The buzzword of the first Trump administration was “Great Power Competition.” That was also a lie.
So much for “Great Power Competition”
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US Foreign Policy
Decoding “America First:” Which international institutions Trump 2.0 will criticize, undermine, or leave
Donald Trump’s second term in office is causing great concern about the future of the Liberal International Order (ILO) in Western capitals and headquarters of international organizations (IOs)....
Grabbing the world by the norms
With the news avalanche that is Trump, it’s hard to keep track of all the outrageous things he says and does. With his recent very vocal attempts at land grabs (that we are not entirely sure will...
Jimmy Carter’s legacy: a challenge to recognize and act on religion’s significance
US President Jimmy Carter's funeral is being held today in Washington, DC at the National Cathedral. Since he passed away shortly after Christmas, tributes have abounded about a man once derided as...
More US Foreign Policy Posts
The Munich Agreement, but Negotiated by Oswald Mosley
When I was but a lad, it was still quite common for foreign-policy hawks to invoke “Munich” as an all-purpose rebuttal to compromise with (they would say the “appeasement of”) rival states, most notably the Soviet Union. The failure of the 1938 agreement — which handed Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in an effort to avoid a general European war. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain infamously proclaimed that the agreement would produce “peace in our time.” The effort, of course, failed. A few months later, a weakened...
The Frontier Politics of Horizon
In the recent Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop, Lachlan McNamee makes a rationalist argument—“colonization projects” are “characterized by a triangle of actors—settlers, indigenes, and the central state,” and for his purposes, we can “assume that all settler migration is voluntary and economically driven”. McNamee is not the only one with such a reading of colonial politics. Director, co-writer, and star Kevin Costner takes a similar view of the nineteenth-century American frontier in his recent film, Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter One. (Hereafter, Horizon....
Leaders’ preambles and world ordering in national security strategy documents: the (un)surprising global strategic ambitions of the US and UK
126 countries now publish a national security strategy or defense document, and 45 of these feature
a leaders’ preambles. How these talk about the world, or not, is surprisingly revealing of historical
global strategic hierarchies.
The Competition Metaphor in International Relations
When I arrived at the Pentagon in 2009, the Obama administration was just getting its footing as caretakers of the War on Terror. Our focus then was truly global dominion. That meant, yes, killing and capturing whatever the intelligence process coughed up as bad guys no matter who they were or where they were. But also, technologically, our fixation was on “prompt global strike”—the idea that the US should be able to reliably put warheads on foreheads anywhere at anytime without constraint. I don’t know what to say about that other than that it sounds much crazier when I say it out...
Book Nook – All Options on the Table: Leaders, Preventive War, and Nuclear Proliferation
Our next Bridging the Gap Book Nook features Rachel Whitlark, an associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She discusses her recent book, All Options on the Table: Leaders, Preventive War, and Nuclear Proliferation. https://youtu.be/dK5_o5zE2hQ
The Fascist Nuke Problem
The world could use some serious thinking about the relationship between political ideology and nuclear escalation—specifically far-right pathways to nuclear war. The nuclear strategy literature is full of smart claims from many angles: entanglement risks, discrimination problems, first-use incentives, credible commitments, retaliatory v. catalytic v. asymmetric postures, the staying power of the nuclear revolution, and the escalatory potential of different kinds of nuclear crises. But regime type is not a major preoccupation of nuclear wonks, and to the extent it factors...
Judging a book by its cover II
Part I here if you are interested On the day of German reunification anniversary I bring you the sequel to the post on the new Russian history book. Only, if you read this history book, you will not find the term "reunification" - it's reserved for Crimea and Donbas - instead, you will find a passage about Western Germany "annexing" the Eastern one. Believe it or not, it is actually a toned down version of another history textbook co-authored by Medinsky: in "World History for 11th grade" he straight up called it an "Anschluss" highlighted in bold. Yes, the untranslated German term that was...
What If Trump was President When Russia Invaded Ukraine?
If Donald Trump was President of the United States when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, instead of Joe Biden, Trump’s personality would have led to a very different U.S. response. Trump would not have swiftly and strongly condemned Russia or clearly sided with Ukraine in the initial stages of the invasion, and he would not have brought together a multilateral front against Russia – as Biden did.