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.
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How do we think about 9/11 in 2025?
I used to feel compelled to write something on 9/11. Some of this was just to participate in the discourse, some out of fear that failure to do so would mean moving on and forgetting. In 2009--back when I provided free labor for The Huffington Post--I wrote this on the shadowy but still serious threat posed by al-Qaeda. More recently, I wrote this on the failure of security studies to adapt in response to 9/11. But I wasn't sure what to say...
Benjamin de Carvalho
Dr. Benjamin de Carvalho joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Ben was born in Switzerland to a mother from Norway and a father from Brazil. Ben talks about how that transpired, growing up in Norway, and how a Fulbright brought him to the United States in the late 90's. Ben recounts his time at the New School for his first Master's, moving to Cambridge for his M.Phil and PhD, and ending back in Norway at the Norwegian Institute of...
Who wants AI in the classroom?
I get emails. Sometimes they find me well; sometimes they try to convince me that I need to bring artificial intelligence (“AI”) into the classroom. “AI is going to revolutionize higher education!” “Prepare your students for the AI-driven job market!” "Resistance is futile!" “Sign up for our workshop!” Despite being bombarded with such messages hyping “AI” (around which I will keep using scare quotes), it remains unclear to me that there is...
6+1 Questions about “The U.S.: A (Mostly) Hands-Off Superpower”
Drew Hogan answers 6+1 questions about how the United States does, and does not, support its overseas citizens.
Is there a strategy behind Rubio’s State Department cuts?
The foreign policy world is still making sense of the Trump Administration's massive cuts to the US State Department last week. Under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, nearly 1500 employees--most of them civil servants--lose their jobs. In some ways, this isn't surprising, as Trump began his second term with a massive, Elon Musk-led, gutting of the federal workforce. But it's still catching some by surprise, given Rubio's reported clash with Musk...
Drew A. Hogan
Drew A. Hogan is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Minnesota. Starting in August 2025, he will be a Predoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies (ISCS) at George Washington’s Elliott School of International Affairs. His research interests include US foreign policy, grand strategy, and rhetoric in foreign policy. Drew holds a BA in political science from Kenyon College and a MALD from the...
After Anarchy? On Hierarchy, Heterarchy, and Multiplicity
Kenneth Waltz famously claimed that anarchy—i.e., the absence of a global sovereign—is the ordering principle of world politics, and much International Relations (IR) scholarship since then has aimed to debunk the claim that anarchy defines IR as a subject. Today, some aim to do so by offering new conceptual foundations for IR. This post is not a relitigation of the “paradigm wars” of the 1980s and ‘90s that Waltz’s work did much to provoke....
Why have so many Muslim communities embraced radicalism?
Over two decades have passed since the horrifying 9/11 attacks. Do we have a consensus understanding of the radicalization process in communities that supported or filled the ranks of jihadist groups, including the likes of al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, Hamas, and the Taliban? The answer (see also here) is a resounding no! As more political science scholars conduct terrorism research than scholars from any other discipline, they have a vested...
Moorthy Muthuswamy
Moorthy Muthuswamy (Email: moorthym@comcast.net) is an independent scholar of violent extremism with a doctorate in nuclear physics from Stonybrook University. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2849-7077
What’s the Matter with Soft Power?
I dislike the term “soft power.” We owe the term to the late, great Joseph Nye. He popularized it in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead. Nye’s book was, first and foremost, an intervention in the “declinism” debates of the later 1980s. Japan was at the peak of its influence; some projected that its economy would overtake that of the United States by the early 2000s. Paul Kennedy’s 1987 bestseller, the Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, argued that...
Trump’s Tariffs and the Profits (and Deficits) of Personality
Dominant theories of international political economy leave little room for the influence of individuals. They also never anticipated that the United States might seek to completely upend the global economic order.