A few months ago, I was commissioned by the International Relations and Security Network of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology to provide a brief write-up on how Asia’s rise will impact the formal discipline of international relations (IR) within political...
This is a guest post by Peter S. Henne. Peter is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University. He formerly worked as a national security consultant. His research focuses on terrorism and religious...
I don't really want to pile on, but the question for me is: how does a major presidential candidate in the 21st century (and a guy who has been running for office now for seven straight years) screw...
This is actually a pretty good checklist.I'm busy with other projects--dissertating, researching, and watching Breaking Bad, in ascending order--but I wanted to point out that the problem with Mitt...
Hey, don't say Lord Eddard didn't warn us...
In my last post, I profiled the Origins of AIDS, Jacques Pépin's masterful study of how the virus that causes AIDS in humans originated in chimps and then jumped to humans and later took off as a result of a complex series of events involving local populations uprooted from traditional practices, the spread of prostitution, and widespread use of injections to fight infectious diseases, among other factors (see Donald McNeil's compact summary review in the Times).If Pépin's book is of a scholar/detective sifting and sorting evidence to advance an argument, Geffen's book represents the history...
SFS undergrad Anton Strezhnev has a new blog called Causal Loop. Highly recommended. Via Jay Ulfelder who, naturally enough, critiques Anton's "first substantive post."
The Washington Post had a fine op-ed this weekend by law professor Jonathan Turley asking the provocative question, Is the U.S. still the “land of the free?” He gave 10 compelling reasons that it is not. Turley’s op ed has the legal issues well-covered. He also draws telling comparisons between U.S. laws and practices—and similar ones by countries that the State Dept annually condemns as human rights violators. True, in the U.S., most of the new policies don’t affect most of “us”—at least if we are not Muslim, politically militant, or poor. On the other hand, the result of these new...
UPDATE: Deazen has made significant corrections to the article. It still implies, I think, more than is warranted, but the egregious misrepresentations in his article are gone.SECOND UPDATE: In case anybody thought that this was anything other than a National Journal fail, it it turns out that Matt himself was instrumental in getting Deazen to correct the story.Yochi J. Deazen of the National Journal details a high-level fight in the Administration about whether or not to attack Iran. His evidence? The juxtaposition of Matt Kroenig's and Colin Kahl's pieces in Foreign Affairs. Now, however,...
The McCain opposition-research file circulating on the internet (if genuine) is just devastating in its picture of a man without any convictions whatsoever. It makes one thing crystal clear: Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee, and quite possibly our next President, because he faced a GOP field made up of incompetent, unserious, and underfunded rivals. A serious contender would have eviscerated him.Many of the positions that should have made him toxic to the Republican base will be far less damaging the context of a general election. Still, the total insincerity of the man has to be a...
Foreign Affairs has gone live with Colin Kahl's explanation of why we shouldn't commence bombing in five minutes. A sample:In arguing for a six-month horizon, Kroenig also misleadingly conflates hypothetical timelines to produce weapons-grade uranium with the time actually required to construct a bomb. According to 2010 Senate testimony by James Cartwright, then vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and recent statements by the former heads of Israel's national intelligence and defense intelligence agencies, even if Iran could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb in six...
Timing is everything; I'm not sure its good to be publishing a paper about strategic narratives just as the US cuts its Advisory Commission on Public Dipomacy, although RAND have begun exploring this field. National-level policymakers still try to tell stories about where their state and the international system are heading and should head. To the extent these narratives create expectations, shore up identities, create buy-in from partners, or have other discernible effects, we can say strategic narratives matter. The investment states have made in their international communications...