For those who were unable to squeeze into the packed room for Stephanie Carvin's "Zombie Holocaust" panel at ISA, here is the video blog version of my remarks on Dan Drezner's new book Theory of International Politics and Zombies.This panel, by the way, was voted...
Small Wars Journal published a longer version of my argument about the criteria associated with the R2P doctrine and why the "If Libya Why Not Bahrain" argument is specious. However, particularly in...
UK Movie Poster for "Monsters" (2010). Source: Wikipedia.The post-9/11 generation sci-fi film "Monsters" (Gareth Edwards, 2010) is a kind of "Cloverfield" for the US-Mexican border (or if you're a...
Since Stephanie has quoted me on the subject, I thought I’d share some thoughts on intervention and consistency. 1. Consistency is a virtue – but it isn’t the only virtue. Sometimes good...
-- Sir Thursday, Garth NixI'm tired of demands for an articulated "Obama Doctrine."Don't misunderstand me. I think it would be nice if the Obama Administration had an overarching vision for US foreign policy. It might even be a good thing if it could produce something resembling a coherent document on the subject instead of the stream-of-consciousness bureaucratic filler it tends to publish.What I emphatically reject is the idea that Obama ought to, in effect, retcon Libya by articulating an ex post facto grand strategy that makes sense of his decision to intervene.Why did we intervene in...
There’s been some really interesting posts here on R2P in the last few days. At the risk of kicking a dead horse – although I hardly think this horse is dead - I’d like to raise a few points. (I've actually been writing this post over the past few days, and was going to post it later in the week, but Obama's speech tonight made me want to post it earlier. You know, because hasty blogging is always a good thing.)Most of my thinking has been on the issue of consistency/inconsistency with regards to R2P. I think I agree with Charli, there is no consistency requirement when it comes to R2P. For...
Foreign Affairs has published a longer version of my original remarks about the so-called "Lady Hawks" who supposedly "ball-busted" our presumably lily-livered president into a war ostensibly "not of his choosing." We'll see how he deals with all this, among other things, tonight at 7:30 EST - (my guess: with his own brand of tough-and-tender masculinity) - but in the meantime, here's the capsule version of my scholarly take translated into Belt-Way-ese:Commentators are falling over themselves to explain the “gender divide” among Obama’s staff, particularly the apparently astonishing fact...
For those keeping score on where the revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East are headed and how to understand it all, it is worth noting that today marked the 30th anniversary of Solidarity's first national warning strike. On March 27, 1981, more than 12 million Poles took to the streets in a peaceful protest action and in defiance of the Communist regime -- a testimony of the power of non-violence. At the time, it was the largest protest action in the Soviet bloc history. The Poles did not have the internet, or Facebook, or Twitter -- but they were still able to mobilize on an...
International politics is such a bore these days, right? Good thing we have Canada to spice things up for us!There were two interesting developments yesterday for those living in the northern end of North America. First, it was announced that a Canadian, Maj. Gen. Charles Bouchard, will be heading up the NATO mission in Libya. My first thoughts about this were that the choice represents an interesting compromise. Canada, the (French?) vanilla ice-cream of the Western alliance (normally boring, but safe and reliable) represents a non-American and non-European choice. Yet, since the Americans...
So here's a question: How do we evaluate whether or not a humanitarian intervention is successful? The obvious difficulty is that the intervention alters history and we are left with running various counterfactual thought experiments. Here's the Obama administration's take on what would have happened in the absence of intervention. According to Laura Rozen, Dennis Ross and Derek Chollet told reporters that:“We were looking at ‘Srebrenica on steroids’ —the real or imminent possibility that up to a 100,000 people could be massacred, and everyone would blame us for it,” Ross explained,...
We're sorry...That some of our soldiers publicly refer to your people in derogatory and racist language.That some of our soldiers shoot your unarmed civilians at random, defile their corpses, and cut off body parts to keep as trophies.That some of our soldiers killed the cousin of your head of state. We didn't even know we were in the hometown of the President, how could we have known he was a Karzai? Oh, right.. we're very sorry.That our helicopter pilots slaughtered your children while they are out collecting firewood. That argument we made about how using attack helicopters instead of...
The official justification for tenure is that it allows scholars to "speak truth to power" without fear of losing their jobs. There's obviously something to that, but I've always looked upon tenure as a form of non-salary compensation. Most college professors make less than they would in other sectors. Tenure compensates us with much greater job security. I'd never thought about it in these terms, but the same reasoning might also apply to teachers in primary and secondar education. It turns out that while direct evidence for schoolteachers proves difficult to come by, data on New Jersey...