And in despair I bowed my head; "There is no peace on earth," I said;"For hate is strong, And mocks the song Of peace on earth, good-will to men! Thanks for reading The Duck of Minerva! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. -Henry Wadsworth...
I started this post sort of confessionally. It's been a while since I wrote on the blog. I had started one earlier this year on the destruction of USAID and PEPFAR but redirected my energy into...
The Hayseed Scholar podcast has come to a close. In this farewell episode, Brent's brother Kyle hosts it and they chat about the podcast and why Brent is closing it down. Two friends of the...
Probably not, but the problem isn't impartiality it's the politics of impartiality On November 9th, the director general of The BBC, Tim Davie, along with the head of news, Deborah...
The U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean is confusing the MAGA faithful. With rumors swirling of an imminent operation to topple Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, the president’s supporters are asking what happened to “America First”? Tucker Carlson recently remarked it was a “little strange” that the...
On November 1, 2025, President Donald Trump threatened to end all U.S. assistance to Nigeria and — if he deemed it necessary — launch a military attack against insurgents in the country. As National Public Radio reported: “If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of...
I’ve been thinking a lot about the meaning of “responsibility,” specifically in the context of politics and governance. We live in an age of populism, rising authoritarianism, disinformation, climate change, and the slaughter of civilians in places like Gaza and Sudan. The notions of...
I had high hopes for director Kathryn Bigelow’s House of Dynamite, a new Netflix movie about U.S. nuclear command and control. There’s so much potential for cinema to unpack the dilemmas and tragedies of living under a nuclear sword of Damocles, and my initial reaction was disappointment at the...
What is the name of the journal article (or book) and what are its coordinates? Miray Philips. 2025. “The Social Construction of Christian Persecution through Quantification in International Religious Freedom Advocacy.” Sociology of Religion. https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/sraf022 2. What’s the...
After years of calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, a ceasefire was recently announced and…those calling for the ceasefire are upset about it. There are some valid reasons to hold off on celebrating, but I worry this represents a deeper issue with how we conceive of peace and how we study the Middle...
Debates about Israel and Palestine have, as one scholar remarked to me, become the “third rail” in British academia. That needs to change. The terror attack in Manchester makes clear that UK academics must engage in a public, thoughtful, and careful discussion about Jews, Israel and Palestine. On...
Back in March, I wrote a post at Lawyers, Guns and Money called “Remember ‘Great Power Competition?’ Lol.” As the “Grand Strategy” of Trump 2.0 comes into focus, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit and update it. In brief, the normie national-security advisors who...
The Republic as we knew it is over. The fight now is whether the new one will be a fascistic, competitive authoritarian regime or a pluralist democracy that, one hopes, is better than what came before.
What’s the name of the book, and where can we find it? American Conquest: The Northwest Indian War and the Making of US Foreign Policy (Stanford University Press, 2025). What’s the argument? Relations with Native American groups were constitutive of early U.S. foreign policy, and this should make...
The UN General Assembly meeting has seen a growing number of states recognizing a state of Palestine, including Western powers like France, the United Kingdom and Canada. Debate has swirled over why they are doing this: is it a principled stand, an attempt to gain international or domestic clout,...
How can we understand Tump 2.0 foreign policy? It’s the product of the fusion of two different forces: Christian Nationalism and Personalist Rent-Extraction.