by Dan Nexon | 26 Nov 2012 | Featured
Robert Gallucci, head of the MacArthur Foundation and former Dean of Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, lays out his view of "How Scholars Can Improve International Relations." Adam Elkus scores the "winners and losers" in the Gaza conflict. Matt Fay answers Max Boot's response to his criticisms of comparisons between Iron Dome and US BMD. China's successful aircraft carrier flight landing at China Defense Blog. More from Rob Farley on the...
by Dan Nexon | 21 Nov 2012 | Featured
I got back from an extended trip to London last night. To all the people who hosted me for talks, entertained me, and generally made the trip both fun and productive: a big thanks! I also bought some sweet rubber ducks at the British Museum. I'm going to start repeatedly flogging the nomination process and voting registration for the academic international-studies blogging awards. You can reduce the annoyance factor by submitting nominations...
by Dan Nexon | 7 Nov 2012 | Featured
One nice thing about a status-quo election: it doesn't leave international-affairs experts with a great deal to prognosticate on. It will be interesting to see if the administration does, indeed, show more "flexibility" on BMD cooperation with Moscow and if it makes a push on Israel-Palestine. We should see a fresh wave of talent coming into the administration. While the money right now is on John Kerry for Secretary of State, I'm more...
by Dan Nexon | 24 Oct 2012 | Featured
Richard Weitz notes an intensification of PRC anti-missile defense rhetoric. He points to the implications of robust BMD for China's minimal deterrence approach and for US-led containment. David Axe reports that John Lehman has a financial stake in a larger navy. Bill French deflates the Romney campaign's claims of "American Weakness." Over at Political Violence @ a Glance, Lionel Beehner analyzes the relationship between climate and conflict....
by Dan Nexon | 16 Oct 2012 | Featured
tl;dr notice: 1200 words. Zack Beauchamp points us to Douglas Feith's latest broadside against the administration with the tweet: LOL Feith cites @slaughteram and Sam Power's jobs as evidence that Obama wanted to limit American use of military force It turns out that the absurdity runs far deeper in Feith's piece. I know that Obama's fecklessness in the face of the Russian threat is an article of faith among neo-conservatives. As I've mentioned...
by Dan Nexon | 12 Oct 2012 | Featured
I scored the Romney-Obama debate as a tactical win for Romney. As of now, it looks more like a strategic one. The lesson for me, I think, is not to assess the political ramifications of debates. So in this post, I'll simply stick to reflecting on the foreign-policy component of the debate, which turned out to be much more prominent than most of us expected. The bottom line is that, with the exception of the earlier Libya exchange, Biden owned...
by Dan Nexon | 13 Sep 2012 | Featured
Richard Grenell was pushed out as Mitt Romney's national-security spokesman. In The Daily Beast, he attempts to defend his former boss.Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got it right. The Middle East desk at the State Department got it right, too. And so did Mitt Romney. All three correctly rejected the initial Cairo Embassy statement on the developing violence in Egypt and Libya as weak and inappropriate. And yet Romney was the only one to...
by Dan Nexon | 9 Sep 2012 |
Robert Golan-Viella reflects on a tectonic shift in partisan foreign-policy debate, i.e., the fact that the Democrats have the upper hand. He chalks this up to campaign politics: the key to a Republican victory runs through the economy. I agree that there are "strong critiques" of Obama foreign policy and that "leading Republicans aren't making them." But I don't think this is "politically smart," insofar as leading Republicans are making...
by Dan Nexon | 8 Sep 2012 |
Associated PressAlthough he doesn't get the European Phased Adapted Approach (EPAA) quite right, Mark Adomanis at Forbes makes the right point about the BMD portion of the Romney foreign-policy memo:I don’t think I’m being uncharitable, but if you read this paragraph and didn’t have any background knowledge about US missile defense in Eastern Europe you would come away with at least two very clear conclusions 1) Obama canceled a missile defense...
by Dan Nexon | 31 Aug 2012 |
Here is a word cloud of the speech's foreign-policy content:In this case, the cloud adds virtually nothing to our understanding, as the entire section is only 202 words long.Below is the section itself. It appears that the speechwriters pulled random posts off of PJ Media, stuck them in a blender, and were satisfied with the results. I will begin my presidency with a jobs tour. President Obama began with an apology tour. America, he said, had...
by Dan Nexon | 31 Jul 2012 |
You may have heard that Romney referred to Russia as America's "number-one geopolitical foe" and plans to double down on this rhetoric during his big speech in Poland.The speech on the "values of liberty" at Warsaw University on Tuesday is expected to seek to rekindle the flames of US cold war righteousness by featuring a strong attack on Russia and President Vladimir Putin's rollback of democratic gains, while also criticising the US...
by Dan Nexon | 23 Jul 2012 |
MANOS: The Hands of Fate is supposedly getting an iOS game. But fans of MST3K are probably much more excited about the Rifftrax live MANOS event on August 16.Dan Drezner takes on the ridiculous Jennifer Rubin piece on how Romney should attack Obama foreign policy. Drezner has regular commentators who are better conservative foreign-policy critics than the people dominating MSM op-ed space.Andrew Yeo responds to Jennifer Lind's analysis of the...