Every year I make my third year Bachelor students read Carol Cohn’s article “Sex and Death in the rational world of defense intellectuals” and they are genuinely surprised by the number of penile metaphors one can use to describe a missile. Except this year: current...
A century before Trump’s tariff threats, Joseph Chamberlain pitched the same idea: use duties as a “big revolver” to force rivals into “fair trade.” That history helps explain why “unfairness” rhetoric and coercive foreign policy keep returning when hegemonic powers decline.
Dominant theories of international political economy leave little room for the influence of individuals. They also never anticipated that the United States might seek to completely upend the global economic order.
Who, if anyone, rules the world? Answering a question like that requires grappling with both the character of international order and the global distribution of power—facets of political life that...
Dozens of regimes around the world are anti-liberal—autocratic to varying degrees—but also big fans of a "rules-based" international order, which for the past 50 years or so has been a neoliberal economic order. Not a coincidence. The reason an anti-liberal might also be a neoliberal seems rather obvious: Because they're kleptocrats and oligarchs who are getting paid! A regime doesn't need to embrace democracy in any meaningful sense in order to be a productive part of global capitalism. To the contrary, systematically suppressing collective and individual rights is a...
This piece is the third of a three-part series grappling with the role of political economy in making a just, sustainable international order. Neoliberalism — the ideology of the primacy of capital — has been bad for American statecraft. It’s a major reason why we have no economic strategy. And I’m totally a get-out-of-neoliberalism stan. But where we go from here matters. The new post-liberal right, for example, also hates neoliberalism, but of course it wants to take us into a future that looks something like the Handmaids Tale. Democrats, on the other hand, see...
This piece is the second in a three-part series grappling with the role of political economy in making a just, sustainable international order. Writing about America’s economic strategy deficit got me pondering why the United States had such a stunted economic imagination. How could the government that many consider to be the global economic hegemon be inept at economic statecraft? For one thing, I think the popular impression of America as the world’s economic hegemon is overstated. Yes, the United States has many economic advantages. Its domestic market is still the destination of choice...
This piece is the first of a three-part series grappling with the role of political economy in making a just, sustainable international order. hat’s America’s story for how economic policy relates to international security? I think for a long time the story was some version of the “big, dumb, beautiful dream of McDonald’s peace theory.” These days, I don’t think there is one. And while that’s not President Biden’s fault, it is his inheritance, and it hinders the task of formulating an economic strategy. The two biggest thematic criticisms lodged against Biden’s...
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) originated in provincial-level efforts that sought to simultaneously integrate interior and frontier provinces to the rest of China as well as neighboring countries during the 1990s.
The Biden administration just issued the government’s first ever anti-corruption strategy. The upshot: It’s needed. It’s analytically informed. It raises the prioritization of fighting kleptocracy. The downside: It’s not all that realistic. It defines corruption so widely that it makes prioritization fanciful. And it defers most of the real work to some to-be-determined imaginary future on the other side of Republican authoritarianism. Eons ago, during the 2020 presidential campaign cycle, anti-corruption was a major theme in the progressive foreign...
Financial hegemony brings with it substantial benefits, most notably reserve currency status. In order to successfully compete, rising powers need to lure financial institutions away from incumbent powers. They often try to make themselves more attractive to international finance by removing longstanding financial regulations.
Corruption is an issue largely off the radar screens of many IR scholars. How can they better theorize corruption’s pervasiveness in international politics, while avoiding the biases of past approaches?