Good Morning Duckies... Happy April Fool's Day. Here are some stories which we didn't make up just for this day...: Nicholas Sarkozy will soon be an employee of Qatar. The four year long battle for the Euro is not over. The top US adviser in Afghanistan is a former kebab restaurant owner from Nebraska. The $37 billion Little Crappy Ship (a.k.a. "The Klingon Bird of Prey") is not survivable in combat. The Indian Air Force loses one fighter...
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Nation’s international relations reference librarians despondent as Game of Thrones returns
The Canard "All the fake news that's fit to print" The long awaited return of HBO’s wildly popular fantasy series, the Game of Thrones, has not generated enthusiasm on the part of at least one group. The nation’s international relations reference librarians, those who help students and members of the public research the complicated dynamics of world politics, are sighing collectively as they anticipate the coming months of boredom. During the...
Small Modular Reactors and US Military Bases
Bear with me, because this post has a long backstory. As many of you know, I'm a former policy debater. Indeed, so are a number of guest and permanent bloggers at the Duck of Minerva. And not a few other international-relations scholars. Well, this weekend is the National Debate Tournament (NDT), which is like the NCAA basketball tournament for fast-talking nerds, misfits, and future legal power players. In fact, the two aforelinked Ducks are...
Friday Nerd Blogging: Globalization Edition
Why show a trailer for an Indian zombie movie? Two reasons: it has the word globalization in it; and it helped me make it to the Final Four of Twitter Fight Club 2013. To newbies, the first rule of #TFC13 is to talk about it. So, check out the competition of the international security wonks, and then vote for me on Monday. That way, I can be utterly distracted at the ISA for the finale is Wednesday. Enjoy your weekend.
Jeffrey C. Isaac on the NSF and Political Science
In a piece that's bound to generate controversy among political scientists, Isaac looks at the "big picture" of the defunding of (many forms of) political science via the Coburn Amendment. What's likely controversial about the piece? First, Isaac argues that the defunding of political science is simply a wedge in the broader conservative "war on science." It seems very clear that the move to defund political science is linked to a broader...
Debating the Benefits of Nuclear Superiority for Crisis Bargaining, Part IV
Editor's Note: Back in February I riffed on a post by Erik Voeten in which Erik discussed two articles in International Organization (IO). One, by our colleague Matt Kroenig, argued that nuclear superiority gives states advantages in crisis bargaining (PDF). Another, by Todd Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann, rejects this claim (PDF). After the two posts sparked some interesting discussion--both on- and offline--I approached all three about doing a...
Did You Know that WMD is DMW Spelled Backwards?
Herbert Marcuse had some interesting things to say about certain political acronyms. The meaning is fixed, doctored, loaded. Once it has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in general usage, "sanctioned" by the intellectuals, it has lost all cognitive value and serves merely for recognition of an unquestionable fact. This style is of overwhelming concreteness. The "thing identified with its function" is more real than the thing...
Friday Morning Linkage
Joshua Goldstein and I look at R2P After Syria. But, what will Syria look like after Syria? And, what exactly is the Obama administration doing there? Training and arming the rebels covertly but not with non-lethal military aid -- body armor and night vision. UN arms treaty blocked by Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Go figure. Title is misleading, but this is comprehensive look at Afghanistan -- will likely be at war long after 2014. Current...
Guest Post by Tom Nichols — Iraq War Debate too Driven by Bush Resentment: A Response to Bob Kelly’s Iraq Posts”
I am happy to invite my friend Tom Nichols to guest-post about the continuing Iraq War debate. Tom responded so substantially to my original post series on the war (one, two, three), that I invited him to provide a longer write-up. Tom is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor in the Harvard Extension School. His blog can be found here, his twitter here. His opinions of course are his...
Rule Number One For Graduate School Applicants
Spring (where it exists) is the time of year when applicants to PhD programs find out the outcome and decide where, if any place, to go. While there are many factors that one must take into account, including what might happen if your preferred adviser leaves (Will Moore's take and mine), there is something far more fundamental: are you going to get funding?* If the answer is no, then the decision is painful but easy: don't go....
Bargaining, Capabilities, and Crisis Outcomes
I have enjoyed the recent exchange between Kroenig and Sechser & Fuhrmann (see here, here, and here). One interesting point that came up regards the role of conventional military capabilities in determining crisis outcomes. Kroenig says that the MCT data S&F analyze must be flawed because their results indicate that conventional military capabilities don't matter whereas we have good reason to believe that the strong do what they will...
Debating the Benefits of Nuclear Superiority, Part III
Nuclear weapons may be useful for deterrence, but can they also coerce? Our theories reach opposite conclusions: we say no; Kroenig says yes. Both sides marshal evidence to support their arguments. So who is right? Our goal in this post is to evaluate Kroenig’s empirical results and respond to his critique of our article.