Salon pisses me off a lot these days. There isn't a single reason. It strikes me as more vapid and less incisive than it used to be... and a lot less daring. I suspect that when the pioneering on-line liberal magazine's obituaries are being written, someone will say that "blogs killed Salon" - which will be particularly ironic, given Salon played some role in popularizing weblogs. Certainly, liberal bloggers are often on "the story" before Salon gets around to publishing anything on it.What's more annoying than the way Salon's "hard" stories disappoint? When their geek-culture analysis gets...

My colleague, Bob Lieber, has a new book out: The American Era: Power and Grand Strategy for the 21st Century.I haven't read nearly as much of it as I should; from what I have seen, it looks to be one of the best defenses of the doctrine of prevention and aggressive US leadership written so far.The blurb reads thusly:he American Era makes a provocative argument about America's world role. It establishes the rationale for a grand strategy that recognizes American preponderance as necessary and desirable for coping with the perils of the post-9/11 world. First, militant Islamic terrorism plus...

Sometimes pondering over this, I am in some degree inclined to their opinion. Nevertheless, not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less.I compare her to one of those raging rivers, which when in flood overflows the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings, bearing away the soil from place to place; everything flies before it, all yield to its violence, without being able in any way to withstand it; and yet, though its nature be such, it does not...

For more than 25 years, the State Department has been required to list all state sponsors of terrorism because such a designation precludes the US from providing foreign aid and exporting arms. Here's the latest list:Country and Designation DateCuba, March 1, 1982Iran, January 19, 1984Libya, December 29, 1979North Korea, January 20, 1988Sudan, August 12, 1993Syria, December 29, 1979On October 20, 2004, Iraq was formally removed from this list. Since May 2003, the President had made terror-related sanctions inapplicable to Iraq, under authority granted by Congress. Iraq, of course, was...

I've been dusting off a long dormant paper on nomadic empires and international-relations theory. While doing so, I came across this discussion of one pathway of pre-modern Central Asian state formation.The centrifugal tendencies of the tribes and the nomad’s natural anarchical inclinations, could be contained only by successful campaigns for booty waged against “outsiders”. This is the paradox inherent in nomadic state-formations, which gives them an ephemeral appearance. A successful nomadic, empire-builder (cf. Attila) forges a nomadic empire with seemingly lightning speed and rules it...

Walter Pincus, staff writer for the Washington Post, reports proposed changes in US nuclear doctrine.The Pentagon has drafted a revised doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons that envisions commanders requesting presidential approval to use them to preempt an attack by a nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction. The draft also includes the option of using nuclear arms to destroy known enemy stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.The document, written by the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs staff but not yet finally approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld,...

The new issue of International Security has a long-awaited forum on the state of the "balance of power" after fifteen-some years of US hegemony and four+ years of the "Bush doctrine." The main focus seems to be soft balancing: what is it, is it happening, does it matter?I haven't read it yet, but it should spark some debate.As if there wasn't enough fodder for blogorama smackdowns about Jared Diamond, my colleague John R. McNeill has a review of Collapse in the new issue as well. The summary:In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond claims that several societies in...

Dan Drezner provides a link to - and discussion of- a new paper on the commercial peace. The paper, written by Columbia's Erik Gartzke, argues that:The transformation of commerce made possible by economic freedom also leads to a transformation in international affairs. Conquest becomes expensive and unprofitable. Wealth in modern economies is much harder to “steal” through force than was the case among agricultural and early industrial societies. This “capitalist peace” has been slow to reach fruition but the tools and evidence are now in place to establish a firmer connection between...