Morning Linkage

31 July 2012, 1300 EDT

Russia seeks to revive its power-projection capabilities by establishing overseas naval facilities.
Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times describes the experience of being a drone pilot.
Apparently selling F-35s will “cement” US alliances (via a twitter source that I can’t recall, but who was equally skeptical of the direction of causality).
RPI relates views on whether or not China will have a soft landing.
Dan Rodrik on manufacturing convergence.
SEK disabuses us all of our erroneous belief in the existence of a movement called “Social Darwinism.”
Io9 provides an uninspiring list of things they’d like to see in a new Star Trek series.
But it provides a more interesting list of recent-ish “big ideas” SF. A big “thumbs up” for Spin, Anathem, and Blindsight, although the latter falls into the “big ideas that are interesting but also completely wrong” category.
The Hobbit will be a trilogy. Jackson will dramatize the struggle with the Necromancer, and so on and so forth. Most literary types are not pleased, but as Tolkien never saw his universe as confined to the published books, I’m not certain that the griping makes sense.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.