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...
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 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...
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...
The Bidens are serving the Macrons US-made wine and cheese. A cute gesture or a clumsy diplomatic move?
The debacle over the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ letter on Ukraine reflects the underlying tensions between progressive values and realist grand strategies of restraint—as well as the danger of progressives failing to see the difference between the two.
This post is the first in a four part symposium on the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the the most studied cases of IR. With the release of documents in recent decades, historical revisions have challenged the received wisdom informed by mainstream approaches to nuclear strategy and a US-centric perspective. However, these revisionist accounts are not well incorporated by IR narratives of the crisis. Sixty years later, a revisiting of the legitimating role that the missile crisis plays in theories of nuclear deterrence and...
I think a lot of people are kidding themselves about what grand strategy is—it’s worldmaking. It’s an attempt to put the power of the state in service of grand political purpose. States big and small can have grand strategies because states big and small have elites who use state power to serve their visions. When you think of grand strategy this way, most of what passes for grand strategic categories and policy prescriptions are exposed as morbidly violent, exploitative, and even reactionary. But wait, what is this concept of worldmaking? What about the “national interest?” What about...
Everybody’s talking about nuclear war with Russia right now and it bugs me, not least because I’ve seen this nuclear frenzy before. Now, I think people have good reason to be worried about Russian nuclear use, as I wrote some five months ago. But what gets me about “the discourse” is that a tremendous amount of it is ahistorical. On the one hand, the conversation is weighted down with the opinions of people with large social media followings but no—zero—knowledge about nuclear weapons or coercion theory. On the other hand, a good percentage of people who actually do know...
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....
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...
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...