Friday Morning Linkage

7 September 2012, 1312 EDT

The Romney foreign-policy memorandum is, for lack of a better term, a bad joke. One example: It twice suggests that the Obama Administration has backed away from European missile defense, in part by using weasel language on the third-site system (“Abandoning A European Missile Defense System”).
The memorandum’s claims about Iran are inadvertently answered in this short Stephen Metz piece on the vacuousness of current “attack Iran” arguments.
Terry Wing explores whether or not the South China Sea dispute will escalate to “war.”
Taylor Fravel on the “perils of predicting Chinese politics.”‘
Also on prediction, Mike Horowitz and Philip Tetlock have suggestions for the intel community and policymakers.
A seminar paper at e-ir looks at the utility of the governmentality framework.
Henry Farrell takes suggestions for Crooked Timber’s upcoming Ken MacLeod seminar. Also plugs the NBinSFF podcast.

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.