Recently I highlighted Korbel's new Responsible Engagement Institute, an important innovation in our profession. I shouted this out in the context of my own concerns with survey experiments that (perhaps irresponsibly) inflate the appearance of American support for...
I am not a fan of Scottish independence, so I thought we should get equal time from the Yes/Aye side:
Though I've been blogging at the Duck of Minerva for more than 9 years, I haven't posted much content for several years. My last post here was in mid-February. You can find maybe half a dozen...
Contenders for the Marine Corps Association's Major General Harold W. Chase Prize, ($3000, publication, and a plaque) are supposed to "propose and argue for a new and better way of “doing business”...
Herbert Marcuse had some interesting things to say about certain political acronyms. The meaning is fixed, doctored, loaded. Once it has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in general usage, "sanctioned" by the intellectuals, it has lost all cognitive value and serves merely for recognition of an unquestionable fact. This style is of overwhelming concreteness. The "thing identified with its function" is more real than the thing distinguished from its function and the linguistic expression of this identification (in the functional noun, and in the many forms of syntactical...
Joshua Goldstein and I look at R2P After Syria. But, what will Syria look like after Syria? And, what exactly is the Obama administration doing there? Training and arming the rebels covertly but not with non-lethal military aid -- body armor and night vision. UN arms treaty blocked by Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Go figure. Title is misleading, but this is comprehensive look at Afghanistan -- will likely be at war long after 2014. Current Intelligence has a nice feature from Clive Schofield dissecting the myths and realities of Arctic competition. Bringing sabermetrics and moneyball to...
I am happy to invite my friend Tom Nichols to guest-post about the continuing Iraq War debate. Tom responded so substantially to my original post series on the war (one, two, three), that I invited him to provide a longer write-up. Tom is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor in the Harvard Extension School. His blog can be found here, his twitter here. His opinions of course are his own, so whenever he says I’m wrong, you probably shouldn’t listen… REK I’ve been reading Bob’s thoughts – cogent as always – on the tenth anniversary of...
I have enjoyed the recent exchange between Kroenig and Sechser & Fuhrmann (see here, here, and here). One interesting point that came up regards the role of conventional military capabilities in determining crisis outcomes. Kroenig says that the MCT data S&F analyze must be flawed because their results indicate that conventional military capabilities don't matter whereas we have good reason to believe that the strong do what they will while the weak suffer what they must. S&F reply that there's nothing odd about their non-finding because this is precisely what bargaining...
Nuclear weapons may be useful for deterrence, but can they also coerce? Our theories reach opposite conclusions: we say no; Kroenig says yes. Both sides marshal evidence to support their arguments. So who is right? Our goal in this post is to evaluate Kroenig’s empirical results and respond to his critique of our article.
About a month ago I wrote that: The recent obsession with MOOCs has its roots in three interlocking trends: the application of business-school speak to higher education, technology fetishism, and the quest to push down labor costs. It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that these are three faces of late-modern capitalism: the colonization of all modes of life by scripts associated with capitalist exchange relations, the “virtuous cycle” of rent-seeking by advocates of “creative destruction,” and relentless pressure to enhance profit by increasing capital-labor ratios. I've been...
Here is your Thursday Morning Linkage with some categories for helpful reading... Global Economy Cyprus and EU avert financial catastrophe but EU looks like "gang that can't shoot straight" Krugman recommends Cyprus exit from the Euro Energy and the Environment Wildlife returns to Guyana CFR hosts joint event with Conservation International on the mainstreaming of environmental security Trevor Houser flags EIA report on U.S. energy consumption John Romankiewicz questions whether shale gas is actually changing the country's energy trajectory all that much Africa Central African Republic...
Dan Trombly worries about the effectiveness of proxy warfare in Syria. Drone reconnaissance aids archeology. Chinese missile porn. US policy toward Bahrain. Did the US once save Hugo Chávez's life? Colin Dueck thinks that the US is strategically overextended. Andrew Yeo looks at the NRA and right-wing social movements. David Kaib riffs on the Portman gay-marriage conversion. So does David S. Meyer. And also: More possible downsides of MOOCs (via Erik Loomis) Possible upsides of MOOCs. Game of Thrones meets Firefly.