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

Bin Laden and the Paradoxical Logical of War

by Patrick Porter | 9 May, 2011 |

Strategist Edward Luttwak once observed that strategy has a paradoxical logic. The best way forward may be the longest way round, offence can be the best defence, and a seemingly victorious course pursued indefinitely will lead to over-reach. This is produced by the limitations of human strength, the resistance and friction of conflict, and the sheer dynamism and chaos of war.This dynamic surfaces in the insurgency in Afghanistan and the terrorist-hunting campaign in Pakistan. Consider two headlines following Bin Laden's death. In Afghanistan, killing Bin Laden may not dis-spirit the...

read more

Thoughts on Bin Laden, #47

by Patrick Porter | 4 May, 2011 |

I'll make it quick.1. He's dead. But that won't stop the vast, academic industry around this war. We academics really have done very well out of the war on terror for the most part. We have a strong professional interest in not facing up to the raw strategic reality, that Al Qaeda has become largely a third-order nuisance, dangerous but mainly in terms of baiting us to do stupid things, and a diversion from much more difficult and serious stuff, like the vast imbalance between our power, resources and commitments, the near collapse of our financial system (September 2008, as well as 2001, is...

read more

Terrorism: A Problem for Realists

by Patrick Porter | 25 April, 2011 |

Whatever version of political realism you are dealing with, the sovereign state is still central to its universe. Which is one reason realists are uncomfortable with any world view that accords 'non-state actors' a pivotal or even significant role.I'm a huge fan of the work of political realists such as John Mearsheimer, Robert Pape or Christopher Layne, especially of their warnings against our own self-defeating behaviour. But there is a contradiction, or at least a tension in some of their arguments that deserves further thinking.They argue that we have inflated the threat of AQ-style...

read more

Libya and the Threshold for War

by Patrick Porter | 18 April, 2011 |

Some questions about Libya.To clear the decks, I'm instinctively uneasy with international interventions in civil wars, given the historical difficulties of keeping such interventions limited and the unintended consequences and moral hazards of such undertakings. Not to mention the burdens that states like the US and UK are now shouldering, with the constraints and pressures on our statecraft after Iraq and with Afghanistan, the global financial crisis, and the need to preserve what Walter Lippmann called a 'surplus' of power in reserve.But the general strategic context aside, this post is...

read more

Introducing myself

by Patrick Porter | 17 April, 2011 |

Hello, readers of the Duck!Dan Nexon has very kindly invited me to do some guest blogging at this site.Introducing myself in brief: I'm an Australian academic with an over-fondness for cigars. Working at King's College London at the Defence Academy, as a Senior Lecturer in Defence Studies. In September I'll be moving to Reading to take up a Readership in Strategic Studies.My main interest these days is in the history and theory of US grand strategy, with an historian's background but also in a dalliance with IR. I guess I quite like Strategic Studies as a kind of inter-disciplinary twilight...

read more