Since Stephanie has quoted me on the subject, I thought I’d share some thoughts on intervention and consistency. 1. Consistency is a virtue – but it isn’t the only virtue. Sometimes good judgement points us in the direction of inconsistency; this is so in personal life as well as domestic and international politics. We (most of us) overlook failings in our friends which would upset us in our enemies. In the realm of sexual politics, we...
-- Sir Thursday, Garth NixI'm tired of demands for an articulated "Obama Doctrine."Don't misunderstand me. I think it would be nice if the Obama Administration had an overarching vision for US foreign policy. It might even be a good thing if it could produce something resembling a coherent document on the subject instead of the stream-of-consciousness bureaucratic filler it tends to publish.What I emphatically reject is the idea that Obama...
There’s been some really interesting posts here on R2P in the last few days. At the risk of kicking a dead horse – although I hardly think this horse is dead - I’d like to raise a few points. (I've actually been writing this post over the past few days, and was going to post it later in the week, but Obama's speech tonight made me want to post it earlier. You know, because hasty blogging is always a good thing.)Most of my thinking has been on...
Foreign Affairs has published a longer version of my original remarks about the so-called "Lady Hawks" who supposedly "ball-busted" our presumably lily-livered president into a war ostensibly "not of his choosing." We'll see how he deals with all this, among other things, tonight at 7:30 EST - (my guess: with his own brand of tough-and-tender masculinity) - but in the meantime, here's the capsule version of my scholarly take translated into...
For those keeping score on where the revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East are headed and how to understand it all, it is worth noting that today marked the 30th anniversary of Solidarity's first national warning strike. On March 27, 1981, more than 12 million Poles took to the streets in a peaceful protest action and in defiance of the Communist regime -- a testimony of the power of non-violence. At the time, it was the largest...
International politics is such a bore these days, right? Good thing we have Canada to spice things up for us!There were two interesting developments yesterday for those living in the northern end of North America. First, it was announced that a Canadian, Maj. Gen. Charles Bouchard, will be heading up the NATO mission in Libya. My first thoughts about this were that the choice represents an interesting compromise. Canada, the (French?) vanilla...
So here's a question: How do we evaluate whether or not a humanitarian intervention is successful? The obvious difficulty is that the intervention alters history and we are left with running various counterfactual thought experiments. Here's the Obama administration's take on what would have happened in the absence of intervention. According to Laura Rozen, Dennis Ross and Derek Chollet told reporters that:“We were looking at ‘Srebrenica on...
We're sorry...That some of our soldiers publicly refer to your people in derogatory and racist language.That some of our soldiers shoot your unarmed civilians at random, defile their corpses, and cut off body parts to keep as trophies.That some of our soldiers killed the cousin of your head of state. We didn't even know we were in the hometown of the President, how could we have known he was a Karzai? Oh, right.. we're very sorry.That our...
The official justification for tenure is that it allows scholars to "speak truth to power" without fear of losing their jobs. There's obviously something to that, but I've always looked upon tenure as a form of non-salary compensation. Most college professors make less than they would in other sectors. Tenure compensates us with much greater job security. I'd never thought about it in these terms, but the same reasoning might also apply to...
ISA 2011 featured a book panel on Daniel Drezner's Theories of International Politics and Zombies. Stephanie Carvin created, animated, moderated, and even presented on the roundtable. Other participants included Robert Farley (of LGM), Jeremy Youde, myself, Charli Carpenter, and, of course, Dan D. Topics included:The results of zombie-apocalypse simulations;The global health regime and flesh-eating ghouls;Post-Zombie IR theory;The laws of war...
Women are supposed to be those innocent of war, protected by chivalric warriors. The Trojan War was made over Helen. G. W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq with the platitude that “violence against women is always and everywhere wrong.” Yet Maureen Dowd, in the New York Times Op-Ed Section, notes that the story of the Libyan no-fly zone is one of “a group of strong women swooping down to shake the president out of his delicate sensibilities...
Since Dan is entirely too modest to blog this himself, I thought I'd do it myself:International Security Studies Section Best book Award to: Daniel H. Nexon (Georgetown University) for The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009).Yes, that's right: our very own Dan Nexon won the best book award from the International Security Studies section of...