What follows is my general philosophy on China issues, by way of answering the hardest of hard defense framing questions regarding China. After my most recent piece in Foreign Affairs, I got a note from a semi-prominent friend in Washington's foreign policy...
Election observation is at a turning point. Roughly 80-85% of elections around the world are subject to election observation. The majority of these are in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. While...
What's the title? Latham, Andrew., 2022. Medieval Sovereignty, ARC Humanities Press. It argues that? A series of thirteenth-century contests over the locus and character of supreme authority in...
Justin Casey and I have a new piece at Foreign Affairs. We discuss the debate about whether or not modern reactionary populism is a variant of fascism (maybe) and whether the dynamics of fascism...
My most recent Foreign Affairs article, co-authored with Justin Casey, landed yesterday. The article started out as an argument about how the normalization of the far right might affect national and international security. Those issues remain a major thread, but the true heart of the piece is a discussion of the dynamics of the transnational right during the 1920s and 1930s (that is, of interwar fascism) and how that relates to the present. The article warns against hindsight bias — which is a major problem in debates about reactionary...
My partner used to refer to Worf as the Klingon equivalent of a Kantian. The Klingon-centric episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: DS9 make clear that Worf is committed to a deontological interpretation of Klingon ethics. If you're still reading this, you likely know that, first, Klingon ethics and morality are built around personal honor and, second, Worf was raised by humans. Because he spent his youth without much, if any, contact with other Klingons, Worf's understanding of Klingon ethical duties is theoretical and idealized. This turns out, to say the least, to be...
Professor Ann Towns of the University of Gothenburg visits the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Towns grew up in Sweden, and was interested in playing music and especially performing classical music as a child. But by the time she was in high school, she wanted to broaden her horizons, and get out of not only her town but Sweden. That led her to Kansas, where she finished high school in an exchange program. She lived outside of a small town, and she reflects on the different contexts in the rural US compared to Sweden — religion, expectations on teenagers, and the social environment of...
The Biden administration’s jarring revisionism on economic policy toward China (and by extension the world) is reviving discussions (most acute during the Trump and George W. Bush years) about whether it’s right to label the United States a revisionist power. There’s a lot at stake in whether the United States is perceived as—or actually is—a “revisionist” (vice “status quo”) power. Theories predicting war are built out of the distinction between revisionist and status quo states. And if the world understands the United States as revisionist, then it is the one upending...