Dozens of regimes around the world are anti-liberal—autocratic to varying degrees—but also big fans of a "rules-based" international order, which for the past 50 years or so has been a neoliberal economic order. Not a coincidence. The reason an...
Much ink has been spilled since last Sunday about the massacre at King’s Landing. Why did Dany carpet-bomb a civilian population after a city had surrendered? Was this a sign of her growing madness?...
Here’s my argument: Late 80s/early 90s Soviet Union. The United Kingdom in 2016. The United States 2016 to now. Three contemporary examples of international suicide that conventional IR neither...
I assigned Plato’s Theaetetus this semester in my foreign policy class. It was the very first thing we read in a course that included more standard text’s like Walter Russel Mead’s Special...
Germany calls for the EU to transition to economic empire. John R. Deni makes the case for a US forward presence in Europe (via Paul MacDonald). Nick Bisley examines the meaning of "Indo-Pacific" for geopolitical order. Mark Leon Goldberg tells us what to watch for in the UN security council...
This may not be the worst (professional, major record label) video of all time, but it certainly makes a strong bid for the title. Do you have any suggestions for worse videos?
There's some rambling analysis after the linkage. Charles King is very skeptical of the Scottish independence referendum. William Nomikos argues that Israeli politics may be moderating. Lisa Lundquist on the most recent insider attack in Afghanistan. Via Victoria Hui, An H-Diplo/ISFF roundtable...
Among the many interesting things about graduate school is its propensity to spark greater drinking than I ever thought possible. After preparing (most of) a three-hour talk on using R, I definitely found that celebrating America's greatest brewer-turned-patriot was useful. (For the benefit of...
The Human Security Report Project (HSR) recently released their 2012 Report. The first chapter on wartime sexual violence makes sweeping conclusions and provocative claims about the nature and rates of sexual violence. The overarching message, and certainly the one picked up by the media is that...
In 1963, JFK predicted that there would be as many 25 nuclear powers by the 1970s. Yet here we are, some 70 years later, and the number of states believed to possess nuclear weapons has grown from 4 to 9. Why haven't more states joined the club? A variety of factors are undoubtedly at work...
Topics covered: Process arguments about Libyan attack; Obama likes to kill Islamic terrorists; Energy independence is good, because... jobs; and Romney wants to start a massive trade war with China, Obama just wants to keep it low-level. That's pretty much all, folks.
Yes, it’s partisan, but it’s a somewhat useful deconstruction First, I included the above video to reference a point I tried to make earlier – that Romney flip-flopped so much in the first debate that I no longer have any idea what he thinks about the big issues of campaign. I just wish I knew wth...
A few weeks ago we saw a nasty eruption of the should "progressives vote for Obama" debate--prompted, ironically enough, by a libertarian columnist. My reaction at the time was rather short. But I feel moved by Russel Arben Fox's explanation of why he's voting Green, albeit in Kansas, and the...
tl;dr notice: 1200 words. Zack Beauchamp points us to Douglas Feith's latest broadside against the administration with the tweet: LOL Feith cites @slaughteram and Sam Power's jobs as evidence that Obama wanted to limit American use of military force It turns out that the absurdity runs far deeper...
George W Bush practically built his re-election effort against John Kerry on the idea that even if you disagreed with him, you consistently knew where he stood on stuff. That commercial above is famous. And the US right in general loves that sort of macho grandstanding on behalf of American will...
Democrats are struggling to explain the math behind the Romney-Ryan tax cut proposal. Such forest-for-the-trees stuff isn't really helping. They need to make the big argument: Romney's policies are the same failed policies offered during the Bush Administration, and here's why Obama's proposals...