The Duck of Minerva

PM

Recent Posts

Yes, I do envy physicists

by PM | 26 August, 2012 |

Even the Evil League of Evil has peer review.One of the laziest sneers directed at us social scientists who use math and statistics in our research is that we suffer from "physics envy."Ha! It sounds like penis envy! It's a quip that will slay them dead around the seminar table!Well, I do use math in some of my work (to my great surprise). I also have a couple of working papers (soon, inshallah, to be articles) that have lots and lots of tables and graphs.But that's not why I have physics envy.Nor is the source of my envy my shared commitment to an idea that the social universe can be...

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The Sino-Japanese Laser Cat War of 2012

by PM | 23 August, 2012 |

Who will win in a world of .... LASER CATS andhegemonic stability theory?In an interesting thought experiment at Foreign Policy, James R. Holmes (an associate professor at the Naval War College) asks whether China could take Japan on the high seas.In July, China's East Sea Fleet conducted an exercise simulating an amphibious assault on the islands. China's leaders are clearly thinking about the unthinkable. And with protesters taking to the streets to smash Japanese cars and attack sushi restaurants, their people may be behind them. So who would win the unlikely prospect of a clash of titans...

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The Peculiar Stability of Instability

by PM | 22 August, 2012 |

The caption for this photo is, no joke, "All the experts posing for a group photo after the event."So, here's all the experts.Conventional wisdom from a foreign-policy expert: It is one of the truisms of our time that because of the sensational development of communications and transportation, the globe has shrunk with distances between formerly far-away countries having been reduced to mere hours of flight time. We all pay continuous lip service to the axiom that the hallmark, today, of relations among States, even among continents, is interdependence rather than independence. But while...

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A warning to parents

by PM | 21 August, 2012 |

Just say no to theory.Parents: Are you worried that your college students aren't interested in the real world anymore? Are they growing distant from conversations about foreign policy at the dinner table? Are your college students getting involved with international relations theory? Could it lead to a destructive path toward an M.A.--or even a Ph.D.?If you're worried that your child could become a graduate student, you need to know the warning signs:Abstracting too much. Real foreign policy professionals resist the urge to generalize, unless they're doing so as part of a doctrine named for...

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That Exceptional Feeling

by PM | 12 August, 2012 |

A crass, gaudy, all-American display.Someone named Steven Walt has published an article, wildly posted on the Internet, entitled “The Myth of American Exceptionalism”. I don’t know who Mr. Walt is, but the bio says he is a professor at Harvard University.  Unfortunately we are seeing too much of this type of thinking coming out of America’s college professors. I should take the time to offer a point by point rebuttal to Mr. Walt’s article. ...But I have found that people like Mr. Walt don’t really listen to facts or care too much about history. --  D. Hancock, RedState.comAcademics often use...

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Reflections on the Ryan Pick

by PM | 11 August, 2012 |

Another victory for Team Wonderbread. Mitt Romney's selection of Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.) means that he has scored a PR coup and won the all-important mid-August weekend news cycle. What can you say about the pick but the obvious? Ryan is the most inspiring vice-presidential candidate since Jack Kemp helped Bob Dole win in 1996, the most ideologically pure candidate since George Wallace chose Curtis LeMay in 1968, and the most boyish sidekick since Batman adopted Robin.Republicans are strangely jubilant today, as are Democrats; we should remember that vice-presidential picks almost...

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Lands of the Rising Sun

by PM | 9 August, 2012 |

Hawai'i isn't the only colonial possessionto get the inset treatment. Although the authors of the Duck of Minerva do not condone, endorse, or even take seriously this proposal, we do want to bring to our readers' attention a petition urging President Obama to return Taiwan to the Emperor of Japan.This is not entirely crazy, just 99.98 percent insane. Taiwan, of course, was a part of the Japanese Empire after the cession of Formosa in the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895. Less well known in the  West is the depth of pro-Japanese sentiment in Taiwan; former president Lee Teng-hui, for instance,...

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The Olympics Make You Care Less About Milwaukee

by PM | 9 August, 2012 |

When Usain competes, U.S. aid plummets. At Andrew Sullivan's Daily Beast, Patrick Appel offers a few hypotheses about why Americans seem to care less about the killing of Sikhs than the killing of moviegoers, including the observation that the timing of the Milwaukee shootings so soon after the Batman massacre have left many pundits unwilling to talk further about gun control for fear of sounding redundant. Appel also hypothesizes that low levels of media coverage may be due to the Aurora killings haven taken place on a slow news day while the Milwaukee killings happened during the Olympics....

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Military Capabilities: A Revionist Metric

by PM | 6 August, 2012 |

 Phil Arena has been playing around with alternative measures of military power. He begins with the straightforward observation that one current and popular measure of military power, the CINC scores in the Correlates of War project, list the United States as having fallen behind the People's Republic of China in its military capability. As Phil writes, this is not a conclusion that most, if any, observers of world politics would endorse--and that even if it is true in the broadest sense (that in some total war between the United States and the PRC, the United States might not be able to...

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Romney is Alone in His Fear of Russia

by PM | 31 July, 2012 |

Per Dan's post below, I don't understand why Russia is our number-one enemy, either today or ten years from now. Neither, it seems, do Americans, who have only noticed Russia's phantom menace at one period in the past several years--immediately after the invasion of Georgia in 2008. Below, polling data from the Pew Research Center on the question of which country represents the greatest danger to the United States; these are not all the answers, but they are the biggest ones. Russia is the orange line. Note that these are free-response questions, which explains Iraq's presence on the list...

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