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 avalanche of hot-takes about the start of a civil war, theoretical...
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...
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...
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...
You're going to need some help. Since 2017, when I departed the Beltway in favor of (literally) greener pastures, I've been trying to figure out how to create an institutional presence for alternative (ok, progressive) voices on foreign policy. Why? Although I don't like the "Blob" epithet, there is a lot of consensus thinking in Washington — especially circa 2017 — and it's historically really difficult to promote competing perspectives without your invitation to the cocktail party getting lost in the mail. Worse than that though, I was appalled watching the "ideas industry" line up to...
“Kuzushi” is the concept of off-balancing. It refers to a tactic of getting your opponent out of a fixed position where he’ll be vulnerable, maybe getting his weight tilted too much to one side or making him overcommit to a move. With kuzushi, you aren’t achieving anything; you’re opening up a window of opportunity. Window ajar, you have a split second to advance your position. A sweep or submission attempt that would’ve been impossible under normal conditions suddenly works against an unbalanced opponent.
So the New York Times reported on Beverly Gage, a history professor at Yale University, resigning from her post as head of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy because of donor pressure. There's a lot at stake in this. As an academic field, grand strategy has a reputation for being very conservative, and for advocating a didactic, great-man view of history. The Yale program has not only been the premier school for grand strategy, inspiring a few similar programs at similarly prestigious universities; it has also been the premier focal point for critics of grand strategy who see it as...
While political comedy thrives, IR comedy, whatever that phrase might mean, is virtually non-existent. omedy gap’? Is it a figment of my imagination or a real problem?
I was an enlisted Airman studying Korean at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, California on September 11, 2001. When the first two planes struck, none of us had any idea whether it was a high-profile accident or an attack. It was only when a third plane flew into the Pentagon that we put 2 and 2 together. I remember feeling confused, and a bit queasy after going out to the "Day Room" to check out the news, but I had a milestone language test that morning and was trying to focus. After the test, I went outside to a smoke pit to wait for the others in my cohort to finish. I...
Ah, those days when you did not feel guilty for reading something that does not contain the term “poststructuralism” and/or footnotes. Back in my teenage years, I used to devour all the books I could get during the summer. I had some favorites: Alexandre Duma’s The Count of Monte-Christo (1844-1846) and The Valley of the Moon (1913) by Jack London. If the Monte Christo long-drawn out revenge plot is a great motivational read for staying in academia, The Valley of the Moon was a type of a comfort read with its slow-paced love story/farming manual features. Following Paul Musgrave’s...
The awfulness of 2020 has become one of the year’s most unforgettable cultural memes.
A couple of years ago, I conducted a Gary Steyngart-esque experiment and watched Russian TV for a day, to find out in what kind of information bubble a regular Russian person lives. This year, I can’t use the remote because I bit all my nails during the American election week, but also the borders are closed, so both Russia and a Russian TV are beyond my reach. Never fear, I fired up Ye olde Tube to see what’s happening with the American elections in the Russian media. Let’s flip to one of the most odious guys on Channel Two – Dimitry Kiselyov, aka “let’s burn gays’ hearts”....