Restraint in US foreign policy is having a moment. That's a good thing. But I worry it's unclear whether restraint is a means or an end, and what that end would be. Without resolving this--preferably in favor of re-imagining a continued US leadership role in the...
The reports about the bilateral agreement between the US and Afghanistan that would allow American troops (and other western countries essentially) have suggested that President Hamid Karzai would...
Twitter went nuts when President Obama said he could not get the Republicans to do what is right because of his finite powers, that he could not do some sort of Jedi mind-meld! He mixed his space...
To the best of my knowledge, no prominent peer-reviewed article in political science has reported a difference in the frequency with which the United States enters into conflict under Democratic...
This is a guest blog by Jarrod Hayes, who is is an assistant professor of International Relations at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research broadly focuses on the social construction of foreign and security policy.The New York Times is reporting that President Obama plans on moving Leon Panetta to the position of Secretary of Defense and David Petraeus to the position of CIA director. While the Panetta move is interesting in its own right (i.e., will Panetta have the force of will necessary to manage the DoD?), what I find far more interesting is the move of General David Petraeus...
Nobody has come close to explaining how strategic narratives work in international relations, despite the term being banded about. Monroe Price wrote a great article in the Huffington Post yesterday that moves the debate forward. As I have already written, strategic narratives are state-led projections of a sequence of events and identities, a tool through which political leaders try to give meaning to past, present and future in a way that justifies what they want to do. Getting others at home or abroad to accept or align with your narrative is a way to influence their behaviour. But like...
There’s been some really interesting posts here on R2P in the last few days. At the risk of kicking a dead horse – although I hardly think this horse is dead - I’d like to raise a few points. (I've actually been writing this post over the past few days, and was going to post it later in the week, but Obama's speech tonight made me want to post it earlier. You know, because hasty blogging is always a good thing.)Most of my thinking has been on the issue of consistency/inconsistency with regards to R2P. I think I agree with Charli, there is no consistency requirement when it comes to R2P. For...
Women are supposed to be those innocent of war, protected by chivalric warriors. The Trojan War was made over Helen. G. W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq with the platitude that “violence against women is always and everywhere wrong.” Yet Maureen Dowd, in the New York Times Op-Ed Section, notes that the story of the Libyan no-fly zone is one of “a group of strong women swooping down to shake the president out of his delicate sensibilities and show him the way to war.” A number of others have been framing this in terms of gender as well.Dowd notes that “we have come a long way from the...
A couple of thoughts on Dana Priest and William Arkin's series that began in the Washington Post yesterday. First, this is the type of story that is all but non-existent in our non-stop 24-hour news cycles -- a two-year investigative report that pulls together thousands of bits and pieces of information and carefully assembles them to tell the bigger story of where we have traveled in the past decade. (I see that the story actually bumped CNN's coverage of Sara Palin's last tweet...) (Update: My bad -- the Post actually featured Palin's last tweet above the Top Secret America in the...
Washington and its "partner" in Kabul are simultaneously pursuing different strategies to try to bring the war in Afghanistan to a conclusion. While the US has opted to pursue a "whack-a-mole" military strategy across Southern Afghanistan that drives the Taliban from one district only to have them pop up in the next one, the Karzai regime is moving forward with its reconciliation strategy. In essence, the Americans have foregrounded a military strategy while the Karzai regime (with some support from the UN) is promoting a political strategy. The US has sidelined the "grand reconciliation"...
My previous remarks about the relative lack of attention to climate change in Obama's speech were written after having read the text of Obama's speech. I stand by those comments - he spent 160 words on nuclear proliferation, 663 on human rights, and 128 on poverty reduction; but only 79 on climate change, which was folded into "freedom from want" rather than separated out into its own section. However, having now listened to the whole thing, I am considerably more blown away about the speech as a whole. For IR scholars and human security specialists, this speech will probably be one of those...
Dan Drezner encourages us to analyze what he said for references to policy prescriptions from IR theories. Steve Walt tells us let's focus not on what he said but on what he does. I'm with those who would focus on what he didn't say as an indicator of what he might or might not do. (Not to be contrarian, but hey.) Namely, with the Copenhagen summit at hand, I'd have liked to see more than just a passing reference to the relationship between the environment and war, and the fact that mitigating the impacts of climate change will be one of our most urgent security problems in the next century....