Steve Walt opines that "would-be foreign policy wonks" should basically get a classical liberal-arts education, and he uses a traditional justification for this: "In world that is both diverse and changing rapidly, a broad portfolio of knowledge is almost certainly the best preparation for a long career in the field." I'd amend that somewhat, and say that a broad liberal-arts education -- which isn't about gaining a portfolio of knowledge or...
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Friday Morning Linkage
Indonesia's foreign minister warns of "deeper divisions" between China and ASEAN over South China Sea.Taylor Favrel and Dennis J. Blasko assess the new PLA South China Sea garrison Mark Hibbs writes about the risks IAEA inspectors face in Iran. Justin Gengler discusses even yet more depressing developments in Bahrain. Dan Trombly: "No-Fly Zones and Dangerous Labels."Marc Lynch plugs "Morsi's Egypt."I think it would make Cliff Bob happy if I...
Podcast No. 6 – The Brain-Melt Episode
PTJ and Dan discuss academic administration and the foreign-policy rhetoric of the 2012 campaign.
Friday Nerd Blogging Mash Up
H/T to @stephaniecarvin for this bit of silliness: Enjoy your last few days before the students come back, if they have not already done so!
The Sino-Japanese Laser Cat War of 2012
Who will win in a world of .... LASER CATS andhegemonic stability theory?In an interesting thought experiment at Foreign Policy, James R. Holmes (an associate professor at the Naval War College) asks whether China could take Japan on the high seas.In July, China's East Sea Fleet conducted an exercise simulating an amphibious assault on the islands. China's leaders are clearly thinking about the unthinkable. And with protesters taking to the...
Thursday Morning Linkage
The Syrian civil war continues. The state of the Brazilian defense industry.STRATCOM commander "rejects high estimates for Chinese nuclear arsenal" (via Taylor Fravel). Minimal deterrent lives (maybe)!David Allen Green tries to clear the swamp of misconceptions surrounding "the Assange extradition" (via Michael Cohen). Have I become a left-of-center contrarian on wikileaks?An interview with Zbigniew Brzezinksi in The National Interest. Dan...
The Tenure Two-Step
I have spent the past several days at orientation meetings at my new place of employment. I am coming in with tenure (just as I did the last time), so I am not concerned about tenure directly. I do care about tenure procedures because the granting of lifetime employment (essentially) is a pretty serious enterprise and how academic units deal with it shapes the culture of the place. So, in the course of events, I asked questions about it, and...
Wednesday Afternoon Video
Wednesday Morning Linkage
The Department of State Report on "Mutual Assured Stability: Essential Components and Near-Term Actions" (PDF) deserves a thorough analysis.Japanese exports are down, but the country's growth outlook remains better than most advanced industrial democracies. Josh Keating looks at the fate of academics, reporters, and dissidents identified in wikileaks cables. For the record, this is the argument I made to colleagues in order to explain the evil...
Why Ferguson’s Newsweek Blather was Even Dumber than you Realized
Most of the attention paid to Ferguson's anti-Obama Newsweek cover story has focused on his mendacious and unprofessional discussion of the administration's domestic policies -- notably its stimulus and health-care legislation.Less attention has been paid to his foreign-policy criticisms. These are not so much mendacious as the kind of thing you'd expect from a third-rate op-ed hack. Obama didn't use the Oval Office's magical chalice to add +10...
The Peculiar Stability of Instability
The caption for this photo is, no joke, "All the experts posing for a group photo after the event."So, here's all the experts.Conventional wisdom from a foreign-policy expert: It is one of the truisms of our time that because of the sensational development of communications and transportation, the globe has shrunk with distances between formerly far-away countries having been reduced to mere hours of flight time. We all pay continuous lip...
Did the NRA Kill the Arms Trade Treaty?
UN members last month failed to reach agreement on the Arms Trade Treaty after a month-long conference. This is the latest setback in a decades old attempt to control the trade in small arms. A broad network of states, NGOs, and the UN bureaucracy had pushed for the treaty and earlier measures. In their view, proliferation of guns contributes to hundreds of thousands of casualties per year in conflict zones and to large numbers of shooting...