The implications of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump over the weekend remain unclear. Will it lead him to strike a more conciliatory tone during the upcoming Republican National Convention? Will it make more Americans sympathize with him? And then there are...
During a pivotal scene in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne talks with his butler/confidante Alfred about The Joker. Wayne suggests he can make sense of The Joker's motivation as a...
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...
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.
I was on a refreshingly contrarian panel recently as part of Victoria Forum, this big shindig in Canada (at University of Victoria in British Columbia, not to be confused with Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, where I teach). The topic was “Trust-Building in Asia in an Era of Great Power Competition.” Unlike most panels on “great power competition,” and I've been on a few, this one didn’t have anyone cheerleading for a new Cold War. Everyone had their own version of skepticism about “great power competition” as a meaningful framework. You can watch the panel below. My...
It’s no surprise that current events regularly lead us to update our syllabi. That doesn’t mean we can’t make “surprise” an important feature of our courses.
Christopher Clary on his new book, which looks at why international rivalry is a hard habit to break.
The security dilemma plays a central role in Walt and Mearsheimer’s reading of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But what if they get the security dilemma wrong?
The global distribution of material power changes from time to time. It’s something that happens, not something we should spend any amount of time pursuing or avoiding. I say this as someone who thinks the United States has done questionable good and much unquestionable harm with its former status as a unipolar power, so this is not a proxy argument about US foreign policy. You might be wondering who wants multipolarity, and the answer is lots of folks. Most versions of the coalition favoring foreign policy restraint implicitly seek a multipolar world....
It turns out that it’s hard to write a roundup of happenings at the Duck of Minerva when there aren’t many to speak of. Much of that’s on me. What’s my excuse? Well, the kid finally contracted COVID. The rest of my family succumbed in short order. So that was fun. On the upside, none of us get seriously ill. On the downside, we got to experience post-COVID fatigue, with a helping of mental fog on the side. We recovered just in time to take our long-planned trip to Thessaloniki. The official purpose of the trip: to participate in 2022 European Workshops in International...
Like a lot of academics, I love Google n-grams, but not as much as the digitized archive Google uses to produce it. It’s a great warren of rabbit holes – even better than wikipedia – and I often wind up following one somewhere or other. My latest journey begins with realism. Steven Walt’s recent Foreign Policy entry (“Why Do People Hate Realism So Much?”) touched off a round of online debate, including entries by Seva Gunitsky, Paul Poast, Patrick Porter, Ken Schultz and others. My daughter suggested that I weigh in. I even began to write a rather lengthy teardown of the kerfuffle. I started...
There’s a battle going down inside the Republican party for what conservative foreign policy ought to be. The problem is that stakeholders in the debate are misrepresenting its terms, and journalistic onlookers are misapprehending what’s really going on. A senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the neoconservative think tank, officially put it on wax that, yes, there’s a debate over conservative foreign policy, but it’s between “internationalists” and “isolationists.” The way the New York Times tells it, what’s happening within...