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...
For Mearsheimer “freedom” and “prosperity” are simply weapons of great power politics rather than aspirations sought by the Ukrainian people.
This piece is the second in a three-part series grappling with the role of political economy in making a just, sustainable international order. Writing about America’s economic strategy deficit got...
Joe Biden's "Summit for Democracy" was held last week. This summit meant to bring together the world's democracies, strengthening them and pro-democratic global norms. The hope is that this would...
Earlier this week, Mustafa Kassem, an American held in Egypt, died. The Trump Administration did little to help him. That wasn't surprising. What was surprising was that the international religious freedom movement (IRF), a community that has gained close access to this Administration, seemed to have done little as well. The reason behind this should make this movement think seriously about its approach to the human rights. Let me tell you two stories. In October 2016, Andrew Brunson--a US pastor who had worked for a long time in Turkey--was arrested for alleged connections to the coup...
We've all spent the weekend processing the killing of Iranian official Qassim Suleimani by a US airstrike. While this is obviously very important, we should think about a secondary implication of this act--how this undermined the apparent Middle East analyst consensus that America was pulling back from tensions with Iran, and how this consensus even emerged in the first place. A few months ago I noticed something interesting. Saudi Arabia, after adopting a hostile foreign policy on Qatar and Yemen--motivated by its fears of Iran--seemed to be getting nervous. They'd issue warning signs about...
Depending on your Twitter addiction, you either went to sleep or woke up with the news that America had assassinated Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran's Quds force. Suleimani was one of the most powerful men in Iran, and the driver of its activities in the Middle East, so this is a big deal. People are debating whether this was just and necessary, and what happens next. But I wanted to raise a different point: what this means for America's Persian Gulf allies. Many would suspect these states--particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)--to be the biggest winners in...
I had a piece in the Washington Post's "Monkeycage" over the weekend, which you can read here. I noted that many worry Saudi Arabia and the UAE will pull America into war with Iran. But it actually looks like they're the ones restraining us. The piece was inspired by the famous "chain-ganging" dynamic in IR scholarship, but there was little discussion of that as it was geared towards a broader audience, so I wanted to expand here. I suspect most readers of this site had to read Christensen and Snyder's "Chain gangs and passed bucks" at some point. In case you didn't, the argument is...
Today, Ryan Crocker--career foreign service officer and former Ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan--wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post criticizing its criticism of the Afghanistan war he oversaw. He pointed to progress made in Afghanistan, which is fair (and doesn't necessarily contradict anything in the Post's reporting), but generally did little to directly undermine worries about the war. Beyond that, as I noted in a frustrated Twitter thread earlier today, he showed off a lot of what's wrong with US foreign policy. I spent 11 years in Washington, DC, doing the usual young professional...
Warning! According to the law that the Russian parliament passed yesterday, this post might need to be prefaced with a disclaimer that the following text has been compiled by a foreign agent. An individual can be labeled as a “foreign agent” in Russia if they (1) distribute information, and (2) receive funds from sources outside Russia. I am ticking both boxes here, even as an academic working at a university, and the law intentionally left the “information spreading” extremely broad: you can literally post something on social media. It would be up for the Justice Ministry and the Foreign...
A guest post by Julia Palik, Peace Research Institute Oslo; Govinda Clayton, Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich; Simon J. A. Mason, Head of Mediation Support Team, Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich; and Siri Aas Rustad, Peace Research Institute Oslo On the surface, it should be easy. Practitioners and policy makers always require better knowledge to make informed decisions, and academics (nearly) always seek that their research makes an impact in the “real” world. Yet this rarely works out. In most cases academic-practice-policy dialogues, forums, meetings and conferences...
So by this point we all know the big news on Syria. Overnight, Trump announced that--after consulting with Turkish President Erdogan--the US would be pulling troops out of north Syria, giving Turkey freedom to operate. This would likely involve military actions against Kurdish forces there, which Turkey fears are coordinating with Kurdish insurgents in Turkey. This is concerning for two reasons. First, the United States had worked with these Kurdish forces to fight ISIS, so we're basically abandoning them. Second, this will basically leave ISIS detention camps unguarded, possibly letting...