The Duck of Minerva

Introducing myself

by Patrick Porter

17 April 2011, 1707 EDT

Hello, readers of the Duck!

Dan Nexon has very kindly invited me to do some guest blogging at this site.

Introducing myself in brief: I’m an Australian academic with an over-fondness for cigars. Working at King’s College London at the Defence Academy, as a Senior Lecturer in Defence Studies. In September I’ll be moving to Reading to take up a Readership in Strategic Studies.

My main interest these days is in the history and theory of US grand strategy, with an historian’s background but also in a dalliance with IR. I guess I quite like Strategic Studies as a kind of inter-disciplinary twilight world, with all its strengths and weaknesses.

For those still reading, I’ve got another blog called the Offshore Balancer:
https://offshorebalancer.wordpress.com/

After experimenting with blogging, its the academically focused ones with a soulful character and a sense of humour that I like the most, like this one.

Anyway, looking forward to writing here and hopefully living up to the high standards of the Duck.

Patrick Porter is Professor of International Security and Strategy at the University of Birmingham. He is also Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, London. His research interests are great power politics, grand strategy, realism, the causes and consequences of major powers’ decline, the Iraq war of 2003, foreign and defence policy in the US and UK, and the intellectual life of major powers and their foreign policy establishments. He has written four books. His book Blunder: Britain's War in Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2018) was shortlisted for the British Army Military Book of the Year Prize, 2019. His most recent book is The False Promise of Liberal Order: Nostalgia, Delusion and the Rise of Trump (Polity, 2020). He also wrote The Global Village Myth: Distance, War and the Limits of Power (Georgetown University Press, 2015) and Military Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes (Columbia University Press, 2009.

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