Seven years ago today, 28 May 2005, is the day that this blog was, in an important sense, born. The previous day the day Dan officially posted the announcement that The Duck of Minerva was henceforth a collective enterprise (he said "collaborative endeavor," but whatever), and on the 28th, Bill Petti and I started weighing in with posts of our own: Bill on nuclear (non-)proliferation, and me -- in what should have been an early signal that I...

You don't understand the power of offensive realism. From Steve Coll's Private Empire:Vice President Cheney seemed particularly interested in China's vulnerability to U.S. naval power. His experience of the global oil market while running Halliburton had left him with a deep understanding of oil's fungible nature. But his thinking about national security was influenced, too, by historical narratives about the rise and fall of great powers, and...

This is a cross-post from my solo blog, Dart-Throwing Chimp.A few days ago, Sean Langberg blogged about a subject that's long been a pet peeve of mine: how we classify countries when we try to talk about the international system, and the labels we apply to the resulting groups. I thought I'd take the cue to air my grievances on the topic and make a couple of simple suggestions.Taxonomies require organizing principles, and the kernel of the...

I'd write a lengthy comment on this, but with my new administrative responsibilities, I have a full day of meetings on liberal arts assessment and impact -- oh, and some kind of silly discussion on the instrumentalization of education and the vocational turn. Whatever. I'll just say that this should take care of my presentation at new faculty orientation next month.... From Department of Omnishambles: Karl Marx's end of year department...

With Obama's proposed $487bn cuts in defense spending over the next ten years and the potential for another $500bn in cuts through sequestration set to kick in next January if Republicans and Democrats fail to reach the grand bargain compromise on the budget, lots of folks are now harping about the looming threat to American national security if the cuts take hold. Earlier this month, General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., assistant commandant, U.S....

I'm totally not bitter that Tom Friedman'selementary correlations have 165citations on Google Scholar!Kindred Winecoff, who is both very smart and possessed of good taste in linking, discusses the value of social science.Winecoff discusses a recent splenetic venting by a philosopher claiming that social science has no role to play in policy debates, unlike physics or biology. I am unaware of any particular policy implications that flow...

This video is part of an advocacy strategy launched by a new NGO, Article36, whose focus is the humanitarian control of weapons technology. The organization takes its name from the provision in the 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions that requires governments to consider the humanitarian impacts of new weapons.Article 36 operates from a principle that practical, policy and legal controls over weapons should be founded on publicly...