by Dan Nexon | 16 Oct 2012 | Featured
tl;dr notice: 1200 words. Zack Beauchamp points us to Douglas Feith's latest broadside against the administration with the tweet: LOL Feith cites @slaughteram and Sam Power's jobs as evidence that Obama wanted to limit American use of military force It turns out that the absurdity runs far deeper in Feith's piece. I know that Obama's fecklessness in the face of the Russian threat is an article of faith among neo-conservatives. As I've mentioned...
by Robert Kelly | 16 Oct 2012 | Featured
George W Bush practically built his re-election effort against John Kerry on the idea that even if you disagreed with him, you consistently knew where he stood on stuff. That commercial above is famous. And the US right in general loves that sort of macho grandstanding on behalf of American will in the face of wimpy, carping detractors - usually Europeans, academics, and liberals, ideally combined. Remember ‘freedom fries’? Palin and McCain...
by Dan Nexon | 16 Oct 2012 | Featured
Democrats are struggling to explain the math behind the Romney-Ryan tax cut proposal. Such forest-for-the-trees stuff isn't really helping. They need to make the big argument: Romney's policies are the same failed policies offered during the Bush Administration, and here's why Obama's proposals will work better. Mark Bowden chronicles the operation that killed Bin Laden. Juan Cole discusses estimates of drone causalities. Marc Lynch on...
by Robert Kelly | 16 Oct 2012 | Featured
(Here and here is the previous Duck debate on this.) The EU? Over a guy regularly facing down death-threats, bullying, and intimidation from one of the worst dictators on earth? Boo to the Nobel Committee for missing this obvious choice. If they can give the prize to the drone-warrior with a kill-list (Obama) and an institution run by wealthy, comfortable lawyers, bankers, and white collar professionals, then surely they can give it to someone...
by Amanda Murdie | 15 Oct 2012 | Featured
Greetings, Duck Followers. I’m Amanda – assistant professor at Mizzou, avid hiker, crazy sci-fi romance novel reader, and pretty competent mother. I’m excited to be a new “duckling” on the block. On the eve of the next US presidential debate, I’ll go out on a limb and guess that the dire human rights situation in Syria will be mentioned. I’ll also bet that neither candidate will say definitively that a humanitarian military intervention is...
by Dan Nexon | 15 Oct 2012 | Featured
This is of interest only to international-relations theorists and fellow travelers. A long-standing claims about hegemonic orders is that they are normative ones: that a dominant power uses a wide variety of power resources to create a set of international rules and regimes conducive to its ideological and material interests. After World War II the United States worked actively to promote norms and institutions consistent with a broadly...
by Charli Carpenter | 15 Oct 2012 | Featured
Along with the face-lift come some new faces to the Duck. Well, new names anyway. We recruited this year based on the desire to increase diversity on the blog, particularly in methodology and area expertise; and also to cover some staple topics while one or more permanent contributors (myself included) cut back for a time to finish book projects and deal with other commitments. Please welcome the following guest bloggers to our site for the...
by Dan Nexon | 15 Oct 2012 | Featured
Analysis of the Chinese 052D Luyang III-class destroyer. David Schorr's April "resolve fairy" post that almost certainly influenced my account of the Romney-Ryan doctrine. Will Romney escalate tensions with China? More on the Iranian-supplied Hezbollah drone downed by Israel. Against Pakistani "sovereignty" objections to US operations. Ukraine supposedly weaponizes dolphins. Jay compares Georgia and Venezuela. Phil Arena discusses "formal...
by Jon Western | 12 Oct 2012 | Featured
The initial reaction from Facebook and from my Realist friends reveals a certain amount of scorn for the Nobel Peace Prize announcement this morning. The EU today is an easy parody and I guess the response is to be expected. Nonetheless, I appreciate Erik Voeten’s post that Dan linked below and share his bottom line that this is a decent decision. I would just add a couple of additional points. First, I agree that if we evaluate or judge...
by Dan Nexon | 12 Oct 2012 | Featured
As I've mentioned before, one of the projects that I'm working on now is a book provisionally entitled "The Politics of the Hunger Games." PM and I are overdue in submitting a full proposal to the press. In an earlier post I sketched out some provisional chapter titles. Here I provide a more complete list and a synopsis of the final chapter. This is definitely a "crowdsourcing" post, so comments are appreciated. Details and spoilers below the...
by Dan Nexon | 12 Oct 2012 | Featured
I scored the Romney-Obama debate as a tactical win for Romney. As of now, it looks more like a strategic one. The lesson for me, I think, is not to assess the political ramifications of debates. So in this post, I'll simply stick to reflecting on the foreign-policy component of the debate, which turned out to be much more prominent than most of us expected. The bottom line is that, with the exception of the earlier Libya exchange, Biden owned...
by Dan Nexon | 12 Oct 2012 | Featured
Erik Voeten is pleased: The Realist argument about the importance of the U.S. security umbrella is probably correct. Yet, the dire predictions regarding the future of European integration have yet to materialize. Indeed, the EU sped up its integration considerably with the end of the Cold War; creating deeper institutions and adding fifteen new member states. The integration of the Eastern European former socialist states has not gone without...