Peter Jennings, long-time anchor of ABC's World News Tonight, died yesterday. Granted, he hadn't been on the air since April because of complications stemming from his treatment for lung cancer, but his death -- along with the retirements of Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather as the news anchors of NBC and CBS respectively -- seems to me to symbolize something bigger: the demise of the nightly television news program as an institution.No, this isn't an...

Cross-posted on my blog.Last week, I blogged about the G-SAVE: global struggle against violent extremists. Reportedly, the Bush administration decided to toss aside the "war on terror" for this new "catchphrase." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been using some variant of SAVE for over a year, and Joint Chiefs Chair Richard Myers says that the new phrasing recognizes that the threat must be met by diplomatic, economic, and political...

From the AP:Some who don't approve of Bush's job performance admire him personally."I think he tries to be likable and I think he's somewhat honest," said Cindy Bashura, a Democratic-leaning resident of Seymour, Conn. "He tries to do what he thinks is right, but sometimes I think he takes the wrong advice from people in his circle."The "evil advisors who lead the ruler astray" narrative was a mainstay of not only Tsarist Russia, but of many...

Dan Drezner posts on one of the best science-fiction series that was ever cancelled before its time... and the upcoming movie. Firefly, for those of you who don't know, was a Joss Whedon series in which he took the western influences in space opera (Roddenberry described Star Trek, after all, as "Wagon Train to the Stars") and magnified them to create an explicit "space western."I find myself a bit annoyed to discover that the Sci-Fi Channel is...

Cross-posted on my blog.The point of Dafna Linzer's front page story in Tuesday's Washington Post (August 2) is clear from the headline: "Iran Is Judged 10 Years From Nuclear Bomb." A major U.S. intelligence review has projected that Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years, according to government sources with firsthand knowledge of the new...

Some thoughts on Chirol's "History of Empires II". I'll state my basic concern up front: Chirol's "second-generation empires" sound pretty much like what international-relations (and other) scholars call "hegemonic systems." There are a number of good overviews of hegemonic-stability theory available on the web. It holds that, "The stability of the International System requires a single dominant state to articulate and enforce the rules of...

From my inbox:Once I get that PhD, I'll finally be rich!Oh, wait. Never mind.Filed as: spam

I'm sure Chirol has no idea what he's done, but he waved an enormous red flag in front of my face by posting "A History of Empires." Sadly, I can't really respond (yet). I'm two weeks away from moving to Ohio for the 2005-2006 academic year, I owe a coauthor a redraft of a piece on hierarchy in international politics before I leave, and the paper that really addresses these questions is currently sitting in revise-and-resubmit limbo. But, as I...

John Ikenberry has more to say about the differences between neoconservativism and liberal internationalism. John follows up on a post by Michael Lind, the upshot of which is that Wilson, FDR, and Truman were not big on democratic enlargement as a guiding principle of American grand strategy.Lind points out that although Wilson thought a more democratic world was a good thing, American involvement in World War I was not motivated by a desire to...

From: XXXXXXXXSubject: You computer are INFECTED.Date: July 30, 2005 4:08:26 PM EDTTo: XXXXXXXXIt isn't up there with "All your bases are belong to us,", but I thought it was amusing.Filed as: spam

Jack Weisberg thinks so. So do I. But remember, "electable" is different than "will actually win." David Adesnik is unpersuaded, but I think he confuses the two questions.With regard to Point A, Weisberg says thatSen. Clinton's political positioning couldn't be better for 2008. Despite being a shrewdly triangulating centrist on the model of her husband, she remains wildly popular with the party's liberal core: It seems to share the right's...

At Charles Krauthammer. Remind me never to make John mad.Charles Krauthammer is well known as the chief polemicist of the neo-conservative movement and op-ed guru of American unilateralism – and he has just outdone himself in writing the most thoroughly risible piece of foreign policy commentary that I have recently seen. Indeed, it is so absurdly fanciful that it is best read as self-parody.In this new polemical burst, Krauthammer argues that...