*The following post is written by Ryan Maness and myself. Events are in motion that many thought were past us, part of a bygone era where conventional war still had a prominent place in deciding the course of nations. Having done a great amount of work on Russia’s strategic behavior and use of power (we have a book on the topic under review), we were a bit caught off guard too. Not by the course of events, but that our vision was focused on...
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America’s Strategic Dilemma in Ukraine
[Note: This is a guest post by Sean Kay, Robson Professor of Politics at Ohio Wesleyan University and Mershon Associate at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University. He has long-researched and written on NATO policy and worked in the US Department of Defense during the first round of NATO enlargement planning. His forthcoming book is America’s Search for Security: The Triumph of Idealism and the Return...
Nuclear weapons wouldn’t have fixed what was wrong with Ukraine
Tyler Cowen discovers John Mearsheimer's seminal 1993 Foreign Affairs article "The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent". Since I know I won't be alone in teaching this piece the next time I put together an Intro to IR reading list, let's take a moment to see whether, as Cowen wrote earlier, "the expected rate of return from denuclearization has fallen". International relations scholars disagree about a lot when it comes to nuclear weapons,...
Analogies Aplenty: Ukraine is ….
Lots of folks are speculating about what Ukraine/Crimea/Russia is like, including not Abkhazia. Right now, the analogies that come to mind for me are: coups d'etat and poker. Coup? Yes, because in a coup, the anti-incumbents (for want of a better term), move first, trying to create facts on the ground that are hard to reverse. If this fait accompli is successful, the incumbents are then put in a position where they are the ones with the...
Conquest by other means, Ukraine edition
Over at the Monkey Cage, Henry Farrell suggests that President Obama is using the OSCE to give Putin an exit strategy. Farrell writes: Obama’s “phone call with Putin on Saturday suggests that the United States wants to invoke the old-style OSCE. It notes that Russia’s armed intervention is inconsistent with Russia’s commitments under the Helsinki Final Act (the agreement that established the OSCE), calls for “the dispatch of international...
Former Duck Gets Riled Up by Ukraine Coverage
For some smart commentary on what's going down in the Ukraine and how (not) to cover it, I point you to former Duck Dan Nexon on his personal blog (*and also cross-posted below). Dan knows a thing or two about the region having served in the Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia regional office in the Office of the Secretary Defense as a CFR International Affairs Fellow in 2009-2010. Here, Dan bemoaned the coverage in the WaPo of the Ukraine crisis by one...
Reporters and Foreign Affairs Analysis: Ukraine Edition
This is a guest post by former Duck of Minerva blogger Dan Nexon. It is cross-posted at his personal blog, Hylaean Flow. One of the ongoing rationales for The Monkey Cage is that journalists do a poor job of covering US electoral politics. They focus on personality and style. They downplay the role of fundamentals, such as economic forces and the nature of the electoral system. The same is too often true in foreign-affairs reporting. Consider a...
Reacting to Ukraine/Crimea
Yesterday, I suggested that there is little the US/NATO could do about the Russian intervention in Ukraine. That still is very much true. Obama's statement referred to costs--that this would cost Russia and it will (trade, the G8 summit, etc). But that is not a redline or a serious effort at deterrence--just a statement of reality. Russia's relations with the US, EU, NATO and others will be "taxed" by this event--Russia will get less in...
Why the Crimea is the Third Rail of International Politics
*this is a guest post by Konstantinos Travlos, currently a Visiting Assistant at Georgia Southern, who writes on international conflict and history. The arguments presented below are based on past research. Russian policy towards Ukraine is partly driven by short term political reasons such as protecting an investment in the form of Yanukovych, the Russian view of Ukraine as a “little brother”, a legitimate worry over the future of the Russian...
Friday Nerd Blogging: Walter White’s Next Big Adventure
The only thing scarier than Godzilla? A scared Walter White (Bryan Cranston). This preview is most exciting trailer in a while And, to pass the time, see The Lego Movie as Everything Is AWESOME!
Classroom Activity: Trust and Exploitation
This sixth activity comes after students are to have listened to a lecture (slides) about trust and exploitation (see also this post). I asked the students to make more or less the same decision faced by the actors in the formal model discussed in that lecture, though their choice was bit simpler because only one of the actions involved risk. The optimal strategy here was not to cooperate at all, since the expected utility for cooperating with...
The “Baptist-Burqa” Network and LGBT Advocacy
It’s been a big and extremely depressing week for the rights of sexual minorities. Despite some minor victories in Texas and Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s veto, anti-gay bills remain on the agenda in many US states. Things continue to get worse in Uganda and Russia. What can be done to help stop the abuse? Unlike many other human rights issues, as former Duck contributor Clifford Bob points out, sexual minority rights promotion is an area...