A01=William H. Thornton
Author_William H. Thornton
Category=JBCC
Category=JPS
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eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Product details
- ISBN 9780742517073
- Weight: 318g
- Dimensions: 150 x 225mm
- Publication Date: 23 Jul 2002
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Beginning where Huntington's Clash of Civilizations ends, Fire on the Rim is a call to action, not fatalism; to cultural dialogue, not militancy. However, in rejecting the entrenched pessimism of cultural realists such as Huntington and Kaplan, William Thornton is equally careful to avoid the teleological optimism of a Francis Fukuyama, Thomas Friedman, or even an Anthony Giddens. He argues that the United States is now paying, in terms of 'blowback,' a long-term price for short-term Cold War and subsequent globalist strategies—mistakes that were chosen, not fated. Yet mending these errors will require nothing less than a paradigm shift in geopolitical (post-New World Order) and geoeconomic (post-neoliberal) thought. Fire instantiates this shift within the specific context of the Pacific Rim. In defiance of ideological convention, it combines a call for social justice, cultural difference, and environmental sustainability with a sober recognition of the need for continued balance of power geopolitics, soft and hard. The author's iconoclastic melding of idealist and realist elements will provoke the Right and Left alike, but his call for moral realism is a vital step toward an Asia policy fit for the twenty-first century.
William H. Thornton is professor of literary and cultural theory at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan.
