As I’ve written before, it is widely acknowledged that the economic health of the United States is a major national security concern. For one, last year Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence declared that the economic crisis had become the U.S.’s “primary near-term security concern.” I decided to read John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Great Crash […]
As you undoubtedly already know, last night Obama announced the end of combat operations in Iraq: What did we accomplish? Where are we going from here and what do we hope to continue to accomplish? How is Iraq related to the geopolitical interests of the United States? Many have taken the time to over the […]
Nine. At least that’s what The Atlantic said last year. In an effort to demonstrate that China is not as monolithic as it may sometimes appear, The Atlantic published an interactive map on its website dividing the People’s Republic of China into nine regions (the interactive feature doesn’t currently work correctly, but you can find […]
There’s been some back and forth this week between Julian Ku and David Bosco about Jeremy Rabkin’s recent critique of the ICC in the Weekly Standard. I’ll add my two cents, for to me, Rabkin’s piece seems like a ghost story told around a campfire. Rabkin intends to make the ICC seem really really scary, […]
Daniel Drezner theorizes that the U.S.’s covert operation to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program is going well and has led to U.S.-Israeli agreement on eschewing preventive strikes against Iran. I think he’s right. Drezner was responding to the New York Times article published in the wake of Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic article. Goldberg reported an apparent consensus […]
The Heritage Foundation published a report by Brett Schaefer earlier this month that argues (unsurprisingly) that the U.S. should remain wary of the ICC (h/t Opinio Juris). I (unsurprisingly) think he’s wrong. The report’s problems begin in its first paragraph: Until recently, U.S. policy toward the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been clear and consistent: […]
Many people claim that international law is not like other law. Some claim it is not even law. (See an earlier post of mine on the subject.) But there are many ways that international law is just like good old municipal law. From a lecture David Kennedy gave last fall: Indeed, many military professionals remain […]
Over the weekend, I listened to the recent Radiolab episode on the power of words to shape our thoughts, feelings, and abilities (watch the accompanying video below). The most interesting part of the episode is when they examine an experiment conducted by Elizabeth Spelke at Harvard. Spelke’s experiment shows an interesting relationship between language and […]
Patrick Frost pointed my way to a Foreign Affairs article published earlier this year, The Best Defense? Preventive Force and International Security, by Abraham Sofaer (downloadable here if you have access). Sofaer argues that unilateral uses of preventive military force are illegal but can be legitimate, and thus states should feel free to eschew international […]
A comments section conversation about WikiLeaks between myself and my FPA-o-sphere colleague Patrick Frost has morphed into a conversation about the morality of American military force. Patrick wrote: The US military’s history of bringing literally unsurpassed prosperity, liberty, and security to the world in the past 70 years cannot even be compared to a minimal […]
Tom Engelhardt expands on the same point I made earlier this week about the hypocrisy of the Pentagon’s condemnations of WikiLeaks. Read Engelhardt’s post here. He ties the issue into the general media bias against U.S.-caused civilian casualties. For example, the highly emotional, attention-getting Time magazine cover, “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan,” could easily […]
“A President McCain would almost certainly have subverted the schedule and tried to keep more troops, and more active combat troops, in Iraq than the Iraqi legislators wanted,” wrote Juan Cole earlier this week. Cole was referring to the Status of Forces Agreement between Iraq and the United States, which states in Article 24: 1. […]
The WikilLeaks aftermath continues, and the FPA’s Afghanistan blog keeps us updated. The Afghanistan writers and I took opposing sides on this issue last week and seemed to be able to remain in the mindset that this is an issue about which reasonable people can disagree. But one of Mike Mullen’s quotes from last week […]
Last week the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence did not violate international law. Read the opinion here. This came as no surprise since international law is largely silent on secession, and as John Cerone wrote at Opinio Juris: Similarly, if I were to stand in my living room […]
Yesterday, the UN General Assembly approved a resolution to make access to clean drinking water and sanitation a human right. The vote was 122-0, with 41 abstentions. Why is this a bad thing? Check out the United States’ justification of its abstention, from the UN’s summary of the proceedings: The representative of the United States […]