Take the Donald Trump Foreign Policy Challenge!!
It's the last day of the International Studies Association annual meetings. I'm sleep-deprived, hung over, moderately sunburned, and pretty sick of international relations theory. While this...
View ArticleHow to have a pretty good foreign policy week... ruined by Joe Biden
So it turned out that this was the week that both the Romneycampaign and the Obama campaign decided that foreign policy was an important thing to talk about during election season. Speaking...
View ArticleThe deep strangeness of Israel's national security debate
Buried within James Risen's interesting New York Times front-pager about the easing of Iran tensions is an even more interesting story about the deep weirdness that is going on within Israel's...
View ArticleThe heads, they were blogged
It's been half a year since I did a bloggingheads, so Heather Hurlburt and I donned our headsets to gab away on Mitt Romney's foreign policy travails, the negotiations with Iran, and Egypt's...
View ArticleThe Iran sanctions are crippling. They might work, but not in the way that...
Because Iran's economy was already badly mismanaged, it's been tough at times to discern when Tehran is suffering because of the "crippling" economic sanctions or just rank stupidity. The New York...
View ArticleIt's a little too soon for foreign policy revisionism
Friend of MittWashington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin blogged yesterday about the ten things she thinks Romney needs to talk about with respect to American foreign policy. Now, some of them are pretty...
View ArticleBad analogy cleanup in the Israeli aisle!!
Back in the days when the Doha round was being negotiated, and it was dragging along interminably, inevitably some columnist would trot out a cliche like "time is running out" or "we're in the red...
View ArticleAn apology and a question for Mitt Romney
It appears that I owe Mitt Romney a partial apology. In yesterday's blog post I quoted from a video procured by Mother Jones' David Corn regarding Romney's perspective on the peace process between...
View ArticleArgo -- the Foreign Policy review
Last night your humble blogger went to see Argo, which Ben Affleck directs and stars in. Here's a trailer: Now, those readers who care about things like "cinematography" or "editing" will love this...
View ArticleDoes the international affairs community need some Razzies?
Your humble blogger was innocently surfing the web yesterday when someone linked to Niall Ferguson's latest Newsweek column. Now even though I've warned everyone -- repeatedly -- not to go to there,...
View ArticleR.I.P., American diplomacy?
Roger Cohen has a column modestly titled "Diplomacy Is Dead." Let's see what he's talking about: Diplomacy is dead. Effective diplomacy — the kind that produced Nixon’s breakthrough with China, an...
View ArticleIs the Emergency Committee for Israel going soft on Iran?
Despite the fact that the administration appears to have the votes to confirm Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense, activist groups like the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) continue to pound away...
View ArticleI'm automating my blog posts about Iran
Your humble blogger is a busy man. There are books to write, referee reports to complete, committee meetings to attend, grant proposals to craft, silver prices to fix at the behest of the Council on...
View ArticleHow to lose a foreign-policy debate that you could win
As someone who is pretty friggin' wary about the use of American force in Syria, and as someone who does not shy away from snark in the blogosphere, I found Steve Walt's top ten warning signs of...
View ArticleWhy Obama is arming Syria's rebels: it's the realism, stupid.
Red line!! RED LINE!!! RED LINE!!!!: The Obama administration, concluding that the troops of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria have used chemical weapons against rebel forces in his country’s civil...
View ArticleWhat to expect when your enduring rivals signal something other than what...
So it seems like the remaining Axis of Evil states are sending signals that maybe they want out of the international relations penalty box. First, in Iran's presidential election, the most moderate...
View ArticleSyria, Iran, and The Credibility Fairy
Your humble blogger continues to be interested in the divide between current/former policymakers and academics over the meaning and significance of "credibility" in international affairs. I have bent...
View ArticleChina Goes Public on North Korea
There's a lot going down in the world this week -- unpopular government shutdowns, popular negotiation preliminaries with Iran, ongoing terrorism in Africa, United Nations action on Syria, damaging...
View ArticleThe White House Hasn't Ended the Debate about U.S. Strategy in the Middle...
I think it's safe to say that the Middle East is in flux. It's during moments like these, when uncertainty seems to be pretty high, that a grand strategy is useful. A key point of a good grand...
View ArticleA Short Q&A on Sanctioning Iran
So I see that Secretary of State John Kerry's efforts to brief the Senate on why it should cool it with the Iran sanctions did not go terribly well. At all. Republican senators sharply criticized the...
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