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

It’s a minus-sum game

by Jon Western | 4 November, 2009 |

The superficiality in the debate on Afghanistan is getting downright absurd. Last week, David Brooks claimed the problem was Obama's "determination deficit." This week, the New York Times saw fit to give more space to Fred Kagan who claims that McChrystal's recommendations will work as long as the administration gets moving on the right political strategy to augment McChrystal's military strategy. Let's face it: Afghanistan today is a minus-sum game. There is no simple set of course corrections that will not have significant downsides. David Sanger's piece yesterday and the lead editorial in...

read more

…didn’t see this coming….

by Jon Western | 27 October, 2009 |

The first oil contract with the Iraqi government goes to China's CNPC and they are not hiring local labor. From the BBC: "Left Behind By Iraq's Oil Rush on why the locals are not getting jobs:There were hopes too, when the Chinese company first arrived, of an employment bonanza."We thought everyone will find a job," said Zahi, a village elder.So far, they have taken on just a handful of al-Mazzagh's residents as guards.But the CNPC says there is little more they can do for local people."We are sorry, but they don't have skills and they can't speak English," says a site manager who agreed to...

read more

Karadzic trial

by Jon Western | 26 October, 2009 |

Radovan Karadzic, the leader of wartime Bosnian Serbs, was a no show today at the opening of his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia. He's planning to defend himself against eleven counts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities. The reason for his no-show? One of his legal advisors told the BBC that from the scope of the trial - thought to include 1.2 million pages of evidence, numerous crime scenes and hundreds of witness - it was understandable why Mr Karadzic, who is not a trained lawyer, had stayed away.I guess mounting a defense...

read more

Bosnia Faltering

by Jon Western | 23 October, 2009 |

As Charli pointed out a while ago, I co-authored a piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs on the backward slide in Bosnia over the past three years. My co-author, Patrice McMahon, and I noted that the institutions created by the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995 successfully ended the war, but created a decentralized duel-entity political system based on ethnic quotas and divisions that are now contributing to the current crisis. For the better part of a decade, the international community poured money and resources into Bosnia's post-war state-building experience. In large part, the...

read more

Uh oh…

by Jon Western | 19 October, 2009 |

Could Afghanistan get any messier? I'd like to have anyone advocating McChrystal's recommendations explain to me how this would work... From the New York Times "Audit Said Likely to Show Karzai has 48 Percent of Vote":Mr. Karzai’s campaign officials have complained about the work of the five-member panel, saying that foreigners were unfairly influencing its outcome. And Mr. Karzai himself indicated this weekend that he might oppose the results, setting off a flurry of last-minute diplomacy by western officials.If he is shown to have won less than 50 percent of the vote, a widely anticipated...

read more

Obama’s Decisionmaking Style

by Jon Western | 16 October, 2009 |

There has been a lot of criticism of President Obama's decision making style in the last couple of weeks. Last week, Dan Balz had this description: The president, according to one official, came to last week's meeting with his top advisers armed with a list of questions, carefully written down in his precise handwriting, that were designed to generate a thorough airing of the choices available and the underlying analysis behind them.So far so good by my reading.... But, apparently this approach is problematic and Balz jumps to this conclusion:...The longer Obama waits to make this decision,...

read more

Read any good books on Afghanistan?

by Jon Western | 7 October, 2009 |

The Wall Street Journal reports today that the Washington policy community has been busy reading books on the Vietnam War to gain insights about what to do next in Afghanistan. According to the WSJ:The struggle to set the future course of the Afghan war is becoming a battle of two books -- both suddenly popular among White House and Pentagon brain trusts.The two draw decidedly different lessons from the Vietnam War. The first book describes a White House in 1965 being marched into an escalating war by a military viewing the conflict too narrowly to see the perils ahead. President Barack...

read more

USA, USA, USA….

by Jon Western | 6 October, 2009 |

The National Brands Index is out with its 2009 survey results and the United States has taken the top spot. It "soared" from seventh place in last year's survey to number one. How can this be? Well, I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that you won't read this in The Weekly Standard, from the National Brands Index press release: "What’s really remarkable is that in all my years studying national reputation, I have never seen any country experience such a dramatic change in its standing as we see for the United States in 2009,” explains Simon Anholt, NBI founder and an independent...

read more

Evaluating Galbraith’s dissent

by Jon Western | 1 October, 2009 |

Peter Galbraith is now officially out as Kai Eide's deputy in Kabul. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon announced Galbraith's recall/firing this afternoon after he received a letter of dissent from Galbraith about Eide's performance in investigating allegations of fraud. Here's a portion of the letter from tonight's NYTimes: “For a long time after the elections, Kai denied that significant fraud had taken place, even going to the extreme of ordering U.N. staff not to discuss the matter,” Mr. Galbraith wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “And, at critical...

read more

Yugoslavia is now gone….

by Jon Western | 29 September, 2009 |

When ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) says it's over, I guess it's over. Tomorrow, websites using the .yu domain extension will no longer be available. I guess it's some kind of ironic tribute to Milovan Djilas that Tito's dream is extinguished -- in the end -- by some anonymous bureaucracy.

read more