Last night’s Vice Presidential debate was a textbook lesson in how to agree to disagree civilly. Senator JD Vance and Governor Tim Walz maintained a high level of professionalism and decorum, even when debating topics where they share little common ground. Perhaps the...
Labour MP David Lammy has a new piece in Foreign Affairs called, “The Case for Progressive Realism.” Where his manifesto is punchiest is in its unsparing critiques of British foreign policy: the...
The takeaway from last night's State of the Union address is that Biden's language continued decades-long trends of decreasing positive emotion, use of the term "we," and overall fewer words per...
If international relations as a field is to have a just purpose—not just justifying the power-hoarding and power-wielding of a ruling class—it needs more concepts to critique power, relate policy to...
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 and capturing whatever the intelligence process coughed up as bad guys no matter who they were or where they were. But also, technologically, our fixation was on “prompt global strike”—the idea that the US should be able to reliably put warheads on foreheads anywhere at anytime without constraint. I don’t know what to say about that other than that it sounds much crazier when I say it out...
Oppenheimer is the first blockbuster about nuclear weapons in a generation. Framing his film’s namesake with kinetic edits, fractured timelines, quantum imagery, and a pulsing score, director Christopher Nolan has crafted a stylistic triumph. But does Oppenheimer accurately depict its subject? And what is an “accurate” representation of the atomic bomb? Reactions from specialists have filtered in over the month since its release, and they are cautiously positive. Prominent nuclear researchers have praised Oppenheimer’s...
If you spent the entire Friday night and Saturday glued to the news about Prigozhin's armed rebellion, you are either an IR-head, a Russia-watcher or the Ukrainian army running out of popcorn. The avalanche of hot-takes about the start of a civil war, theoretical debates about a coup or not a coup and an army of blue-check grifters with the latest FSB letters reigned the day. The pundits who rushed to their keyboards with the news of Russia's impeding collapse saw their takes turn to pumpkins even before midnight: after Wagner's mostly unobstructed march to Moscow and seizing Rostov on Don...
The professional bureaucracies of both the US and Chinese national security states encourage mistrust, jingoistic attitudes, pessimistic assumptions, and hawkish policies. This is a growing source of war risk, and the only near-term fix is a security dilemma sensibility. Let me explain. The Security Dilemma Sensibility Some time ago, Kenneth Booth and Nicholas Wheeler wrote of a “security dilemma sensibility” that policymakers could (and should) cultivate in order to better manage the interactive processes that can lead to crisis and war, even between two actors who have only...
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...
Dozens of regimes around the world are anti-liberal—autocratic to varying degrees—but also big fans of a "rules-based" international order, which for the past 50 years or so has been a neoliberal economic order. Not a coincidence. The reason an anti-liberal might also be a neoliberal seems rather obvious: Because they're kleptocrats and oligarchs who are getting paid! A regime doesn't need to embrace democracy in any meaningful sense in order to be a productive part of global capitalism. To the contrary, systematically suppressing collective and individual rights is a...
If you’ve spent any amount of time in Washington, there’s a good chance you’ve internalized a rosier narrative of the Cold War than the actual history warrants (I certainly had). To correct that, I have an essay out in Foreign Affairs with Michael Brenes, arguing that the bipartisan cheerleading for great-power rivalry today is based on a jaundiced reading of Cold War history. The popular image of the Cold War—as a historical moment that brought out America’s productive energies and made us step up our democracy game—has a basis in truth but obscures more than...
What's been quacking at the blog? The Duck of Minerva opened for business in 2005, so it’s had a lot of time to accumulate duck-puns and stupid duck references. Over the years, contributors embraced the Duckness of the Duck to different degrees. I can’t say for sure, but my impression is that Steve Saideman was one of the worst (or best, I suppose) offenders. For my part, I’ve always been ambivalent about the matter. So I spent far too much mental energy on what to call our semi-regular roundup of blog content. In the end, I settled on putting the stupid duck reference in the...