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...
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...
Does China's more ambitious foreign policy and bid for "national rejuvenation" come at America's expense? It's a question where some neoliberals and some on the anti-imperialist left converge — in...
G. John Ikenberry is one of the most influential scholars of “liberal international order.” It’s likely that he, along with Dan Deudney, is responsible for popularizing the phrase. John’s most recent book, A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order has reportedly shaped the thinking of the Biden foreign-policy team. I interviewed him for a recent podcast.
Over the weekend IR Twitter was abuzz with both the Red Sox winning the world series and a multi-threaded discussion on liberal international order. Regarding the former I have very little to say...
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Moonhawk Kim, who was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado Boulder from 2007 to 2016. His research focused on the politics of international trade institutions. This post first appeared on his blog To Be Analyzed. Ruggie’s (1982) “embedded liberalism” provided the framework for understanding the nature of the domestic social contract underlying the post-World War II international economic arrangement for the last three-and-a-half decades. As an alternate to the...
Trump’s election may amount to an inflection point in the institutional fabric of our political system. I do not simply mean our domestic republican institutions. I also mean the broadly liberal-republican international order constructed after World War II. Indeed, these two sets of institutions are profoundly bootstrapped to one another. This dual threat amounts to the greatest challenge to the American experiment since the early years of the Cold War.
Note: The following is a guest post from Mlada Bukovansky, Professor of Government at Smith College. The word freedom has to come into it, when speaking of the Ukraine crisis. It has become exceptionally difficult to use that term without wincing in the post-Bush era, but still I think it needs to be said. I was speaking to my mother about Ukraine and inevitably Czechoslovakia 1968 came up. I could hear in her voice the urgency and echoes of the passion that accompanied our fleeing Prague in August of that year. There would be no more freedom there. She said those who stayed behind were...
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Tim Dunne. He is Research Director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect at the University of Queensland and the past editor of the European Journal of International Relations. tl;dr warning: ~2400 words. In a recent lively and provocative post, Stephen Walt argues that liberal imperialists are like ‘neocons’ only more human rights-friendly. They are alike in the sense that both ‘are eager proponents for using American hard power’. And combined, these two sets of protagonists have been responsible for bad foreign policy decisions...
Naazneen Barma, one of the authors of the "Mythical Liberal Order," responded to my post of last week with a reply to my critique. With her permission, I'm posting her message here and my response. Readers, we'd love for you to weigh in with your views. Naazneen had this to say about my original post: I'd push back, in particular, on your straw man point. We started by defining the aspirations / ideal of the liberal order precisely because that's what so many turn to in defending it. Our goal was to separate the aspirations from the reality — and then to ask, very concretely, whether it is...
Last week, Naazneen Barma, Ely Ratner, and Steven Weber offered "The Mythical Liberal Order," a provocative update to their earlier article on the world without the West. They sought to puncture certain mythologies about the strength of the liberal order, that it never was a strong as defenders thought: its decline is much exaggerated since there was not much to begin with. Moreover, they seek to offer more convincing and significant evidence that non-Western countries are "routing around" the West through currency swaps and discussion of a new multilateral bank and other actions. Both that...
2012 interview with Alexander Cooley, focused on Central Asian politics.