The security dilemma plays a central role in Walt and Mearsheimer’s reading of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But what if they get the security dilemma wrong?
What Walt and Mearsheimer Get Wrong About the Security Dilemma
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war
Will Eastern Mediterranean tensions matter to IR if there is no war?
We open each of my undergrad classes with a discussion of current events. In the past four years, there have been several times that students have wondered whether a war may be about to break out:...
Ethical Robots on the Battlefield?
Every day it seems we hear more about the advancements of artificial intelligence (AI), the amazing progress in robotics, and the need for greater technological improvements in defense to “offset”...
Should the United States Arm Ukraine?
With Russia's incursions into Ukraine becoming more aggressive, there has been a lot of chatter about whether or not the U.S. government should arm Ukraine with lethal weapons. Defense Secretary...
More war Posts
Russia’s Coercive Diplomacy against Ukraine: The Power Politics Story
*The following post is written by Ryan Maness and myself. Events are in motion that many thought were past us, part of a bygone era where conventional war still had a prominent place in deciding the course of nations. Having done a great amount of work on Russia’s strategic behavior and use of power (we have a book on the topic under review), we were a bit caught off guard too. Not by the course of events, but that our vision was focused on cyber conflict and thus were distracted from the real world developments. The events in Ukraine fit a recent pattern of Russia’s coercive diplomacy...
Why the Crimea is the Third Rail of International Politics
*this is a guest post by Konstantinos Travlos, currently a Visiting Assistant at Georgia Southern, who writes on international conflict and history. The arguments presented below are based on past research. Russian policy towards Ukraine is partly driven by short term political reasons such as protecting an investment in the form of Yanukovych, the Russian view of Ukraine as a “little brother”, a legitimate worry over the future of the Russian minority in Ukraine, and a very real opposition to what is seen by the Kremlin elite as the meddling of Western powers in its Near Abroad. However, I...
What Patterns of Trade Might Tell us About the Democratic Peace
Stop me if you've heard this one: it appears that wars between pairs of democracies are relatively rare compared to wars between other pairs of states. Some people even think this relationship might be causal. In the decades since this empirical regularity first got everyone's attention, a number of different theoretical arguments have been developed to account for it. A little known problem with all such explanations is that their additional observable implications are at odds with empirical observation. As I mentioned when Dan interviewed me for a Duck podcast, every major explanation...
Regional Variation in the Explanatory Power of War and Reason
Many conversations about the empirical relevance of game-theoretic models of war begin and end with Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman's War and Reason. That's unfortunate, but it's not exactly surprising. Most game-theoretic studies of war do not include any empirical analysis, whereas War and Reason offered a systematic analysis of European dyads. The standards by which BdM and Lalman would have the predictions of the International Interactions Game (IIG) be judged are clear. In the Behavioral Origins of War, Bennett and Stam seek to assess the relative explanatory power of all the major...
Gender, Violence, War, Political Memory
The sailor (George Mendosa) and nurse (Greta Zimmer Friedman) depicted in this iconic photo snapped moments after the announcement that World War II had ended turned out to be complete strangers, and apparently Greta Friedman, the nurse, wasn't kissing back: Mendosa: "It was the moment. You come back from the Pacific, and finally, the war ends,' Mendonsa told CBS. 'The excitement of the war being over, plus I had a few drinks. So when I saw the nurse, I grabbed her, and I kissed her." Friedman: "I did not see him approaching, and before I know it, I was in this vice grip. That man was very...
The Trouble with Combining, or Why I’m Not Touting the Global Peace Index
The Institute for Economics and Peace is making a big splash today with the release of the 2012 edition of its annual Global Peace Index (GPI)---"the world's leading measure of global peacefulness," according to its web site. The launch event for the 2012 edition included several people whose work I respect and admire, and the Institute identifies some of the heaviest hitters in the global fight for peace and human rights---Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama, for crying out loud---as "endorsers" of the GPI.I really want to like this index. I'm a numbers guy, and I've spent most of...
When Life Imitates Sports
Lots of folks use war as analogy for football (US version) or football as analogy for war, such as the blitz starting with war going to football and going back to war. How about we take a key concept from football and from other sports and apply it to US (and perhaps NATO) defense policy: the salary cap? In professional sports, leagues have had to impose restraints upon owners of teams since competition among them (combined with nepotism leading to lousy decision-making) cause salaries to escalate. As a result, bargaining with unions tends to be about the split of the income, with each...
A Reminder
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...