Drew Hogan answers 6+1 questions about how the United States does, and does not, support its overseas citizens.
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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.
Julia Calvert
Julia Calvert is a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at the University of Edinburgh. Her research examines the role that low- and middle-income countries and emerging economies play in shaping global governance institutions, with a special focus on Latin America, trade and investment policy, and international investment law. She is the author of The Politics of Investment Treaties in Latin America (2022, Oxford University...
Resisting a narrative on Israel and antisemitism
I've had four potential posts on Israel, anti-Israel actions and antisemitism this week. As new events occur, the old post falls to the wayside. I was stuck on whether I should pick one, or try to weave the events together into some kind of narrative and draw conclusions. I've decided I can't, or don't want to, do either. And I wonder how much of the morass Israel-Palestine discourse feels stuck in is due to our compulsion to create such a...
Joseph Nye’s other big idea
Renowned international relations scholar and practitioner Joseph S. Nye passed away last week. Numerous tributes have been written, noting his high quality scholarship and influence on US foreign policy. While most have discussed his major idea--soft power--I'd encourage today's IR scholars to look into his work on complex interdependence as well. Soft power and Nye's legacy Many have noted his specific contributions to our understanding of...
Probiotic disinformation
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” is something I would say at the risk of alienating the younger readership of this blog, but given that most of us are old here, it should be fine. I have been busy working on Russian Neo-Nazis, so I almost forgot that back in the simpler times I was also interested in how identities are eaten. Thankfully, a Russian outlet Agentstvo reminded me of that in their recent material about kefir....