World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

Want to see a satellite photograph of many of the military bases the US maintains throughout the world?  You can now do so, due to the dedicated efforts of Josh Begley who has compiled them from published sources.  The US has over 700 military bases all over the world.   It is truly a stunning display.

Bucholz Army Airfield (Kwajalein), Marshall Island

The projective military power of the US is a fact not lost on other countries in the world.  Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a dramatic increase in his country’s military spending, saying that “Let no one have illusions that he can achieve military superiority over Russia. We will never allow it.”   The speech, which was delivered to a joint session of the Russian Parliament, was largely directed against the military ambitions of the US, but the rhetoric could hardly have been lost on other countries in the world.   At a time when defense budgets in the US and Europe are going down, the dramatic increase in Russian spending cannot help but raise fears of Russian ambitions.

I try in my classes to note how the arts contribute to political understandings.  Indeed, my personal belief is that the arts lead the way to new ways of social thought:  I cannot, for example, imagine the Enlightenment without thinking about how Renaissance art changed the way humans viewed the world.  It is, however, difficult to articulate the linkage between the arts and politics.  Jacobin, a reliably lefty blog, has a great, thought-provoking essay on that linkage.  A representative paragraph from the essay makes this point:

The Belgian philosopher and art historian Lieven De Cauter has distinguished between “good politics,” which needs to be decisive in its goals and practices, and “good art,” which is by its nature ambiguous about moral and political commitments. To describe a character in a novel as “good” does not necessarily refer to their morality or politics but may describe the success of the artist in capturing a truth, passing on insights, taking us into exciting or troubling uncharted territories.  This seems especially relevant to the present moment. With left politics in limbo, and being at an early stage in building the hope, confidence, and capacities for moving beyond capitalism, the current counter to fatalism is not certitude but possibility and experimentation –terrain that would seem to give special weight to the contribution of “good art.” The weight of art within the political is likewise reinforced by the fact that understanding often begins with the emotional and only then moves on to a concern with the structural limits on our lives.