I have a new article up this morning at Washington Post's Monkey Cage, Â responding to those who have previously tried to classify Bernie Sanders as a "pacifist" (Krauthammer who calls his view "part swords-into-plowshares utopianism, part get-thee-gone isolationism")...
Two kinds of military intervention are being discussed and conflated by political elites (like Nicholas Kristof) and international diplomats. The first is an enforcement operation to punish a state...
It's Syria week. Post use of chemical weapons, some sort of intervention looks more likely than not. We are conflicted. Here to help us make sense of this: The intel that suggests the Syrian regime...
So, I ran into Dan Drezner in the trendy-food part of the West Loop in Chicago tonight, as you do when you are at APSA. Dan asked if I was planning to respond to his post on networking, which is...
When my wife dragged me to a performance of St. John's Passion at Lincoln Center a few years back, I could feel myself turning gay. A quick exit, however, saved my marriage and kept me on the straight and narrow. Seriously, either these guys are just completely ignorant or it's the start of the secret agenda of the Christian conservative movement: first the Catholics, next the Lutherans....Filed as: stupidity
Leon de Winter in the New York Times (via Marc Schulman):FOR centuries the Netherlands has been considered the most tolerant and liberal nation in the world. This attitude is a byproduct of a disciplined civic society, confident enough to provide space for those with different ideas. It produced the country in which Descartes found refuge, a center of freedom of thought and of a free press in Europe.The murder last year of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose killer was convicted this week, and the assassination of the politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 marked the end of the Holland of Erasmus and...
I've been reading through R.J. Rummel's blog which, as one of his regular commentators puts it, is kind of a "public seminar" on the virtues of democracy in terms of inter-state and intra-state violence. Rummel's blog is, indeed, not just a really excellent academic advocacy website but a nice "public seminar."Rummel was one of the first contemporary advocates of the Democratic Peace. The basic idea is that if two states are democracies then they will not got to war with one another. He also developed the idea of "democide" and is a tireless advocate of the argument that democracies do not...
Jonathan J. Monten, a graduate student at Georgetown, has just published a piece called "The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy" in International Security. Jon is one of what I hope will be a growing wave of scholars seeking to combine (in a coherent manner) structural realism with arguments about the role of ideology and identity in world politics. This is a research program Stacie Goddard and I recently advocated in our own article, "Paradigm Lost? Reassessing Theory of International Politics" (European Journal of International...
I wasn't in my office on Wednesday, and thus didn't post a maxim. Given Dan Drezner's recent post on prospect theory and terrorism, I thought it would be interesting to post Guicciardini's views, in effect, on the rational-choice controversy in International Relations:What I said earlier about princes also applies to people with whom you must deal: always keep an eye not so much on what reason dictates they ought to do, as on what you believe they will do, in view of their nature and their habits (Series C, 151)Filed as: Guicciardini and maxims
I've pulled my post entitled "Tim Burke Wows Me." I want to write a more substantive reflection - and call for discussion - on what, if anything, the online debate about Theory's Empire tells us about "post-prefixed" approaches to IR, and that post will get in the way. Apologies to people with an RSS feed.
Robert Farley doesn't think much of Wretchard's (of the Belmont Club) take on the Battle of Guadalcanal. Here's what Rob has to say:So much is wrong with this; Wolcott does an effective job of demolishing the hyper-masculinity of Wretchard's argument. Let's be frank, if Al Qaeda were given the option of fighting Americans by Marquess of Queensbury rules on an open field in the middle of Afghanistan, they'd leap at it. Winning a war, in spite of what the boys at Belmont think, is not about having a larger set of balls.I agree that there's something a bit unseemly about treating...
A number of weblogs have linked to Elliot Cohen's Sunday Op-Ed in the Washington Post, "A Hawk Questions Himself." Cohen defends the basic rationale for the war, but slams the administration for its poor implementation of the Iraq occupation. Key quotation:But a pundit should not recommend a policy without adequate regard for the ability of those in charge to execute it, and here I stumbled. I could not imagine, for example, that the civilian and military high command would treat "Phase IV" -- the post-combat period that has killed far more Americans than the "real" war -- as of secondary...