When I was but a lad, it was still quite common for foreign-policy hawks to invoke “Munich” as an all-purpose rebuttal to compromise with (they would say the “appeasement of”) rival states, most notably the Soviet Union. The failure of the 1938 agreement — which...
In the recent Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop, Lachlan McNamee makes a rationalist argument—“colonization projects” are “characterized by a triangle of actors—settlers,...
126 countries now publish a national security strategy or defense document, and 45 of these feature
a leaders’ preambles. How these talk about the world, or not, is surprisingly revealing of historical
global strategic hierarchies.
When I arrived at the Pentagon in 2009, the Obama administration was just getting its footing as caretakers of the War on Terror. Our focus then was truly global dominion. That meant, yes, killing...
Our next Bridging the Gap Book Nook features Rachel Whitlark, an associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She discusses her recent book, All Options on the Table: Leaders, Preventive War, and Nuclear Proliferation. https://youtu.be/dK5_o5zE2hQ
The world could use some serious thinking about the relationship between political ideology and nuclear escalation—specifically far-right pathways to nuclear war. The nuclear strategy literature is full of smart claims from many angles: entanglement risks, discrimination problems, first-use incentives, credible commitments, retaliatory v. catalytic v. asymmetric postures, the staying power of the nuclear revolution, and the escalatory potential of different kinds of nuclear crises. But regime type is not a major preoccupation of nuclear wonks, and to the extent it factors...
Part I here if you are interested On the day of German reunification anniversary I bring you the sequel to the post on the new Russian history book. Only, if you read this history book, you will not find the term "reunification" - it's reserved for Crimea and Donbas - instead, you will find a passage about Western Germany "annexing" the Eastern one. Believe it or not, it is actually a toned down version of another history textbook co-authored by Medinsky: in "World History for 11th grade" he straight up called it an "Anschluss" highlighted in bold. Yes, the untranslated German term that was...
If Donald Trump was President of the United States when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, instead of Joe Biden, Trump’s personality would have led to a very different U.S. response. Trump would not have swiftly and strongly condemned Russia or clearly sided with Ukraine in the initial stages of the invasion, and he would not have brought together a multilateral front against Russia – as Biden did.
Carol Cohn is the G.O.A.T. Back in 1987, she wrote what is still the best gendered take on the pathologies of deterrence in a piece called, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” It absolutely demolishes the cult of the missile bro. And every deterrence scholar I know who’s not a caveman kneels before this article with overt praise. Many swear they even teach it. Yet, modern deterrence theory is basically all rationalist—an implicit rejection of Cohn’s critique. The language of the field—from “Minuteman missiles” to “vertical erector launchers”—remains...
Maybe the problem isn’t that scholars don’t know how to speak to U.S. foreign-policy makers, but rather that U.S foreign-policy makers don’t know how to engage with scholarship?
The government of a country makes explicit or implicit threats to another: "if you cross this line, we will inflict harm upon you." The threat fails; the government crosses the designated line. Has deterrence failed? Well, yes. Of course. By definition. It is, for example, unequivocally true that the United States did not deter Russia from invading Georgia in 2008, nor Ukraine in 2014, nor Ukraine (again) in 2022. Should you have any doubts about this, you can always go read a nearly four-thousand word Foreign Policy article on the subject. I agree with its authors, Liam Collins and Frank...
There is more continuity in the history of U.S. military basing policy than is typically assumed.