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 of war risk, and the only near-term fix is a security dilemma...
Since marginalized communities tend to suffer disproportionately when governments make contemptible policy choices, it stands to reason that those communities might develop a heightened sensitivity...
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...
The ISA statement lacks not only comparative history but also local historical depth. It also distorts moral responsibility.
According to a recent tweet, which I am not going to link to, "CRT" led to "multiple civil wars and transnational conflicts by the 1990s" in the Soviet Union. The simple answer is no, but let me explain in more detail. Some have dubbed the Soviet Union an "affirmative action empire" that glorified internationalism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism; at home, however, one could see a much less rosy picture. The notion of nationality, which is bound in Western Europe to the concept of citizenship, derives in Russia from a Soviet atavism that included ‘Natsional’nost’ (ethnicity) in the vital...
There is perhaps no greater film institution than the James Bond franchise. Over 27 movies and 59 years from Doctor No (1962) to Goldfinger (1964) to the modern era of Goldeneye (1995) and Skyfall (2012), Bond is a touchstone in many people lives, although not without controversy. Bond is a threat to women, minorities, and buildings yet also an in-demand entertainment property. That is all over now. James Bond has been made redundant The central question in the latest Bond movie, No Time to Die (2021), is how does James Bond fit into our modern world? In an era of technology and advanced...
Matt Hancock, a Conservative MP and the UK’s Health Secretary during most of the Covid lockdowns, has failed upwards.
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?
Over the past six months or so, I've gotten a lot of pings about NATO and the "Big 3" (UK, France, and Germany) taking on a role in Asia — and specifically a bigger military presence in the region. The issue has come up a few times on my podcast. I got an early preview of a book about a closely related question by a European scholar. I've had EU parliamentary staffers reach out to me about this. And I gave an interview to a lefty newspaper in Norway that was trying to make sense of NATO's approach to China/Asia/Indo-Pacific. It keeps coming up. Then, of course, the big Australia-US-UK...
Australia’s attempt to balance against China using nuclear submarines is not just a material decision. It’s one shaped by over a century of deep fear about Australia’s role as an outpost of whiteness in Asia.
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...
Musgrave’s identification of dangerous ideas is correct, but his metaphor risks entrenching the fundamental problem: the (inevitable) weaponization of “scientific objectivity.”