The Duck of Minerva

So, this is third installment of my series on defending Obama's foreign policy, part of an extended set of remarks for a debate with Colin Dueck that one day, weather permitting, we shall have. In part 1, I laid out the legacy of the Bush years and in part 2, I identified the Obama administration's strategic inclinations and achievements. Here, in part 3, I try to identify lines of critique from Dueck and other folks critical of the Obama administration's policies. On Russia, Defense Spending, and US Standing Finally, let me say three things about Russia, US defense spending, and US standing...

Yesterday, I posted about my canceled debate with Colin Dueck on the Obama Administration's foreign policy. In part 1, I reflected on the Bush administration's legacy. Here is part 2 of what would have been my defense of the administration's achievements.  Again, it was a debate, where each of us were tasked to assume a side, and I wrote this to be delivered as oral remarks with attempts to dramatize things for a live audience. My thinking is in keeping with a number of recent evaluations of the administration's foreign policy, notably essays that appeared in Foreign Affairs by Gideon Rose,...

Well, I was supposed to be debating Colin Dueck on the Obama administration's foreign policy tomorrow, but the residue of last week's weather took much of the Austin airport out of commission, leaving his flight to be canceled. So, I'm going to be posting my prepared remarks in a series of posts as well as my quick take on Dueck's 2015 book The Obama Doctrine which sought to critique the administration's grand strategy and offer up an alternative of "conservative American realism." The debate may get rescheduled for the spring, but in the meantime, I thought I'd get my thoughts out...

Done. Here is the transcript. You can scour it for an odd line from Christie about "isolationism" or "ISIS." There was a question about climate change which lasted for all of a minute where Christie fumbled something about investing in clean energy but not through the government. There was a bit more in undercard debate, mostly introduced by Lindsey Graham who wanted to talk about defense spending, terrorism, and tie Secretary Clinton to Obama's foreign policy. As usual, Senator Graham was hyping threats "I’ve never seen so many threats to our homeland than I do today." There was actually a...

I just read David Edelstein and Ron Krebs' provocative piece ($) in Foreign Affairs on how the practice of grand strategy leads to threat inflation. One section struck me as somewhat problematic in that it seemed to derive little influence for ideational factors in the construction of the liberal order, as if the United States was materially driven to choose that path. They write: Indeed, the United States has acted as a liberal hegemon, more or less coherently, ever since World War II. But this is less the product of a formal grand strategy than the result of enduring structural features of...

I'm on team Dan on the question of not freaking out over Syria. I don't think Jeff's assessment on this blog reflects the reality which is one of Russian weakness, nor am I convinced, per Seth's conjecture, that the Obama administration had some master plan to lure the Russians in to Syria.  Russia's moves in to Syria suggest real fear that their long time client state could fail. By one estimate, the Syrian army  has been reduced by 2/3 to less than 100,000, and as Dominic Tierney points out in The Atlantic,  Assad may control only a 1/5 of Syria. I also agree with a number of folks like...