As if on cue the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, yesterday released the US National Intelligence Strategy of the United States (NIS). The WP has a nice article which summarizes the report as well as notes what is different from past reports. Most of the rhetoric in the report is unremarkable. However, the portion of the report getting the most attention is the appearence of democracy promotion as a main strategic objective...

The latest issue of Foreign Affairs contains a review by John Owen IV of Ed Mansfield's and Jack Snyder's Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War. Mansfield and Synder contend, among other things, that a transition from authoritarian to democratic regimes can make states more war prone than it would otherwise have been. As Owen argues, this has profound implications for Iraq:The Bush administration's desire to break with its...

A growing number of professors use podcasting - or the functional equivalent - to distribute their lectures, overviews of readings, and so forth. When I have the time, I know that I want to supplement blogging with podcasting. Our very own Patrick Jackson, on the other hand, has long been on the cutting edge of using technology in the classroom. Perhaps some day he'll tell us about what he's been up to.Meanwhile, Stanford is testing the waters...

Mother Jones recently had a brief note about the Roosevelt Institution, which is a progressive think tank organized by and for college students: The Roosevelt Institution takes students’ ideas out of the filing cabinet and places them on the desks of reporters, civil servants, and politicians so that students’ ideas change public policy. One of the ways Roosevelt brings the innovative ideas of brilliant students to an audience capable of...

Adesnik's latest post confuses me.Much of the incoherence at the heart of Jimmy Carter's foreign policy reflected an inability to reconcile realist anti-interventionism with an idealist commitment to human rights. Today we tend to think of Carter as exclusively a dove and an idealist, but his strongest supporters included liberal realists such as Harvard's Stanley Hoffmann.When Reagan embarked on a crusade against communist Nicaragua, his...

Here's the AP's headline:Lawyers Condemn Oil Tycoon's New HomeWhat's the story about?Lawyers for imprisoned oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky condemned his being sent to a penal colony in Russia's Far East and said Friday they would appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.In early October, after his appeal of the conviction on fraud and tax evasion was rejected, Khodorkovsky was transferred out of a Moscow jail. But the oil magnate's...

From the BBC: A parrot that died in quarantine in the UK has tested positive for avian flu, the government has said.Insert the appropriate Monty Python joke here. I know, I know, it's not funny. It's serious.

Brad DeLong criticizes Dan Drezner thusly,danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: Blog: [Colonel Larry] Wilkerson also points out, however, that there was a stronger pre-war consensus on Iraqi WMD intellgence than many want to believe..."WMD" means chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Nearly everybody in the intelligence community was confident that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. But there was no consensus that...

Apropos my last post: this gem.Words fail me.Filed as: Goldberg

Robert Farley puzzles over Jonah Goldberg's new book, Liberal Fascism : The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton. I haven't read it, but that's never stopped me from making ill-informed comments before. Here's the editorial summary:Since the rise and fall of the Nazis in the midtwentieth century, fascism has been seen as an extreme right-wing phenomenon. Liberals have kept that assumption alive, hurling accusations of...

One of the main reasons I started blogging was to force me to keep up with current events. I spend so much time reading history and social theory that I often lose track of why I wanted to study international relations in the first place. Sometimes, however, the news just isn't all that good, as it was last night.The worst news continues to come out of South Asia, where reports place the death toll at over 79,000. Foreign aid remains inadequate...