US President Jimmy Carter's funeral is being held today in Washington, DC at the National Cathedral. Since he passed away shortly after Christmas, tributes have abounded about a man once derided as a weak one-term President. After leaving the Presidency, however, he...
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...
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.
Since marginalized communities tend to suffer disproportionately when governments make contemptible policy choices, it stands to reason that those communities might develop a heightened sensitivity about the merits of new policies. At the very least they have reason to cultivate a perspective and preferences that differ from people with resources (money, power, societal standing) to buffer them from the consequences of poor policy stewardship. That perspective has a kernel of wise counsel. There’s an abundance of evidence that policies ranging from de-industrialization since the 1970s to the...
Twenty year recollections of the 2003 invasion of Iraq are popping up. Some are debating whether there were any positive outcomes from the war, others reflecting on what it meant for those who fought (on the US side) or suffered (on the Iraqi side). The Iraq war has played a big role in my career, but I wanted to talk about what it means for the liberal internationalist orientation to the world. The Iraq War and Me In the first lecture of my classes, I tell my students that the 9/11 attacks were my second week of college, and discuss what a big impact they had on my choice of career and...
What follows is my general philosophy on China issues, by way of answering the hardest of hard defense framing questions regarding China. After my most recent piece in Foreign Affairs, I got a note from a semi-prominent friend in Washington's foreign policy community basically praising it but also posing some tough questions about China policy. In my view they're the wrong questions. But we've known each other a long time, and my response, I think, might be useful for others to consider. So I've anonymized bits but otherwise include the entire note below. Hey [anonymized],...
My most recent Foreign Affairs article, co-authored with Justin Casey, landed yesterday. The article started out as an argument about how the normalization of the far right might affect national and international security. Those issues remain a major thread, but the true heart of the piece is a discussion of the dynamics of the transnational right during the 1920s and 1930s (that is, of interwar fascism) and how that relates to the present. The article warns against hindsight bias — which is a major problem in debates about reactionary...
The Biden administration’s jarring revisionism on economic policy toward China (and by extension the world) is reviving discussions (most acute during the Trump and George W. Bush years) about whether it’s right to label the United States a revisionist power. There’s a lot at stake in whether the United States is perceived as—or actually is—a “revisionist” (vice “status quo”) power. Theories predicting war are built out of the distinction between revisionist and status quo states. And if the world understands the United States as revisionist, then it is the one upending...
The Bidens are serving the Macrons US-made wine and cheese. A cute gesture or a clumsy diplomatic move?