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...
In my first post on the coronavirus outbreak, I reviewed the nature of the disease. Here, I want to ask and answer the first of four questions I posed about whether a global public health emergency...
Even if you don't study global health, you've probably been following the coronavirus outbreak in China with a mix of dread and fascination. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower Chinese doctor, who...
I got an alert from the Foreign Policy app on my phone the other day: Tunisia had fired its UN ambassador after he opposed Trump's Israel-Palestine "peace plan." Tunisian foreign policy doesn't...
My first post on the Iraq War asked if academic IR had any responsibility to slow the march to war. The second tried to formulate what the neoconservative theory of the war was, because many of us, in retrospect of a conflict gone so badly, desperately want to un-remember that there...
Check out my new post at e-IR for a consideration of how Game of Thrones tends to reflect how non-IR scholars might be thinking about IR.That's all, folks.
Yesterday the Senate passed the Coburn amendment cutting off funds for political science research through the National Science Foundation. It was by a voice vote, which is another way of saying that it was so unanimous that no one bothered to even count hands. So that doesn’t bode well. I heard on...
Some further thoughts on why the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. We've had a few posts already now that the tenth anniversary has come. But given the magnitude of the decision and since even its most vocal defenders were caught off guard by how costly, lethal and protracted it was, it is worth...
The debate is indeed on, and the Duck is paddling rapidly on this one with excellent posts from Robert, Jon, and Dan. I take/took a slightly different tack. I opposed the war at the time and like everyone else watched how President Bush--whose job ratings were so low on 9-10 that he was rapidly...
Yesterday morning I forgot to link the National Security Archive's "Iraq War Ten Years After" page. It highlights some of the greatest hits of the period. I founded the Duck after the start of the Iraq War, but, as was the case for many US political and international-affairs blogs, the...
OK, the 10-year retrospectives on the Iraq War are in and the debate is on. Yes, Bush, Cheney, and the neocons sold the country a bill of goods on Iraq. They are war criminals and should be held accountable. Iraq was a strategic disaster, it was a financial disaster, and for far too many it...
Manta rays and sharks get new protections, CITES closes on a hopeful note Yet new slaughter of elephants in Chad Black market for sea cucumbers in Mexico, driven by demand in China Oh yeah, Senate passes measures restricting NSF funding for study of democracy (cuz that's not important), NSF can...
I've realized that it is mathematically impossible to finish what I need to get done before ISA. So this will be brief. Some of this morning's world-politics headlines: deposit levy fails in Cyprus, leading to emergency talks; ROK banking and television computer networks hit by "virus"; and Al...
The Globe and Mail investigates why Japan is falling in love with robots (by the way, I know we're supposed to love longform journalism now because it's long, but you can read either half of this piece and you won't miss the other half) [The Globe and Mail] U.S. Naval War College Professor Tom...
My first thoughts on the war’s ten year anniversary are here. There I asked if there was any defensible theory behind the war, anything that might explain why we launched it, because weapons of mass destruction were not really the reason. Paul Wolfowitz notoriously admitted they were just a...
For students of international affairs and security, especially from either side of the Atlantic, its that time of year again when we congregate at the ISA Conference to muse on the globalisation of everything in a borderless world...after enduring an increasingly unpleasant border regime at the...