History and Historiography

It’s Not September 11 Anymore

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It’s Not September 11 Anymore

David Pan
On this anniversary of the September 11 attacks, it has become clear that the type of counterinsurgency warfare that the United States was fighting at the beginning of the century is behind us. Whatever the outcome of the war in Ukraine, the long-term consequences for the U.S. will be significant in terms of the need to shift its defense capabilities. Not only has the war exposed a dangerous deficiency in our stocks of ammunition and heavy weapons, but it has also revealed the dangers of the decline in the industrial capacity for replenishing those stocks. In addition, there is also a severe manpower deficit in all our armed forces that will need to be addressed in order to maintain our defenses against the present return of World War II–style warfare on broad fronts. Without a concerted strategy for maintaining a strong deterrent to both China and Russia, the U.S. could end up in the same situation it was in by 1941, in which expansion by authoritarian powers made the U.S. increasingly isolated and in fact an inviting target for attack due to the deterioration of its armed forces. In this panel on “War Today” from our conference on Forms of War, Carl Mirra, Stephen Trynosky, and Florindo Volpacchio discuss the long-term consequences of the insights gained from the war in Ukraine.
Now Available!

Telos 203 (Summer 2023): The Manifold Foundations of Human Rights
Telos 203 (Summer 2023): The Manifold Foundations of Human Rights is now available at the Telos Press website.
The struggle for human rights, while beginning as a moral problem about our common responsibilities, can only be taken seriously when we consider its political ramifications. The crucial problem running through the essays in Telos 203 is the difficulty of establishing a unified foundation for human rights given the variety of cultural, legal, moral, and political perspectives that we find in the world regarding the question of how we relate to each other as humans. Three key themes dominate the discussions: the difficulty of balancing the commitment to the universality of human rights with a respect for cultural diversity, the centrality of individual conscience rather than legal determinations in the development of the habits and conventions of human rights, and the inevitably political nature of the human rights project.
Read David Pan’s Introduction to Telos 203 in TELOSscope.

Categories: History and Historiography

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