The Bidens are serving the Macrons US-made wine and cheese. A cute gesture or a clumsy diplomatic move?
Say “cheese”!
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US Foreign Policy
Trump’s Budweiser Putsch
US President Donald Trump gestures as he arrives to a "Make America Great Again" campaign rally in Cincinnati, Ohio, on August 1, 2019. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo credit should read SAUL...
The True Meaning of a Hot Christmas Prince
In the spirit of holiday cheer and Paul Musgrave's great Foreign Policy piece "The True Meaning of Christmas Movies Is a Cozy American Worldview" as well as our common poli sci curse of "being...
Voldemort, Trump, and the other usual suspects of Putin’s press conference
Klimentyev, RIA Novosti. Sing it with me: It’s the most Putinist time of the year! For the 16th time the Dear Leader addressed the nation and the world from through their TV screens during a...
More US Foreign Policy Posts
Understanding Trump’s Worldview
Over the weekend, Donald Trump gave an interview with Michael Gove of The Times of London and Kai Diekmann, a former editor of the German newspaper Bild. (The interview is behind a paywall, but you can register for free for access to two articles a week from The Times.) There has been ample coverage in the press (see here, here), focusing on Trump's ambivalence to NATO ("obsolete" "very important"), hostility to the European Union ("Personally, I don’t think it matters much for the United States"), and equal regard for Angela Merkel and Putin ("Well, I start off trusting both — but let’s see...
Trump and IR Theory: Did We Forget Great Men?
I was reminded on twitter that international relations professors have trained students for generations to focus on the third and second levels of analysis and dismiss the first--that individuals and their characteristics matter much less than the constraining impact of institutions and the incentives provided by the international system. So, should we just apologize as Trump sells out the postWWII order and ends American hegemony by whim or fiat? No, we need to drink heavily. Seriously, there are a few real responses to this question of agency and structure. First, realists will say, and...
Never Too Early for a Crisis in Civil-Military Relations
To be clear, the latest news is "intra-civilian" but is likely to cross over given the stakes. Remember the old days where the "smart" Bolsheviks left the personnel and other boring issues to Stalin? Yeah, so Stalin staffed the new Soviet government with his guys, and the theorists, well, they did not end up this way. That might be too bloody of an example, but I am not at all surprised that General (retired) Mattis is having tensions with Michael Flynn and the other Trump folks over who to staff the Pentagon. If Mattis can't pick his own staff, it will mean not only that he will not have...
#RussiansDidit
Putin’s annual press conference is a chance for regular citizens to spend 3 hours in a great and rich Russia, where everything is in order and Putin is capable of installing presidents in foreign countries (according to one journalist). In general, the press conference strived to paint a picture of a great power facing some economic problems and who is constantly challenged by other countries (they are probably jealous and/or Russophobic). For me it was also a chance to wonder at Putin’s stamina. He might not be Superman, as one of the posters brought by the journalists stipulated, but his...
Explaining the Obvious in the Age of Trump
The President-Elect has called for expanding the US nuclear arsenal, not just modernizing it (old warheads may not be good warheads). And when asked about whether this might lead to an arms race, he said woot! Who wins arms races? Arms manufacturers and their stockholders Maybe Ken Waltz (who is already dead) Yeah, that's about it. How about who loses? Each country that is involved The taxpayers Pretty much everyone else. Really? Is it that bad? Yes, it is. Why? There are two possibilities when it comes to a nuclear arms race: either the competition among nuclear powers to build more...
WPTPN: The Loss of the American Narrative
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Aida A. Hozić is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Florida. This blogpost draws on a chapter prepared for Hegemony and Leadership in the International Political Economy, edited by Alan Cafruny and Herman M. Schwartz (Lynne Rienner, forthcoming). There is a moment at the end of every regime when the relationship between all hitherto accepted modes of representation and reality seems to collapse. Regimes start running on fumes when well-established political rituals...
The Russians Are Coming (for your language too)
Gone are the good old days when I had to explain what the word ‘yarki’ means to my friends and colleagues (for the record, ‘colorful’, not ‘brilliant’). Now I will have to clarify the complexities of planting child pornography into the computers of oppositional leaders thanks to the re-emergence of ‘kompromat’. Why did kompromat, arguably a KGB-developed practice of mining compromising material on politicians and blackmailing them with it, surface again in the media? As Fabian Burkhardt noticed, the word first appeared in the English language with the information wars of the 90s. Moreover,...
WPTPN: Will Populist Nationalism Lead to Great-Power War?
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Louis F. Cooper. His online writing includes “Reflections on U.S. Foreign Policy” at the U.S. Intellectual History Blog (July 16, 2014). His Ph.D. is from the School of International Service, American University. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of 1792-1815, which one historian has labeled “the first total war,” engulfed basically the whole of Europe. A century later, a war broke out in Europe that extended beyond the continent to become global in scope. One can think of the two enormously...