Mansur Mirovalev of the AP reports:TASHKENT, Uzbekistan - A senior State Department official said Tuesday the president of Uzbekistan made it clear that American forces must leave their air base in the Central Asian country, and the U.S. intends to do so "without further discussion."The demand came as relations soured following U.S. criticism of Uzbekistan's crackdown on anti-government protesters in May in the eastern city of Andijan.Regular readers of the Duck will know that I think a US-Uzbekistan break is long overdue. However, the way this played out should please no one. The US didn't...

A while back, Marc Lynch threw down the gauntlet and declared the last decade of international politics a vindication for the constructivist approach to international relations.Warning: what follows is a very long post, one that will be primarily of interest to people who care about academic International Relations (IR)Marc wrote:Back in the 1990s, the International Relations subfield of Political Science was consumed by the so-called "rationalism-constructivism" debate. Constructivism argued that mainstream Realist, Liberal, and formal modeling approaches to IR drastically under-stated the...

Via Robert Farley.The title of my twenty-third post was: "Nineteenth-Century Soft Power."The fifth sentence was part of a quotation from Anders Stephanson:Laggard by comparison, the United States nevertheless had enormous potential for emulation.Directions:1. Go into your archive.2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.Passed onto Mark Safranski , Curzon, and Jesse Bennett.

I'd like to think that the Duck's patron saint Max Weber would have been slightly apoplectic after reading this story in this morning's Washington Post about a new museum outside of Cincinnati dedicated to the promulgation of a "Young Earth Creationist" understanding of life, the universe, and everything: "It holds that the world and the universe are but 6,000 years old and that baby dinosaurs rode in Noah's Ark."This would be laughable -- indeed, it even sounds like a Daily Show skit -- except for two very disturbing pieces of information:1) the article points out that polls from last year...

The Mortara Center for International Studies at Georgetown University, with which I will renew my affiliation when I return next year, has a weblog.So far there are three posts.The most recent is by Jeff Anderson, the Director of the BMW Center for German and European Studies. He provides a short post-mortem on the German elections and predicts that " neither Schroeder nor Merkel will succeed in becoming chancellor."There is also a debate between Carol Lancaster, the Director of the Mortara Center, and Michael Hawes, a Visiting Professor in the Government Department, over John Bolton at the...

I don't really understand the nature of the kerfuffle between the good folks at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Justin Gardner of I-can't-say-this-name-without-grimacing Donklephont. It does provide me, however, with an opportunity to quote the Duck's patron saint, Max Weber.The sociology of self-described "moderate" sites (as opposed to people who are simply moderates) on the blogoverse has always interested me (I have a few aborted posts on the subject). Perusing these sites, whether Donklephont or Totten's, one comes away with the distinct impression that "moderate" sites are mostly...

Over at Coming Anarchy, Curzon links to an MA paper by the very well credentialed Steven Huybrechts ("Biology of Conflict: Ruling Out World Government"). Curzon writes,I adhere to a Kaplanesque version of pessimistic realism and fundamentally believe that human beings are hardwired to be violent. Steven Huybrechts agrees in his recent paper Biology of Conflict: Ruling Out World Government, arguing that people naturally divide into tribe-like subgroups destined for conflict. Conclusion: no world government will ever be able to wholly eradicate war, and thinking otherwise will actually make...

Have you noticed this very odd story (from CNN)?:The [Iraqi] official [speaking to CNN on the condition of anonymity] said two unknown gunmen in full Arabic dress began firing on civilians in central Basra, wounding several, including a traffic police officer. There were no fatalities, the official said.The two gunmen fled the scene but were captured and taken in for questioning, admitting they were British marines carrying out a "special security task," the official said.Within three hours, British forces rescued these marines in dramatic fashion, crashing an armored vehicle (escorted by a...