Oppenheimer is the first blockbuster about nuclear weapons in a generation. Framing his film’s namesake with kinetic edits, fractured timelines, quantum imagery, and a pulsing score, director Christopher Nolan has crafted a stylistic triumph. But...
If you spent the entire Friday night and Saturday glued to the news about Prigozhin's armed rebellion, you are either an IR-head, a Russia-watcher or the Ukrainian army running out of popcorn. The...
The professional bureaucracies of both the US and Chinese national security states encourage mistrust, jingoistic attitudes, pessimistic assumptions, and hawkish policies. This is a growing source...
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....
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...
If you’ve spent any amount of time in Washington, there’s a good chance you’ve internalized a rosier narrative of the Cold War than the actual history warrants (I certainly had). To correct that, I have an essay out in Foreign Affairs with Michael Brenes, arguing that the bipartisan cheerleading for great-power rivalry today is based on a jaundiced reading of Cold War history. The popular image of the Cold War—as a historical moment that brought out America’s productive energies and made us step up our democracy game—has a basis in truth but obscures more than...
What's been quacking at the blog? The Duck of Minerva opened for business in 2005, so it’s had a lot of time to accumulate duck-puns and stupid duck references. Over the years, contributors embraced the Duckness of the Duck to different degrees. I can’t say for sure, but my impression is that Steve Saideman was one of the worst (or best, I suppose) offenders. For my part, I’ve always been ambivalent about the matter. So I spent far too much mental energy on what to call our semi-regular roundup of blog content. In the end, I settled on putting the stupid duck reference in the...
This is the third and final part of a three part interview between Adam B. Lerner (ABL) and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson (PTJ). It is the first instalment of a new series of interviews on Duck of Minerva entitled Quack-and-Forths.
This is part II of the first instalment of a new series of interviews on Duck of Minerva entitled Quack-and-Forths.
that I actually conceived of the idea for this post last week but was only able to force myself to write it today by promising myself a variety of self-care rewards like naps and whiskey.
I read a lot of crap this year, but the good stuff was really good. The Causes of World War Three, by C. Wright Mills This book is from 1961, just after Mills's famous "Letter to the New Left" and just before the Cuban Missile Crisis. The book basically predicts the Cuban Missile Crisis down to the U-2 incident. But what's remarkable is his ability to marry analysis and prose. His passionate critique of power rivals the evocative language of Fanon or Du Bois, and his criticisms work at the level of both extreme specificity and general frames and mindsets. Nearly every page has memorable...
Academics depend on slow processes subject to unfortunate slowdowns. And, unfortunately, academic timelines can make or break careers.