give foreign aid?
Support a dictator?
Hunt down Julian Assange?
etc. etc.

While ethical, these questions can only be answered accurately if we have a clear grand strategy.


This week we'll be continuing out discussion about the US' grand Strategy, and we'll be doing some cool things to figure it out :)