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...

The always smart, always acerbic folks at Coming Anarchy have been getting their chortles by photoshopping Theodor Seuss Geisel's (aka Dr. Seuss) political cartoons from the 1940s. Dr. Seuss was a strong anti-fascist. Many of his cartoons are stinging criticisms of American isolationalists and German sympathizers. These cartoons, among others, are collected in Dr. Seuss Goes to War, by Richard H. Minear. The volume is fascinating; I highly...

Cross posted on my blog. On July 26, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker reported in the New York Times that the US is no longer fighting a global "war on terror" (GWOT): The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, pushing the idea that the long-term struggle is as much an ideological battle as a military mission, senior administration and military officials said Monday.In recent speeches...

Dan Darling and I have been discussing the structure of al-Qaeda. The basic question: how centralized is al-Qaeda? There's been a lot of discussion of this lately. Mark Sageman, for example, is currently plugging his own book on the subject; Sageman argues that the al-Qaeda movement is decentralized and fragmented. As Stygius notes,Marc Sageman was on Sunday's All Things Considered, discussing how al-Qaeda's fragmentation since the invasion of...

Cross-posted on my blog.Monday's Washington Post website has an interesting AP story about some Defense Department legislation proposed by Republican Senators. John McCain (previously identified as my favorite Republican member of Congress), John Warner and up to 10 other GOP Senators are supporting various amendments to a policy bill that would try to reign in the dubious treatment of various prisoners in the "war on terror.""What we're trying...

Wretched responds to the notion that there is no global Islamicist conspiracy.Or sort of. Really, it is just an excuse to attack that old nemesis: "the Left."Although the proposition that organized international terrorism does not exist may seem funny, many writers on the Left seriously believe that terrorism is a derivative phenomenon with no independent existence of its own. It is simply a reaction to Western, and particularly American...