The US needs a more restrained approach to its national security, but not all arguments for restraint – and not all policies of restraint – rest on solid foundations.
On Sunday, the US Border Patrol fired tear gas into Mexico at migrants, including children, attempting to enter the US near the San Ysidro border crossing between Tijuana and San Diego. The use of a...
Like everyone else, I'm still trying to catch up after the Thanksgiving holiday. So I have a quick, kind of speculative post this week. It looks like the distressing saga of Matthew Hedges has...
The US Congress recently introduced bills that would call on the Trump Administration to press China over its treatment of the Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group. This would seem to be a...
Hawai'i isn't the only colonial possessionto get the inset treatment. Although the authors of the Duck of Minerva do not condone, endorse, or even take seriously this proposal, we do want to bring to our readers' attention a petition urging President Obama to return Taiwan to the Emperor of...
When Usain competes, U.S. aid plummets. At Andrew Sullivan's Daily Beast, Patrick Appel offers a few hypotheses about why Americans seem to care less about the killing of Sikhs than the killing of moviegoers, including the observation that the timing of the Milwaukee shootings so soon after the...
One of the more interesting issues raised informally during the time I spent at the Lincoln Center's Emerging Technologies Workshop was the relative likelihood of developments in lethal autonomous robotics leading to fully autonomous armies: that is, eliminating the human presence from...
Phil Arena has been playing around with alternative measures of military power. He begins with the straightforward observation that one current and popular measure of military power, the CINC scores in the Correlates of War project, list the United States as having fallen behind the People's...
Adam Elkus and Kelsey Atherton discuss strategic studies and speculative fiction.
Regular blogging will begin to resume over the next weeks now that I'm back from a family road trip down the eastern seaboard and starting to gear up for the academic year. In the meantime, of possible interest to Duck readers is this terrific exhibit on The Art of Video Games at the Smithsonian...
I get a lot of emails asking for advice about putting together their graduate-school applications. I also get a lot of emails asking how to "improve" an application to make it "more competitive." I suspect that these emails come to me because I am Director of Admissions in the Government...
Per Dan's post below, I don't understand why Russia is our number-one enemy, either today or ten years from now. Neither, it seems, do Americans, who have only noticed Russia's phantom menace at one period in the past several years--immediately after the invasion of Georgia in 2008. Below, polling...
I am happy to guest post my friend Dave Kang of the University of Southern California. I think Dave’s work on east Asia and IR theory is excellent; I would start with this or this if you’re interested. REKConfucian North KoreaFigure 1. Korean Worker’s Party symbolIt is easy to caricature North...
2012 interview with Phil Arena.
The running through of the bullsSomeone asked me the other day whether I had read any books for fun recently. Caught up as I was in compiling the lit review for one project and writing lectures for an introductory class, I couldn't think of anything--the words "fun" and "reading" at the moment...
The logic of inappropriatenessBelow, Scott Weiner argues that Carly Rae Jepsen's song "Call Me Maybe" is an illustration of the dynamics of standard game-theory models, specifically the prisoner's dilemma and stag hunt. Weiner assumes that Jepsen is a rational actor, that both Jepsen and her beau...