I'm slated to teach International security this fall for the first time in a couple of years and have been thinking about what to cover. It is a broad topic, of course, and people have all sorts of perspectives. Especially prior to the "war on terror," there was a...
"Speak Victorian, think Pagan." Kaplan's clever phrase is also the motto of Coming Anarchy. I wonder, though, if Curzon takes that maxim as seriously as he should.In his June 20 post, "Thanks for...
Robert Farley's posted the first of a six-part series on the future of Sino-US relations. If the quality of the first post is any indication, the whole series will be an excellent primer on the...
I guess that's what I get for waiting until everyone else has already posted. Ok, so I need to comply with the “five books I liked enough as a teen/young adult to read again as an adult” meme. After...
David Adesnik takes an odd swipe at the mainstream media.What the WaPo actually reported on Sunday's front page was thatBlair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a "protracted and costly" postwar occupation of that country.As Kevin Drum points out, this isn't exactly a revelation (even if Juan Cole calls it a "bombshell"). No one needed secret intelligence, even in 2002, to discover that the Bush administration hadn't done enough to prepare for the...
After the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy advocates in Tiananmen Square by the People's Liberation Army, the NRA ran advertisements claiming that if the protesters had been armed, they could've defended themselves and thus prevented the anti-democracy crackdown. This kind of argument, rooted in the (correct) conviction that the ultimate recourse against tyranny is armed insurrection, has a long history both in political theory and in gun-rights advocacy.Adopting this logic, Joe Katzman, of Winds of Change, writes that the world's indifference to the mass violence in Zimbabwe has convinced him...
I just discovered that my colleague at Georgetown, Tony Arend, has started a weblog on Georgetown's new - and barely used - blog system. Besides being an expert on international law, Tony's a Georgetown institution unto himself.Tony's latest post argues that the Geneva Convention is actually only one of a number of treaties that the US may be violating in Guantanamo Bay.I'd say "welcome" to Tony, except that his blog is older than the Duck.Filed as: international law, Guantanamo Bay, Geneva Convention and Arend
It looks like the Duck of Minerva's going to start quacking "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" if I don't post something on international relations soon. So, in the interests of all non-baseball fans everywhere... On America Abroad, Ivo Daalder reflects on the The High Cost of Unilateralism:In the early days of the Bush administration, us foreign policy wonks would sit around and bemoan Bush’s unilateralism — his decision to walk out of the ABM Treaty, declare Kyoto “dead,” abandon efforts to strengthen the ban on biological weapons, unsign the treaty establishing the International Criminal...
[Cross posted at Discord and Elaboration]As a New York Mets fan I can't help but marvel at the acquisition and the performance of Pedro Martinez this season. True, many doubted whether giving Pedro a 4-year deal given his age, loss of velocity, and recent injuries was a wise move by the Metsies, but so far the investment is paying off. It got me thinking--just exactly how good is Pedro? It seems to me that his antics over the years (the midgtet mascot, the Don Zimmer throw down, the threat to peg the Bambino in his *ss, etc.) has to some extent lessened the apprecatiation for just how...
Cross posted on my blog.Two days ago, Steve Holland of Reuters asked Tony Blair and George W. Bush about the so-called "Downing Street Memo." You know, the leaked transcript from a secret British government meeting held during summer 2002: "C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."Lots of bloggers have commented about the lack of...
Last weekend my wife and kids and I went to visit the National World War Two Memorial that now stands on the Mall in Washington between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. We hadn't been before, and since both of our grandfathers served in WWII, we though it was kind of appropriate for Memorial Day weekend. I don't quite know what we were expecting; I'd heard some of the press about the site's sterility and its nineteenth-century throwback architecture, but if I'd seen a picture of the memorial before I'd managed to flush it from my mind somehow. I know a fair amount about...
The international community's inadequate response to the ongoing genocide in Sudan (and yes, it is a genocide) brings shame upon us all. Recent polling suggests the American people agree, as majorities favor a stronger US commitment to the stop the crimes against humanity being committed by the Sudanese-backed Janjawid.Today, NATO pledged to provide airlift support to send additional African troops to the region:NATO defence ministers gave the green light on Thursday to an operation to airlift extra African troops to Sudan's troubled Darfur region, the alliance's first mission on the...