Foreign Affairs ran a poll on the question. A few of us expressed skepticism about the debate itself.
Was NATO expansion a mistake?
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Recent Posts
The International Religious Freedom Campaign: A Cautionary Tale
There was some interesting/concerning information hidden at the end of the New York Times coverage of Secretary of State Pompeo’s Cairo speech. After criticizing Obama’s foreign policy and calling...
Enes Kanter was right to be cautious
The NY Knicks will be travelling to London in a few weeks for a game against the Washington Wizards. But center Enes Kanter has announced he won't be joining them. Kanter, who is Turkish and a...
Where Is Intro to IR When You Need It?
One of the basic claims I make as a poli sci professor is that my goal is to help the next generation become more informed citizens, so that they understand their interests, and can vote...
More Recent Posts
EU and the Peace Prize (Round 2)
The initial reaction from Facebook and from my Realist friends reveals a certain amount of scorn for the Nobel Peace Prize announcement this morning. The EU today is an easy parody and I guess the response is to be expected. Nonetheless, I appreciate Erik Voeten’s post that Dan linked below and...
The Politics of the Hunger Games
As I've mentioned before, one of the projects that I'm working on now is a book provisionally entitled "The Politics of the Hunger Games." PM and I are overdue in submitting a full proposal to the press. In an earlier post I sketched out some provisional chapter titles. Here I provide a more...
Friday Morning Debate Reaction
I scored the Romney-Obama debate as a tactical win for Romney. As of now, it looks more like a strategic one. The lesson for me, I think, is not to assess the political ramifications of debates. So in this post, I'll simply stick to reflecting on the foreign-policy component of the debate, which...
The EU Peace Prize
Erik Voeten is pleased: The Realist argument about the importance of the U.S. security umbrella is probably correct. Yet, the dire predictions regarding the future of European integration have yet to materialize. Indeed, the EU sped up its integration considerably with the end of the Cold War;...
Announcement: The Duck of Minerva is Moving (UPDATED)
Update: the Duck has moslty migrated (and that sentence makes sense in a non-technical context! Score!). Comment migration is in process, so probably not a good time for a magnum opus response. The existing RSS feed should work, so no need to change that. Vikash designed our new banner. The...
Podcast No. 11 – Interview with Janice Bially Mattern
Featuring Janice Bially Mattern. From 2012.
Friday Morning Linkage
Georgetown University's debate coach comments (video) on the first presidential debate of 2012. PM's not the only one to respond to John Quiggin's post on the US Navy; Robert Farley also has a lot to say. Jeremy Keenan provides an overview of the Mali civil war at allAfrica. The Syrian civil war...
Stuff Political Scientists Like #17: Outside Offers, or Stuff Other Political Scientists Like
Political scientists like to complain about how little they are paid, which tends to be irritating to any number of other groups, most notably anyone who has a job other than that of a political scientist and has to be into the office say, before noon. Part of the reason that political scientists...
Does naval success invalidate the need for navies?
Acting was a big part of Battleship. At Crooked Timber, John Quiggin writes a post that seeks to sink a thousand ships: The trillions of dollars that have been spent on building, maintaining and scrapping fleets since 1945 has yielded almost zero benefits to the nations that have spent this money,...
Gender, Violence, War, Political Memory
The sailor (George Mendosa) and nurse (Greta Zimmer Friedman) depicted in this iconic photo snapped moments after the announcement that World War II had ended turned out to be complete strangers, and apparently Greta Friedman, the nurse, wasn't kissing back: Mendosa: "It was the moment. You come...
Technical Difficulties with Podcasts? (UPDATED)
I've been getting sporadic reports of problems opening the podcasts, e.g., of people clicking on them from the "podcasts" tab with no result, being unable to force a download to show up as an audio file, and so forth. If you've been having this kind of difficulty would you let me know in...
New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy: Meagan Spooner’s Skylark
Check out the third episode of New Books in Science and Fantasy, in which I interview Meagan Spooner about Skylark.The summary:Lark Ainsley lives within a near-hermetically sealed city located in a world scarred and depleted by magical wars. The Architects, who oversee the City, maintain it by...