The Duck of Minerva

Patrick Porter

Patrick Porter is Professor of International Security and Strategy at the University of Birmingham. He is also Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, London. His research interests are great power politics, grand strategy, realism, the causes and consequences of major powers’ decline, the Iraq war of 2003, foreign and defence policy in the US and UK, and the intellectual life of major powers and their foreign policy establishments. He has written four books. His book Blunder: Britain's War in Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2018) was shortlisted for the British Army Military Book of the Year Prize, 2019. His most recent book is The False Promise of Liberal Order: Nostalgia, Delusion and the Rise of Trump (Polity, 2020). He also wrote The Global Village Myth: Distance, War and the Limits of Power (Georgetown University Press, 2015) and Military Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes (Columbia University Press, 2009.

Recent Posts

A Small Farewell

by Patrick Porter | 25 January, 2014 |

It is cold in the scriptorium, my thumb aches. Actually, it isn't. I've just always wanted to use that line from the end of Name of the Rose. In fact its about room temperature in the American Institute Library and my thumb is thriving. Anyway, I don't blog much any more because of work and other things, and its even a job pushing out opinion on the barbaric form of Twitter. So I'd like to say farewell to the Duck. Its been a real privilege. Many thanks to Dan Nexon for the invitation to come on board a few years ago. The Duck is a great site and its allowed yours truly to talk about IR,...

read more

The Great War of…1990

by Patrick Porter | 6 November, 2013 |

The year 2014 is nearly on us, and reflections on World War One are already weighing down bookshop shelves. In my own research, I've stumbled across an odd tendency: that whereas in Britain the cause of World War One, if not its conduct, attracts strong supporters as well as critics, the first Gulf War is remembered as a bit of a disappointment. Consider the difference with one of history's archetypal 'limited' wars, which few seem keen to defend. In early 1991, having defeated the fourth largest army in the world after a bombing campaign and 100 hours of ground war, President Bush I called...

read more

Questions about Syria

by Patrick Porter | 27 August, 2013 |

The US and UK are apparently preparing for air strikes against the Syrian Assad regime, claiming there is little doubt that it is responsible for horrific chemical weapons attacks. Syria has allegedly crossed President Obama's 'red line.' Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague claims that "We can not in the twenty first century allow the idea that chemical weapons can be used with impunity, that people can be killed in this way and that there are no consequences for it." Several problems here: This rush to judgment is happening before the UN has established beyond reasonable doubt who is...

read more

Ham Omelettes and Taiwan’s Defence

by Patrick Porter | 23 August, 2013 |

In the old old question of why the weak occasionally beat the strong, my favourite metaphor is the Ham Omelette. In a Ham Omelette, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed. In a clash over the Taiwan Strait, who would be the pig, who the chicken? This matters, because in the end predicting the outcome of a China-Taiwan clash would not be about the absolutes of military victory narrowly conceived, but about the issue of cost tolerance and the fear of a Pyrrhic result. Relations between Taiwan and Beijing have eased in the latest 'detente.' But some worry that their mutual aims...

read more

Sorry General, War is a Choice

by Patrick Porter | 14 June, 2013 |

General David Petraeus advises Americans and their allies to be coldly realistic about what force can achieve. Oddly, he also advises them to prepare for a future where small wars are pretty much inevitable, where America must intervene early to prevent worse things happening later on, and where ‘stabilisation’ is a core part of war itself. Because, ultimately we sometimes have no choice. Looking back on the ‘lessons’ that have been ‘written in blood’ in America’s wars since 9/11, Petraeus thinks he can see the greatest lesson, but repeats a common fallacy: Our enemies will typically attack...

read more

Sharing Power: America’s Strategic Choices

by Patrick Porter | 4 May, 2013 |

The Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College has just published my latest effort, a study of America’s strategic choices and the prospects for a grand strategy based on the two principles of Concert and Balance. The PDF is free to download. Bottom Line: the US does not have to choose between unipolar hegemony and 'coming home', as the reductionist debate often characterises it. Somewhere in that middle ground, it can retrench while retaining a forward presence. It can both accommodate rising states, while hedging against the adventurism of any would-be aggressor. This will be...

read more

Iraq: It takes a President

by Patrick Porter | 22 March, 2013 |

Some further thoughts on why the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. We've had a few posts already now that the tenth anniversary has come. But given the magnitude of the decision and since even its most vocal defenders were caught off guard by how costly, lethal and protracted it was, it is worth lingering on the question. In varying degrees of sophistication, there is a recurrent argument that the Iraq war flowed out of pre-9/11 developments, with 9/11 itself merely functioning as an enabling event deftly exploited by the war party in Washington. But against the grain of some...

read more

A (very reluctant) case for Airport Security

by Patrick Porter | 18 March, 2013 |

For students of international affairs and security, especially from either side of the Atlantic, its that time of year again when we  congregate at the ISA Conference to muse on the globalisation of everything in a borderless world...after enduring an increasingly unpleasant border regime at the Airport. I'm not sure about our readers, but the general experience of Heathrow, JFK or LAX is not exactly border free. In the age of anxiety, about mass casualty terrorism especially, the airport in states that once fancied themselves far away from the troubled places on the planet has become an...

read more

On the Word ‘Global’

by Patrick Porter | 24 February, 2013 |

The word 'global' has become so frequently used in Western strategic debate that is has almost become background music. On one level, overuse robs it of resonance. But on another, it might be contributing to the conceptual and rhetorical overstretch that has led the US to overextend itself. Consider just one recent example. In making the case recently for maintaining the Pax Americana, the expansive grand strategy in which the US tries to hold on to unipolar supremacy with a worldwide military presence, Stephen Brooks, John Ikenberry and William Wohlforth deploy the word 'global' (or words...

read more

Planning to be Shocked

by Patrick Porter | 28 December, 2012 |

One of the most repeated, and most dubious, axioms about strategy is the notion that being proactive is wiser than being reactive, and that reactivity is something we should be allergic to. In the words of Briain's foreign secretary William Hague, 'the nation that is purely reactive in foreign policy is in decline.' Likewise, written into the folklore of the US foreign policy establishment is the notion that the 'strategic shocks' that struck America - such as Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor or 9/11 - happened because Washington was passively sleeping. A quick read of Presidential...

read more