Like Bill, I'm willing to speculate about the content of tonight's "State of the Union" address. However, allow me to guess about what won't be discussed. I'm willing to conjecture that President Bush will ignore a globally crucial issue that close ally Tony Blair...
Thought we could all have a little fun with the State of the Union tonight. Let's try to guess how many times the President uses a derivative of the word terror (the word itself or words using the...
It is being reported that the US has secured the consent of all five permanent members of the Security Council to submit the case of Iran for the body's review. However, the US did not secure a...
An interesting story via Laura Rozen, Andrew Sullivan, and Cunning Realist. According to reports, a series of emails and an internal Army memo suggests that US soldiers have used insurgents' wives...
Mansfield and Snyder were featured on NPR's Morning Edition today. Have a listen.Filed as: Democratization, Democratic Peace
The world is abuzz this morning with the news that the radical muslim group Hamas has apparently won a majority of seats in the recent parliamentary elections in Palestine. The group which in the past has called for Israel to be 'wiped off the map' has apparenlty won a a 53% majority of seats in the parliament. Hamas' victory seems due in no small part to the dissatisfaction on the part of Palestinians with the incumbent government and their inability to stem corruption. However, this turn of events obviously puts a chill on the peace process in the short term. President Bush and Secratery...
One of the perennial issues for academics, and perhaps especially for academics studying social phenomena (although I can easily see how this would be of concern for those of my colleagues in the physical sciences as well), is the relationship between the issues and topics that we choose to study and the concerns of politicians, bureaucrats, and the electorate as a whole. This is a perennial issue in part because, whether we teach at public or private institutions, we are in large measure supported by social surplus -- whether in the form of governmental funding, alumni donations, tax...
I was going through some of last week's dead tree editions of the NY Times and found this in the January 19 edition:Six former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, including five who served Republican presidents, said Wednesday that the Bush administration needed to act more aggressively to limit the emission of greenhouse gases linked to climate change.Speaking on a panel that also included the current agency chief, Stephen L. Johnson, they generally agreed that the need to address global warming was growing urgent and that the continuing debate over what percentage of the problem...
Peter Beinart writes in the Washington Post (hat tip: Marc Schulman) about cycles of isolationalism. I tend to cringe whenever I read invocations of "political cycles" in American history, so I was pleasantly surprised to read Beinart's comment that:Such theories, of course, lack social scientific rigor; American foreign policy cannot be set to a clock. But cyclical thinking still subtly frames much public discussion. For President Bush, the pendulum swung on Sept. 11, 2001, when a decade of introversion ended and the war on terrorism began. "After the shipwreck of communism," Bush declared...
In a speech last week at a nuclear submarine base in Brittany, French President Jacques Chirac signaled a shift in his country's nuclear doctrine (for coverage see here, here, and here; for hilarity, see Chirol over at Coming Anarchy). The speech outlined the reconfiguration of French doctrine which reflects Chirac's concern with ability of regional powers/actors to threaten French strategic concerns. This shift has been in the works for over a decade (see here). Specifically, Chirac noted that France's nuclear arsenal has been reconfigured to allow for tactical, retaliatory strikes against...
[Updated 1/23]George H.W. Bush, "Global Message", March 19, 2003:In a free Iraq, there will be no more wars of aggression against neighbors...no more poison factories...no more executions of dissidents...no more torture chambers and rape rooms.Nicholas D. Kristoff, The New York Review of Books, "Genocide in Slow Motion," February 9, 2006:On one of the first of my five visits to Darfur, I came across an oasis along the Chad border where several tens of thousands of people were sheltering under trees after being driven from their home villages by the Arab Janjaweed militia, which has been...
Spread the quacky goodness and vote Duck for "Best New Blog" in the 2005 Koufax Awards [Voting isn't open yet, so check out our competition and be ready to cast your ballot].Patrick and I just wrapped the Mershon leg of the "realism and constructivism" conference. We'll be back to blogging soon. Heck, I'm even thinking of completing my long overdue final installment on balance-of-power theory soon. Please remind me in the future never to promise posts if I can't guarantee completion within a week....Filed as: Koufax Awards and Best New Blog