Moments of Permanence - April 23rd, 2009

About April 23rd, 2009

10:05 am
Liveblogging Obama, the US, and the future International Order:

17:43: People arriving. A number of them seem to now each other. I know none of them. This is a lecture on politics organised by the UWA Politics Club - I suspect they may be politics students. I am a history/linguistics major. I will try to keep myself from sneering openly at their patent inferiority.

I'm sitting in the back row, because I could nab a powerpoint here (I'm not sure how long this lecture is supposed to be). It's in Fox, and I'm having kind of a fit of nostalgia - I haven't had a class here in years, but I've had some classes I liked here, had some fun moments, and hey, about five metres from here is the exact spot where I first met [livejournal.com profile] lizbyrd, over nine years ago. Regrets I've had a few, but that is not one of them.

17:51: Kim Beazley just walked in. I knew he was teaching at UWA now, but somehow it still seems weird seeing someone I once actually hoped would become my Prime Minister from across the room. (Hey, it was the Howard era, and the point at which Beazley actually looked kind of awesome, before being ousted by Simon Crean, who would not be able to look awesome under any circumstances whatsoever.)

17:58: "Wow, I've never seen one of these lectures so full..." We conclude it must be because it's about Obama. Everyone loves Obama. (As was pointed out before the election even took place, by sheer virtue of Not Being George W. Bush this cycle's president was always going to look good...)

18:06: After a momentary power cut, have had introduction from the Politics club pres and Ian Clark is now being introduced by Kim Beazley.

Apparently Kim's thesis supervisor described his writing style as that of a "third rate state department official". Ouch, burn.

18:10: Hmm, that brief powercut seems to have done bad things to the network. Annoying.

"And we are fascinated by Barack Obama, and fascinated by what he is doing in the international community." Interesting comment on the Obama administration's policy that follows on from the Bush Doctrine. "I think it was largely the product of a wounded society, that was confused by what had happened to it..." Beazley, he are not stupid. I like that summation of how America went so wrong so fast.

I hope this is recorded, it's way past my medicated time.

Professor Clark is starting, he looks genial and nice.

Aww, he's nostalging, he hadn't been back to UWA in 25 years since he spent ten years teaching here.

He plans to talk about what is "possibly the key issue in international politics" - a theme around it, anyway.

He just outlined what he's not going to talk about - I missed the second one, but oh well, he's not talking about that.

He's going to start off generally about the Eight Powers and their role in the international order. Cool, I'm interested in that.

1990 was a key point in world history - the end of the Cold War, the transition in international power dynamics to existence of one superpower. Clark things we've wasted the potential of the last twenty years, depressingly, at a critical time where we can't afford to waste many more. Awesome.

Argh, focus issues suck. ADHD can be annoying.

What the debate over world power structures in a world with only one superpower lacked was adequate address to the question of what this brings to the rest of the world; it was considered in terms of what this would bring to the benefit of the US.

Interesting: Suggestion that perhaps the US is returning to multilateralism, rather than the bad old days of unilateralism.

But if the US is coming back to the fold, what is the fold, now?


... and that's where I stopped liveblogging, really, I got distracted by the content.
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