The Duck of Minerva

Jon Western

Jon Western has spent the last fifteen years teaching IR in liberal arts colleges at Mount Holyoke College and the Five Colleges in western Massachusetts. He has an eclectic range of intellectual interests but often writes on international security, U.S. foreign policy, military intervention, and human rights. He occasionally shares his thoughts about professional life in liberal arts colleges. In his spare time he coaches middle school soccer, mentors the local high school robotics team, skis, and sails.

Recent Posts

Why We Fight?

by Jon Western | 7 April, 2011 |

Steve Walt asks an interesting question: Is America addicted to war? He gives five reasons why we find ourselves in constant war: 1. Because we can2. Because we have no serious enemies3. The all volunteer force4. It's the establishment stupid5. Congress has checked outThe first three and the last point all speak to the limited international and domestic structural constraints the United States faces on the use of force. The fourth speaks to the agency involved. On this point he argues:the foreign-policy establishment is hard-wired in favor of "doing something." Foreign-policy thinking in...

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Truth Will Win

by Jon Western | 28 March, 2011 |

For those keeping score on where the revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East are headed and how to understand it all, it is worth noting that today marked the 30th anniversary of Solidarity's first national warning strike. On March 27, 1981, more than 12 million Poles took to the streets in a peaceful protest action and in defiance of the Communist regime -- a testimony of the power of non-violence. At the time, it was the largest protest action in the Soviet bloc history. The Poles did not have the internet, or Facebook, or Twitter -- but they were still able to mobilize on an...

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Will R2P Survive?

by Jon Western | 25 March, 2011 |

So here's a question: How do we evaluate whether or not a humanitarian intervention is successful? The obvious difficulty is that the intervention alters history and we are left with running various counterfactual thought experiments. Here's the Obama administration's take on what would have happened in the absence of intervention. According to Laura Rozen, Dennis Ross and Derek Chollet told reporters that:“We were looking at ‘Srebrenica on steroids’ —the real or imminent possibility that up to a 100,000 people could be massacred, and everyone would blame us for it,” Ross explained,...

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Tinariwen, pt. 2

by Jon Western | 1 March, 2011 |

For those interested, Tinariwen was profiled in Steve Chandra Savale's six-part documentary on Music of Resistance that aired on AlJazeera English back in 2009. It provides a brief history of the Tuaregs and of the band:

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Tinariwen

by Jon Western | 1 March, 2011 |

Many of the "mercenaries" fighting on behalf of Gaddafi's regime in Libya are ethnic Tuaregs who fled conflicts in Mali and Niger in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1980, Gaddafi began encouraging the young Tuareg men -- illegally residing in Libya -- to join military service as "African regiments" within the Libyan military. The general reputation of the Tuareg are as fierce and brutal fighters and they appear to be the "foreign mercenaries" in many of the eyewitness reports of brutality in Libya.My first exposure to Tuareg peoples and their relationship with Gaddafi came several years ago when I...

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From LSE to the ICC?

by Jon Western | 22 February, 2011 |

Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi's second son and purported successor, Saif Al-Islam Alqadhafi fueled the protests the other night with his disjointed speech. The irony of Saif's complicity in all of this is that he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation under David Held at London School of Economics titled: "The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance Institutions." From the Abstract: This dissertation analyses the problem of how to create more just and democratic global governing institutions, exploring the approach of a more formal system of collective decision-making by...

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Baron von Cut-and-Paste

by Jon Western | 18 February, 2011 |

Ooops. The young, charismatic, German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg is in trouble for allegedly plagiarizing parts of his dissertation. He announced that he is temporarily dropping his doctoral title. His defense? -- there were mistakes, but nothing plagiarized:"It was compiled over the course of about seven years while I was at the same time working as a member of parliament and while I was a young father. It contains mistakes, no doubt about it. I am extremely unhappy about every single one of those mistakes."Among other things, he apparently he lifted passages from a US...

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Bush’s failed freedom agenda

by Jon Western | 16 February, 2011 |

Condi Rice writes some fancy words this morning:As I watched Hosni Mubarak address the Egyptian people last week, I thought to myself, "It didn't have to be this way."In June 2005, as secretary of state, I arrived at the American University in Cairo to deliver a speech at a time of growing momentum for democratic change in the region. Following in the vein of President George W. Bush's second inaugural address, I said that the United States would stand with people who seek freedom. This was an admission that the United States had, in the Middle East more than any other region, sought...

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This ain’t gonna cut it….

by Jon Western | 14 February, 2011 |

Friends at the National Priorities Project have a quick assessment on President Obama's budget. Here's their take on the defense and security budget:Defense spending, which accounts for roughly 58 percent of discretionary spending and 20 percent of total federal spending (both based on FY 2011 estimates), will continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace than in recent years.The $553 billion base-line Department of Defense request is approximately 3% higher than current funding levels. This figure does not include funding for nuclear weapons or $117.6 billion for the U.S. wars in Iraq and...

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Mubarak’s Ceausescu Moment?

by Jon Western | 10 February, 2011 |

Marc Lynch calls Mubarak's speech "The Worst Speech Ever." His assessment: With the whole world watching, Mubarak instead offered a meandering, confused speech promising vague Constitutional changes and defiance of foreign pressure. He offered a vaguely worded delegation of power to Vice President Omar Suleiman, long after everyone in Egypt had stopped listening. It is virtually impossible to conceive of a more poorly conceived or executed speech. Maybe, but watching Mubarak tonight reminded me of watching the delusional Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu in Nicolae's last speech on December 21,...

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