How can we understand Tump 2.0 foreign policy? It’s the product of the fusion of two different forces: Christian Nationalism and Personalist Rent-Extraction.
Trump’s Foreign Policy and the Purpose of the MAGA State
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US Foreign Policy
What’s the Matter with Soft Power?
I dislike the term “soft power.” We owe the term to the late, great Joseph Nye. He popularized it in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead. Nye’s book was, first and foremost, an intervention in the...
Unreal climate ‘realism’
It’s hard to keep track of the problems confronting Americans these days. But, just in case a reminder is needed, climate change is still a thing. Casual observers may have noted that US climate...
The Folly of Trying to Trade Russia for “Europe”
I published an article yesterday in Real Clear Defense. The title is “The Road to Securing European Cooperation on China Runs Through Ukraine”, but I suppose I could have called this piece, “How to...
More US Foreign Policy Posts
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.
Patriarchy and the Cult of Coercion: Pale, Male, and Stale Will Make Deterrence Fail
Carol Cohn is the G.O.A.T. Back in 1987, she wrote what is still the best gendered take on the pathologies of deterrence in a piece called, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” It absolutely demolishes the cult of the missile bro. And every deterrence scholar I know who’s not a caveman kneels before this article with overt praise. Many swear they even teach it. Yet, modern deterrence theory is basically all rationalist—an implicit rejection of Cohn’s critique. The language of the field—from “Minuteman missiles” to “vertical erector launchers”—remains...