For Mearsheimer “freedom” and “prosperity” are simply weapons of great power politics rather than aspirations sought by the Ukrainian people.
For Mearsheimer “freedom” and “prosperity” are simply weapons of great power politics rather than aspirations sought by the Ukrainian people.
It seems that every pundit, scholar, and borderline academic publishing online has developed a new term to describe the state of war in the system. I can’t browse the pages of Foreign Policy,...
This activity comes after students are to have listened to a lecture (slides) about domestic politics helps us understand variation in the likelihood of international conflict. I focused...
This activity comes after students are to have listened to a lecture (slides) on information problems as an explanation for war—which I'd say is the most useful explanation we've got. The broad...
I am going to try to keep this short, because the function to split the page is not available in this browser ...what browser, you ask? Safari for IPad, I'll tell you.I've decided to make this my first IPad post in part because I was itching to try it, but also because it seemed fitting for it's subject matter...a talk that Peter W. Singer gave at ISA-West in Los Angeles on September 25 on his book,Wired for War. So I thought I would write about Wired for War wirelessly. Funny, right? Maybe I should keep my day job. Maybe.Ok, my thought about this talk and the book is relatively...
Football and War have long been metaphors for each other, with players famously (and infamously in some cases) referring to themselves as "warriors" who will "do battle" on the gridiron led by "field generals" at quarterbacks, throwing "long bombs" to score, and Generals "calling an audible" to launch a "blitz" or a "hail-marry pass." Indeed, those seeking to inject greater tolerance into American culture have long counseled that we do away with such metaphors, as they trivialize war on both sides of the equation. George Carlin saw this years ago. (Updated--repaired link to Carlin's baseball...
Dan recently commented on how the decline in US economic power will likely lead to a rewrite of the post-war global order. Additionally, there are reports that a new intelligence assessment by US agencies is set to be released after the upcoming elections which notes the coming relative decline of US predominance, particularly in the economic realm, by 2025. Now, there have been numerous predictions of US decline that, like the death of Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated. But the current panic in the US economy is on par with the very worst crises we've seen since the Great Depression...
The 2008 Summer Olympic games kicked off today in Beijing, on the same day as Russia and Georgia go to war. Correlation? Causation?John Hoberman's "Think Again" article in the most recent issue of Foreign Policy would have us believe that the Olympics are not only irrelevant to, but actually bad for world order and international cooperation: "The real genius of the IOC is its ability to create and sustain the myth that it promotes peace. In reality... trapped by its grandiose goal of embracing the entire 'human family' at whatever cost, the IOC has repeatedly caved in and awarded the games...
Political leaders have long relied on historical analogies to frame, explain, and justify important policy choices. The current administration is no exception when discussing its policy toward Iraq—the most recent instance occurring when Tony Snow described keeping US forces in Iraq “as we have in South Korea.” Indeed, Iraq has been a war full of analogies: Bush’s father analogized Saddam Hussien to Hitler in the first Gulf War, Rumsfeld wanted to rebuild Iraq like Germany after World War II, the insurgents in Iraq created another Vietnam, though the US did not want to leave like Vietnam,...
Last weekend my wife and kids and I went to visit the National World War Two Memorial that now stands on the Mall in Washington between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. We hadn't been before, and since both of our grandfathers served in WWII, we though it was kind of appropriate for Memorial Day weekend. I don't quite know what we were expecting; I'd heard some of the press about the site's sterility and its nineteenth-century throwback architecture, but if I'd seen a picture of the memorial before I'd managed to flush it from my mind somehow. I know a fair amount about...