Kenneth Waltz, via Travis Sharp:To say that militarily strong states are feeble because they cannot easily bring order to minor states is like saying that a pneumatic hammer is weak because it is not suitable for drilling decayed teeth.
ir theory
Dan Drezner (cursed be his name) aptly sums up my thinking on international law and Iraq. First, I think he's quite right to call out John Quiggin on the latter's.
The foreign policy community debate has led down some pretty interesting avenues, one of them being an interrogation of the idea that the United States has "vital interests". The short.
Adding to Matt's commentary on the Daalder/Kagan Democracy League for America plan, it's important to remember that the framers of the UN Charter included the Security Council for a reason. Apart from the problem of disagreements between democracies and the difficulty of determining what precisely...
Peter has an excellent post on analogies of war, and how useful/not useful they may be in constructing policy. I would only add that analogies are more than simply a.
There are some things to like in Helmut's discussion of Fukuyama's NYT piece, in particular his point about the Cold War providing ideological cover for any policy the US wanted.