The Duck of Minerva

In the war on terror, the United States now officially considers Venezuela part of the problem. The BBC today: The US is to impose a ban on arms sales to Venezuela, US state department officials have said.A spokeswoman, Darla Jordan, said the decision was taken because of lack of support by Venezuela for counter-terrorism efforts. Condi Rice expressed disappointment in October 2003 at Venezuela's failure to live up to its "responsibilities in the hemisphere to fight terrorism, to fight narco-trafficking." Thus, this is not altogether new policy.Libya and Muammar Qaddafi, by contrast, are now...

Dan Kervick, whose fine blog seems to be dormant, often leaves comments on many of the same blogs I read. This comment about US carrots to offer Iran, posted at Democracy Arsenal, is worth preserving: We've heard a lot about the sticks recently, but the carrots available to the US are impressive indeed. One of Iran's top concerns is the $10 B - $12 B in assets that were frozen in 1979 following the hostage crisis. The US also maintains stringent economic sanctions against Iran. Surely the prospect of having those assets unfrozen and sanctions lifted, opening up a market of hundreds of...

Happy May Day! Or should that be "mayday"? You know it's the end of term (grading, grading, grading) when friendly academic bloggers mostly just point readers to other good links on the web.Let me add one that I found particularly entertaining. Check out "I'm the Decider (Koo-Koo-Ka-Choo)." It's worth a listen. I've not been reading many other blogs, so I don't know if this has already been widely linked. Filed as: The Decider

The Atlantic Monthly recently asked a group of foreign policy "insiders" a number of questions about US foreign policy. The poll results were in the April 2006 issue, which is hidden behind a subscriber wall. The magazine greatly limited the possible poll answers. For example, the insiders were given a list of seven countries and asked to rank which would post the greatest threats to US security in the next decade. The outcome was perhaps predictable: Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and then Russia. Venezuela and Egypt each received a write-in vote. Michael Gersh...

Thanks to Dan, I read the interesting AU piece about Patrick. This is what caught my eye:“We wouldn’t have a car culture if it weren’t for superhighways,” he says. “The whole idea of being able to drive a car depends on the existence of a certain set of infrastructures. Material infrastructures, certainly, but also conceptual. Think about the metaphors we use. Someone who’s in control is in the driver’s seat. There’s something significant about that. What I want to try to do is pull it together and look at the way the construction of superhighways has this effect of producing us as the kinds...

One of my former graduate students, Igor Danchenko, is in the news for uncovering Vladimir Putin's plagiarized dissertation. This is from the Chronicle of Higher Education, March 26: Two scholars at a research institution in Washington have accused Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, of plagiarizing a management textbook by two professors at the University of Pittsburgh in a dissertation for which he received an economics degree, The Washington Times reported on Saturday. According to the scholars, Mr. Putin copied substantial portions, including tables and diagrams, from a 1978 book,...

The new 2006 National Security Strategy is out. Bill has been anticipating this since early January. CSM has a March 17 story ...with some remarks by John Mearsheimer."It's not an especially hawkish document," says Professor Mearsheimer. "It makes arguments about using force that most security experts - left or right - would agree with. It goes out of its way to say that using force would be a last resort."Ivo Daalder of Brookings says that the "Bush Revolution is officially over." He ought to know since he wrote the much-read book on the Bush Revolution.I'm not sure I'll get around to...

During one IR seminar in grad school (this would have been about 1985), George Quester pointed out on several occasions that a good book could be written comparing international relations and mobsters. Has anyone done that in the past two decades?Maybe the point is too obvious. It certainly would not be especially controversial to realists like John Mearsheimer:For Realists, all states are basically black boxes that behave the same way. If the United States has to be ruthless, the United States will be ruthless. That's the argument that Realists make.Like mobsters, self-interested states are...

Vice President Dick Cheney found a friendly audience for his latest hawkish statements about Iran, but his March 7 speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee 2006 Policy Conference was obviously quite constrained compared to what he and others in the Bush administration used to say about Iraq, back in 2002 and early 2003. To begin, Cheney focuses exlusively on nuclear weapons, rather than the more ubiquitous notion of "weapons of mass destruction." The regime in Tehran also continues to defy the world with its nuclear ambitions. Of course, this matter may soon go before the...