International Security

Jacqueline L. Hazelton reviews Timothy Andrews Sayle, Jeffrey A. Engel, Hal Brands, and William Inboden (eds.). The Last Card: Inside George W. Bush's Decision to Surge in Iraq. (Cornell University Press, 2019).

Pandemics are not always transformative events. While some worrying preexisting trends could accelerate, it’s incorrect to assume that the coronavirus will end globalization, kill liberal democracy, or enhance China’s soft power.

In the highly charged political atmosphere surrounding nuclear initiatives in the Middle East, legitimate concerns are sometimes blown out of proportion, with potentially problematic results. This has been the case with recent coverage and commentary on Saudi Arabia’s nuclear activities, which have been characterized by a degree of what can be described as “threat inflation.”

Calder Walton is interviewed about the defection of the Russian cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, in September, 1945, who revealed to Canadian authorities a web of Soviet espionage spun throughout Canada, with threads running through atomic military research, Canadian parliament, and across the world — in Washington DC, London, and Moscow. Seventy-five years later, we can observe how this single defection sent ripples and cracks throughout the global military and political landscape.

Estimating the long-term effect of the current pandemic is not an exact prediction of the future, but an exercise in weighing probabilities and adjusting current policies. When envisioning the international order in 2030,  joseph Nye details five scenarios that stand out.

Stephen M. Walt offers a reality check about the foreign-policy implications of a sick president.

How do leaders use external events or pressures as political levers to facilitate domestic reforms? In this article, the authors build a theory of aspirational politics to address this question. We show that aspirations to improve a country's international status can help leaders justify the implementation of their preferred domestic policies.

The authors explain why over recent decades, militant groups with the kind of vast international network of affiliates, allies, and supporters that ISIS has assembled have proved difficult to defeat. Alliances have helped ISIS expand and gain influence in good times and have relieved pressure by deflecting attention toward affiliates in bad times. 

In recalibrating its international engagement, Canada should start by deepening its foreign policy collaboration with the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, writes Graeme Thompson.

This article revisits the Cutter Incident in the United States in April 1955 when mass-produced doses of polio vaccine containing insufficiently inactivated (killed) live polio virus were released to the U.S. public. The Cutter Incident also affected subsequent vaccine development and these lessons remain relevant in the international quest to create a rapidly developed vaccine for COVID-19. The Cutter Incident shows how things can go wrong when a vaccine is manufactured in haste and without adequate safety precautions during mass-production