Saturday Noontime Linkage

4 August 2012, 1634 EDT

William Pesek argues that the recent surge in corn prices might lead to economic disaster.
Alisa Neman Hood on Chinese shale gas.
Josh Foust argues that Rosa Brooks gets the key story of the NSS, drones, and the Osh crisis wrong: “Sadly, they did turn into a more serious cleavage. But more than the cleavage resulting in atrocities that the U.S. was unwilling to assist with (the U.S. didn’t even send humanitarian aid for the Uzbek refugees who fled the carnage) is the bias inherent to how the NSS was trying to understand the situation. In 2010 there were U.S. government employees either in or very close to Osh — both at the State Department and with the DOD and various intelligence agencies who run the Manas air base. The NSS didn’t want to contact them to get a handle on what was going on — they wanted a drone.”
Is it possible to have a thoughtful rant? This post at Ink Spots on Romney’s foreign-policy rhetoric suggests an affirmative answer.
Robert Haddick thinks Beijing’s got the South China Sea in the bag. I think they should have waited longer to abandon their assurance game toward their neighbors.
Kate McNamara takes aim at the ECB’s democratic deficit. Once technocrats turn out to be ideologues, central-bank independence sure starts to look dicey, doesn’t it? Particularly if technocratism starts to look like an ideology.
Felix Berenskoetter advances arguments about “the End of IR Theory” that are very similar to some of what PTJ and I argue in our submission — currently, but I expect not permanently, entitled “I CAN HAS IR THEORY?!” — to the relevant EJIR special issue.

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.