Back in March, I wrote a post at Lawyers, Guns and Money called “Remember ‘Great Power Competition?’ Lol.” As the “Grand Strategy” of Trump 2.0 comes into focus, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit and update it. In brief, the normie...
It’s hard to keep track of the problems confronting Americans these days. But, just in case a reminder is needed, climate change is still a thing. Casual observers may have noted that US climate...
Labour MP David Lammy has a new piece in Foreign Affairs called, “The Case for Progressive Realism.” Where his manifesto is punchiest is in its unsparing critiques of British foreign policy: the...
Earlier this week, professional opinion-haver Tom Nichols posted a "short" Twitter thread complaining that the push to make IR a social science, combined with the dominance of realism, is leading to...
The debacle over the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ letter on Ukraine reflects the underlying tensions between progressive values and realist grand strategies of restraint—as well as the danger of progressives failing to see the difference between the two.
It turns out that it’s hard to write a roundup of happenings at the Duck of Minerva when there aren’t many to speak of. Much of that’s on me. What’s my excuse? Well, the kid finally contracted COVID. The rest of my family succumbed in short order. So that was fun. On the upside, none of us get seriously ill. On the downside, we got to experience post-COVID fatigue, with a helping of mental fog on the side. We recovered just in time to take our long-planned trip to Thessaloniki. The official purpose of the trip: to participate in 2022 European Workshops in International...
Like a lot of academics, I love Google n-grams, but not as much as the digitized archive Google uses to produce it. It’s a great warren of rabbit holes – even better than wikipedia – and I often wind up following one somewhere or other. My latest journey begins with realism. Steven Walt’s recent Foreign Policy entry (“Why Do People Hate Realism So Much?”) touched off a round of online debate, including entries by Seva Gunitsky, Paul Poast, Patrick Porter, Ken Schultz and others. My daughter suggested that I weigh in. I even began to write a rather lengthy teardown of the kerfuffle. I started...
At its core, the current war in Ukraine reflects an incompatibility of nationalist narratives. Many Ukrainians want to escape Russia’s imperial shadow. Putin wants to reextend that shadow – to erase Ukraine as an independent national identity.
Most versions of the left gain little and sacrifice much in accepting a realist epistemology. Theories of international relations are just tools for making sense of patterns and puzzles in the world; they don’t need groupies.
Two recent interviews in the New Yorker have received substantial attention in recent weeks. Unfortunately, taken together, they make the IR discipline look terrible. How can IR theorists demonstrate their discipline’s relevance in the face of rapidly changing historical events?
In 2014, John Mearsheimer authored a Foreign Affairs article in which he blamed that year’s Ukrai…
The problem with saying that Russia had legitimate security fears and that NATO expansion is partly to blame for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is that it omits some parts of the picture while exaggerating others. It creates a lopsided view. It magnifies every remote and hypothetical security threat to Russia, while ignoring the very real security threats to Russia’s neighbors, and ignoring Western efforts to accommodate Russia’s security concerns. The framing reflects habitual blindspots that have distorted many left-wing perspectives on Vladimir Putin and Russian foreign policy.