This is a guest post by Christopher Gelpi, Chair of Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution and Professor of Political Science Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University The appearances of retired Generals Michael Flynn and John...
LTG (retired) Mike Flynn has become a Trump advocate and appeared at the Republican National Convention. General (retired) John Allen surprised many by not just speaking at the Democratic National...
This has been going around: Why is this such a dumb counterfactual? Let me count the ways: Unlike parliamentary elections, individual voters could not vote for the full range of candidates--they...
The idea that citizens should be empowered by law to lethally judge who is a criminal threat is dangerous and wrong. Here's one reason why: Just a small-n social experiment? Yes, though here are...
Some prominent liberal commentators are upset that Treasury and the Fed have ruled out the "$1 trillion coin" option. The basic reasoning: the declaration weakens the President's bargaining position and forecloses a way that it could have ameliorated the consequences of a failure to extend the debt limit. I suspect that the reason for the declaration was sincere: key players believe that it is neither legal nor prudent. The second is Ezra Klein's position. He also notes that the decision coheres what the administration has been arguing all along: The administration’s position is that raising...
It increasingly looks like Romney is gonna lose. Intratrade now puts that likelihood at 75%. Now it’s my understanding from the American politics subfield, in which I took exactly zero courses in grad school, that the state of the economy is supposed to be the great determiner of American elections. But somehow Romney can’t seem to win despite 8+% unemployment. So I’ll take that as a methodological opening for wild speculation - namely my own - masquerading as rigorous theory. Given my masterful background in this field, which includes watching Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, still getting Fox...
As American troops trickle back from Iraq and-eventually- Afghanistan, it seems like the perfect time to examine the lessons learned from the last decade of warfare. One of the policies requiring a review is the combat exclusion for women. Although most positions within the US forces have been opened up to women over the last 50 years, there has been adamant efforts to sustain rules which prohibit women from joining the so-called front lines of conflict in combat roles. Many of the remaining justifications for this exclusion are based on expired research (or no research at all), and outdated...
It was full of gloom and doom, which is not what some of us might have expected from the "hope" President, but just the kind of realism the nation needs to hear. Finally someone who will ask us to step up to bat and make the sacrifices needed to turn the planet around! (And frankly the enormity of the mess we're in was hit home to me when my kids and I, desperate to see Obama sworn in during a layover in Charlotte, were told by the manager of the sports bar near our gate that the basketball game was more important than hearing this historic speech. If anyone can change this mentality that...