This piece is the second in a three-part series grappling with the role of political economy in making a just, sustainable international order. Writing about America’s economic strategy deficit got me pondering why the United States had such a stunted economic...
Most of my public comments on Snowden have focused on how to evaluate his actions as a US citizen and someone entrusted with a high-level security clearance. Here I want to focus on an analytical...
About a year ago I introduced an ocasional series called "Quarter-Baked Ideas." The idea was to blog about semi-formed thoughts related to international affairs. The whole notion turned about to be...
This is of interest only to international-relations theorists and fellow travelers. A long-standing claims about hegemonic orders is that they are normative ones: that a dominant power uses a wide...
This is the first in what may become an occasional series. Over the last year or two, I've drifted out of regular blogging. The usual excuses apply: too much work and not enough energy. I am so badly behind on a number of book chapters, manuscript revisions, and the like that the simple act of writing this explanation feels like a misuse of my time. Well, anyway, so my notion is this: write short posts designed to provoke discussion of various issues in international relations and international-relations theory. We'll see if it works. For the last decade or more, unipolarity has been the...
The United States is currently fighting wars in lands that, while distant to us, are not so distant to their inhabitants and US soldiers. I am tempted to carry on about the "new normal," or compare the experience of peripheral wars to that of imperial Britain, France, and Russia. But the fact is that US forces have been engaged in some form of conflict--whether directly or indirectly--pretty much continuously since the start of World War II. And that's a conservative timeline. Still, the most striking thing of the US wars of the twenty-first century is how incidental they've been to most...
Phil Arena does it very effectively.Personally, I don't see how the claim that the US is not in decline follows logically from the observation of changes in Australian policy, Japanese policy, and Burmese policy. What is the logic behind assuming that the US would be less likely to push for all the changes highlighted by Mead if the US was not in relative decline? Is it not at least plausible that states try harder to assemble counter-balancing coalitions in the face of a rising threat?Read the rest.My quick take: There's simply no question that the US is in relative decline on at least some...
Dave Noon Erik Loomis relates two anecdotes about the workings of US power. Both are a bit extreme. The US-Haiti relationship, in particular, is about as unequal as you can get in contemporary world politics. Still, Loomis' stories illustrate why some of us leave short-term stints in government with the impression that Washington is both much more powerful and much weaker than US academics often assume.US officials find themselves significantly constrained by America's web of alliances and economic interdependencies, but that web also privileges their voices in day-to-day interactions...
Four days ago I suggested that time is running out in Libya. With news that Brega has now fallen to pro-Gaddafi forces, it seems more likely than not that the end is nigh for the rebels. And yet France and the UK are still trying to build support for a no-fly zone, now with a major assist by the Arab League. The problem: a no-fly zone isn't going to save the rebellion. An air campaign against Libyan forces, combined with indirect assistance to the rebels might be enough. But that would be a heck of a lots less "sanitary" than advocates of a no-fly zone are hoping for. This makes all of the...
I admit it, I usually look forward to the release of US and international public opinion data. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs just released this year's Global Views survey aptly titled Constrained Internationalism: Adapting to New Realities. Only a quick look so far, but a couple of things jump out on first glance: First, these views strike me as far more rational (in the Page and Shapiro sense) than the general tenor of elite and media discourse. In the past decade, the US has spent roughly half of the world's expenditures on defense (i.e., slightly more than every other country in...