I recently posted a piece at Lawyers, Guns and Money about Jonathan Swan’s two-part series on Trumpworld’s plans for a second term. The gist is that Trump and his inner circle intend to revive his Schedule F executive order. What is Schedule F?...
Many a postdoc are likely in my position this year, dissertation defense safely in the review mirror and settling into the groove of their research. Those who, like me, are fortunately enough to...
This post comes from Bridging the Gap co-director Jordan Tama, Associate Professor at the School of International Service at American University. American presidents have typically been more...
I feel like I should say something about the disappearance—and likely assassination—of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi. This tragedy was enabled by America’s permissive stance towards Saudi Crown...
This is my Asian pivot.Here is part one, where I argued that there is no constituency in the US to support an Asian pivot besides the some businesspeople. 2. Connected to the first point is that Americans don’t know much about Asia. Of course, it’s true Americans don’t know a lot about the world...
Rush Limbaugh, the teaparty, OWS, all the way to the seven sisters -- a deeply misguided Smith College alumna, an open feud between Barnard and Columbia... and so it goes... Bobcat Goldthwait's new dark satire, God Bless America is supposed to be an hysterical look at the mixing of stupidity and...
I did not make these to destroy feminism.Duck readers, I have a confession. I bake cupcakes. Thousands of them. I love doing it, I love icing them, I love decorating them and I really like eating them.This is not something that I would typically share with a blog on international politics....
I found this image here. So the US pivot toward Asia is all the rage in foreign policy now. Obama and Secretary Clinton genuinely seem to believe in this, and there good reasons for it. Briefly put, Asia has the money, people, and guns to dramatically impact world politics in a way that no other...
KONY, WE GON' FIND YOU - as soon as I buy my bracelet!Anyone who has been on Facebook and Twitter over the past 24 hours has probably seen impassioned pleas to watch a high-production video by Invisible Children, an American NGO (whose Board of Directors just happens to be entirely white American...
...How I could just kill a man!Obama said today, or at least I think it was today, that "we have Israel's back." So have we replaced the cowboy swagger bullshit with some urban swagger bullshit? Fo shizzle.In general, I object to any dumbing down of foreign policy, even in the public discourse,...
I'm very much looking forward to attending this year's International Studies Association conference in lovely San Diego. This is partly because I can fight a losing struggle against its declared theme for this year:'Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the...
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Why should academics and policymakers prioritize a state's acquistion of "... the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory"? Obviously, this monopoly is fundamental to masking the violence of the state in daily domestic affairs, but what about in areas where that...
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Antoine Bousquet has a fascinating post at Disorder of Things on developments in neuroscience and how they are being used by militaries to 1) enhance their own soldiers and 2) degrade the abilities of their opponents. The post is in response to a report by The Royal Society on Neuroscience,...
Here is part one, where I noted Walt, the Duck, and Walter Russell Mead as the IR blogs I read almost always despite the avalanche of international affairs blogs now. Here are a few more: Martin Wolf: Here’s a grad school education in IPE, op-ed by op-ed, better day-to-day than either Krugman or...