Christopher Clary on his new book, which looks at why international rivalry is a hard habit to break.
6+1 Questions about The Difficult Policies of Peace: Rivalry in Modern South Asia
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domestic politics
What was behind the UAE’s detention of a UK graduate student
Like everyone else, I'm still trying to catch up after the Thanksgiving holiday. So I have a quick, kind of speculative post this week. It looks like the distressing saga of Matthew Hedges has...
The “Israel Lobby” and the Nixon Administration
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Eric Grynaviski, who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. When Mearsheimer and Walt wrote the Israel Lobby, I was...
Get the Lead Out?
Yesterday, Dan Drezner's "one post about American gun violence" explicitly linked the post-Newtown debate about gun violence to Kevin Drum's interesting and provocative Mother Jones article on the...
More domestic politics Posts
The Susan Rice Fiasco
I'm not sure the Obama administration could have handled this any worse. We live in a highly politicized world and somehow the Obama administration is "shocked, shocked" that this issue is being hyped. And while I'm sympathetic to the flurry of criticisms of FoxNews and others for hyping this, I'm also struck by how badly the administration has handled it all. The core of Obama's foreign policy has been to lighten America's global military footprint and to redirect away from Bush's flawed idea that we could "defeat" terrorism. In other words, the gist of Obama's foreign policy has been...
RNC: Don’t Speak in a Publicly-Built Facility when you Attack Government – D’oh!
I got bogged down with NK for awhile, so I missed a chance to comment on the RNC and the US election more generally. I have some thoughts after the break, but a Democrat friend of mine wrote the following, which is a pretty good first draft of the GOP’s problems I think, in this election cycle:On the whole, I found the Republican convention disgusting and not simply because I disagree with their policies. They substantively are disconnected from the problems of the average person. They offered nothing which will help average people and, what they do offer, is bereft of details. They said...
Inside the Bubble
Erik Erikson's full-throated attack on the US media and Obama is getting bounced around the right-wing twitter-verse today. For those of us who aren't part of that universe, it provides an interesting glimpse inside the bubble. It begins thus: Yesterday, as the American consulate in Libya was smoking and the rioters were returning in Egypt, the President of the United States flew off to Las Vegas for a fundraiser while his spokesman was telling the American press corps that yesterday wasn’t really a normal political day. Had it been George W. Bush, the media would, right now, be marching on...
#virtualAPSA2012 – Phil Arena, “Crisis Bargaining and Domestic Opposition”
Phil Arena was supposed to present his paper, "Crisis Bargaining and Domestic Opposition" at APSA. If you are reading this on an RSS feed, you should see the audio. His slides are not integrated, as his audio presentation is in mp3 format. This is the first of what I hope will be more of these. If you need an APSA fix, or are just interested in the topic, take 10-15 minutes to listen to Phil's presentation and leave feedback.If and when we accumulate more #virtualAPSA2012 presentations, I will create a more conference-like environment for them.
Guest Post: Dave Kang – “Confucian North Korea”
I am happy to guest post my friend Dave Kang of the University of Southern California. I think Dave’s work on east Asia and IR theory is excellent; I would start with this or this if you’re interested. REKConfucian North KoreaFigure 1. Korean Worker’s Party symbolIt is easy to caricature North Korea as a “bizarre” “land of no smiles” full of brainwashed robots. In the past few years, North Korea has become somewhat prominent in popular culture either as a salacious joke or a freak show of a country. (And yes, I refuse to give you too many links to articles I think are misinformed...
All Politics is Local, Korean style
<img src="https://lh3.ggpht.com/-lXf905vas9I/T4Zfu5yVCwI/AAAAAAAAAJg/Cgr7ZRk41Cg/videoefa933ead93d%25255B3%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" style="border-style: none" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('6321b8cf-9761-4208-8fea-48b2a79cce22'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" alt="" />Dancing for Votes in Dongnae! Because I work for a public university, I am a national civil servant. So it was inappropriate for me to comment on my site about the recent Korean parliamentary election. But now that it’s over (here are...
The US will not ‘Pivot’ much to Asia (1): We don’t really Want to
I found this image here. So the US pivot toward Asia is all the rage in foreign policy now. Obama and Secretary Clinton genuinely seem to believe in this, and there good reasons for it. Briefly put, Asia has the money, people, and guns to dramatically impact world politics in a way that no other region can now. But I think the US Asian pivot won’t happen much nonetheless, because: 1) Americans, especially Republicans, don’t care about Asia, but they really care about the Middle East (a point the GOP presidential debates made really obvious); 2) Americans know less about Asia than any part...
Some Political Science Thoughts on the GOP Debate Marathon
<img src="https://lh4.ggpht.com/-kdQcW4Vl7-k/T1A4B7ds90I/AAAAAAAAAGc/qah90Do3fTk/videoc8c44ca00ba6%25255B13%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" style="border-style: none" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('1f164c0c-2f86-4021-9047-76be574cf4fc'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" alt="" />Here’s the last one if you haven’t seen it yet So it looks like the GOP debating season is over. Wow. I don’t study American politics, but I can’t remember a marathon run of debates like that ever before. (Can anyone speak to that point,...