Saturday Noontime Linkage

4 August 2012, 1634 EDT

  • William Pesek argues that the recent surge in corn prices might lead to economic disaster. 
  • Alisa Neman Hood on Chinese shale gas
  • Josh Foust argues that Rosa Brooks gets the key story of the NSS, drones, and the Osh crisis wrong: “Sadly, they did turn into a more serious cleavage. But more than the cleavage resulting in atrocities that the U.S. was unwilling to assist with (the U.S. didn’t even send humanitarian aid for the Uzbek refugees who fled the carnage) is the bias inherent to how the NSS was trying to understand the situation. In 2010 there were U.S. government employees either in or very close to Osh — both at the State Department and with the DOD and various intelligence agencies who run the Manas air base. The NSS didn’t want to contact them to get a handle on what was going on — they wanted a drone.”
  • Is it possible to have a thoughtful rant? This post at Ink Spots on Romney’s foreign-policy rhetoric suggests an affirmative answer. 
  • Robert Haddick thinks Beijing’s got the South China Sea in the bag. I think they should have waited longer to abandon their assurance game toward their neighbors. 
  • Kate McNamara takes aim at the ECB’s democratic deficit. Once technocrats turn out to be ideologues, central-bank independence sure starts to look dicey, doesn’t it? Particularly if technocratism starts to look like an ideology.
  • Felix Berenskoetter advances arguments about “the End of IR Theory” that are very similar to some of what PTJ and I argue in our submission — currently, but I expect not permanently, entitled “I CAN HAS IR THEORY?!” — to the relevant EJIR special issue.