Foreign Policy magazine asked those attending its major gala release at The Corcoran of the 2010 FP100 Top Global Thinkers to feel free to comment and send in thoughts on who should have been on the list and did not make the cut for one reason or another.
I decided to give this a shot and noted that two key intellectuals (though I have thought of a dozen or more since) should have been included. My letter appears today in the most recent issue of Foreign Policy.
The letter isn’t long — but in it I make the point that Charles Kupchan, a professor at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has swum upstream writing and thinking about unlikely eruptions of peace in war-torn corners of human history and thinks about these episodes systematically. Kupchan’s work deserves to be on this roster.
I also suggest Chalmers Johnson who I think stands out as one of the greatest thinkers of the last century — certainly the last half of the 20th century — for his contributions on the “developmental state” and for his provocative commentary on the state of America’s post-Cold War empire.
I should have also added Princeton’s G. John Ikenberry whose concept of a “liberal Leviathan” describing America’s predicament with the rest of the world has and will be an enormously important frame through which to look at the management and containment of American power.
— Steve Clemons
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