The latest issue of Foreign Affairs has a fascinating piece by Alex Cooley called "Base Politics." Cooley writes about the dilemmas posed by American basing policy in the context of the kinds of political regimes that play host to US military bases. Cooley echoes some of the claims I made way back in a debate over Uzbekistan and K2, but he does so with far greater knowledge and eloquence. None of this is surprising, since Cooley has spent a...

Stuff worth looking at:Zenpundit's roundtable on "Globalization and War" kicked off today. Mark put together a good, and very diverse, group of people to contribute. I'm already annoyed by some of the pieces, which is a good sign (I hope) that the roundtable will provoke some more general blogo-discussion.The Princeton Project on National Security has issued the report (PDF) of its Working Group on Grand Strategic Choices, which was co-chaired...

John Whitesides, of Reuters, writes:Voters across the United States went to the polls on Tuesday in elections that could gauge the depth of President George W. Bush's political woes and affect next year's critical congressional elections....With control of both chambers of the U.S. Congress and 36 governorships at stake in 2006, both parties will scour Tuesday's off-year election results for clues to next year's political climate and the...

There's an interesting discussion (see also here) of the issues raised by the existence of an "information aggregator" for the International Relations job market over on IR Rumor Mill.The experience of looking for a job in the academy - or, at least, in the field of International Relations - can be a very difficult one.[fn1] At least some of the comments are best seen, in my view, as reflecting the psychological toll the job search takes on...

Who, in the wild world of sports, speaks out for peace and social justice in the way that Muhammad Ali once did? After all, this is the age of Nike endorsements and globalization, not protest. Well, did you hear about the former Argentine soccer star who is speaking out against the Free Trade Area of the Americas? You probably did because it was in the news this past weekend.From the BBC: [Ex-soccer star Diego Maradona] "has become the unlikely...

I've been meaning to write a new post on the question of threat inflation and intelligence failures in the run-up to the Iraq War that reacts, in part, to some questionable arguments put forth by one of my favorite center-left bloggers. However, as should be clear from my sparse posting lately, I haven't had a lot of time. So, in the meantime, here's the latest not-so-variation on the theme....Agence France Press:US military intelligence warned...

Ivo Daalder an email from Stephen Cimbala attacking humanitarian interventions. Here's a representative expert:The mechanics of Bush policy are bad enough, but the discussions on policy related Websites show that, in academia as in policy studies, there is insufficient regard for geostrategy and military history - including American history. The Philippine insurrection that followed our victory over Spain was a preview of postwar Iraq from 2003...

Both Patrick Jackson and I taught in Columbia's Contemporary Civilization program (CC) during our stint in graduate school. Contemporary Civilization is the capstone (or, at least, we viewed it that way) in Columbia's core curriculum; it is a classic "Western Civilization" course in the "Plato to NATO" idiom. When we taught it, students read a lot of dead white guys, a few dead white women, a few dead non-whites, and, at our discretion, some...

I got this email from the powers-that-be at Georgetown yesterday:As part of his official visit to the U.S., His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales will be attending a seminar on Faith and Social Responsibility at Georgetown with academic and faith leaders from across the nation on [xxx].The seminar is unable to accommodate additional participants but members of the campus community interested in seeing the arrival and departure of His Royal...

A minor brouhaha over at America Abroad. David Rieff sent an email to Anne-Marie Slaughter (short version: liberal interntionalism inevitably leads to neoconservativism, so stop enabling!). Today, John Ikenberry summarizes Reiff's argument:Behind Rieff’s comments is his own intellectual journey away from the liberal interventionism of the Clinton years chronicled in his recent book, At the Point of a Gun. The Iraq war has led Rieff to question...

Chris Bertram received some flack, apparently, for describing the recent Birmingham race riot as a "pogrom." Today he gets to enjoy a qualified (and somewhat angsty) last laugh:But I see that both the conservative columnist Theodore Dalrymple and the Observer’s Nick Cohen have also noticed the echoes. Dalrymple wrote:The rumour that a 14-year-old black girl had been caught shoplifting by a Pakistani shopkeeper in the Lozells area of Birmingham,...