Bush is going on vacation

21 July 2006, 1227 EDT

But he’s not going to abandon work altogether. And what kind of work will he do?

BUSH WILL MIX work with vacation time at Crawford ranch. Aides explore August swing to battleground state such as Pennsylvania, where Republicans are defending three endangered House seats and Sen. Santorum. Also planned: one-year commemoration of Hurricane Katrina, viewed by Republican strategists as biggest second-term setback.

The Duck really isn’t supposed to be a shrill, partisan blog. But there comes a point in time when those of us who care deeply about international relations just can’t take it any more. Historians will remember this month of unwanted back rubs, “cutting the pig”, recommending Iraq-style democracy for Russia, and exercising his first veto to prevent the “murder” of cytoblasts while the Middle East and Afghanistan burn. They will write about it as the time when the story of the Bush administration changed from a Greek tragedy to Juvenalian satire.

That’s about it. Later today I’ll publish the first of a few posts on what current events do, or don’t, tell us about American primacy.

Filed as: Bush

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.