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
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,...
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...
More US Foreign Policy Posts
On Washington’s China Fetish
What follows is my general philosophy on China issues, by way of answering the hardest of hard defense framing questions regarding China. After my most recent piece in Foreign Affairs, I got a note from a semi-prominent friend in Washington's foreign policy community basically praising it but also posing some tough questions about China policy. In my view they're the wrong questions. But we've known each other a long time, and my response, I think, might be useful for others to consider. So I've anonymized bits but otherwise include the entire note below. Hey [anonymized],...
Is Reactionary Populism a Form of Fascism? Does it Matter?
My most recent Foreign Affairs article, co-authored with Justin Casey, landed yesterday. The article started out as an argument about how the normalization of the far right might affect national and international security. Those issues remain a major thread, but the true heart of the piece is a discussion of the dynamics of the transnational right during the 1920s and 1930s (that is, of interwar fascism) and how that relates to the present. The article warns against hindsight bias — which is a major problem in debates about reactionary...
America is the Preeminent Revisionist Power
The Biden administration’s jarring revisionism on economic policy toward China (and by extension the world) is reviving discussions (most acute during the Trump and George W. Bush years) about whether it’s right to label the United States a revisionist power. There’s a lot at stake in whether the United States is perceived as—or actually is—a “revisionist” (vice “status quo”) power. Theories predicting war are built out of the distinction between revisionist and status quo states. And if the world understands the United States as revisionist, then it is the one upending...
Say “cheese”!
The Bidens are serving the Macrons US-made wine and cheese. A cute gesture or a clumsy diplomatic move?
The Quincy Institute is not a progressive foreign-policy think tank
The debacle over the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ letter on Ukraine reflects the underlying tensions between progressive values and realist grand strategies of restraint—as well as the danger of progressives failing to see the difference between the two.
On the Legitimating Effects of Brinksmanship
This post is the first in a four part symposium on the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the the most studied cases of IR. With the release of documents in recent decades, historical revisions have challenged the received wisdom informed by mainstream approaches to nuclear strategy and a US-centric perspective. However, these revisionist accounts are not well incorporated by IR narratives of the crisis. Sixty years later, a revisiting of the legitimating role that the missile crisis plays in theories of nuclear deterrence and...
Grand Strategy is Worldmaking
I think a lot of people are kidding themselves about what grand strategy is—it’s worldmaking. It’s an attempt to put the power of the state in service of grand political purpose. States big and small can have grand strategies because states big and small have elites who use state power to serve their visions. When you think of grand strategy this way, most of what passes for grand strategic categories and policy prescriptions are exposed as morbidly violent, exploitative, and even reactionary. But wait, what is this concept of worldmaking? What about the “national interest?” What about...
Nuclear Precarity and the Russia Crisis
Everybody’s talking about nuclear war with Russia right now and it bugs me, not least because I’ve seen this nuclear frenzy before. Now, I think people have good reason to be worried about Russian nuclear use, as I wrote some five months ago. But what gets me about “the discourse” is that a tremendous amount of it is ahistorical. On the one hand, the conversation is weighted down with the opinions of people with large social media followings but no—zero—knowledge about nuclear weapons or coercion theory. On the other hand, a good percentage of people who actually do know...