Morning Linkage

2 August 2012, 1230 EDT

That aircraft carrier base in Perth? Not so much.
Against self-epublishing (“self-epublishing”? Gah!).
Artillery as “The Last Argument of Tyrants.”
Gerard N. Magliocca asks if Washington, DC is unconstitutional. The correct question, though, is if it is the greatest place to be?
Jamie at Blood and Treasure on the flap over the Churchill bust: “People close to the seat of power in the United States, at least in the geographical sense, are arguing over the positioning of a minor hearth God relative to the household altar.”
Jay Ulfelder at his home blog: “I think that political science deserves the second half of its name, and I therefore consider myself to be a working scientist. The longer I’ve worked at it, though, the more I wonder if that status isn’t as much a curse as a blessing. After more than 20 years of wrestling with a few big questions, I’m starting to believe that the answers to those questions are fundamentally unknowable, and permanent ignorance is a frustrating basis for a career.”
Robert Murray makes the important point that IR students need to “read more history” and that this applies to scholars as well. That way we might, among other things, stop making wrongheaded claims about the Peace of Westphalia and all that. Unfortunately, his discussion of Popper, Lakatos, and Kuhn suggests that IR students and scholars also need to read more philosophy of science.
LFC writes something depressing, but too common, about his graduate-school experience.
Robert Farley wants to know why Star Trek is so, well, non-Asian. At least it is better than Firefly.
Daniel Little on Daniel Elder-Vass’s The Reality of Social Construction. And yes, I recognize that this basically amounts to trolling for a Colin Wight-PTJ comment war.
Matt Scroggs at The Smoke-Filled Room riffs on Kenneth Waltz’s Nukes-for-Iran! article. The punchline: nuclear weapons may not enhance stability, but a nuclear Iran can be deterred.

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.