Nuclear Issues

This week in Say More, Project Syndicate talks with Joseph S. Nye, Jr., an emeritus professor at Harvard Kennedy School, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense, and the author, most recently, of A Life in the American Century.

In this deeply personal book, Joseph Nye shares his own journey living through the American century.

Stephen Walt analyses the past thirty years of U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East, focusing on five events.

As the best documented major crisis in history, in substantial part because Kennedy secretly taped the deliberations in which he and his closest advisers were weighing choices they knew could lead to a catastrophic war, the Cuban missile crisis has become the canonical case study in nuclear statecraft. Over the decades since, key lessons from the crisis have been adapted and applied by the successors of Kennedy and Khrushchev to inform fateful choices.

Stephen M. Walt advises presidential candidate Joe Biden to embrace nationalism while reaffirming liberal values: They are an election-winning combination.

Stephen M. Walt critiques to Francis Gavin's review of his 2018 book, The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy, and offers his view on how one should not evaluate U.S. grand strategy.

How do presidents incorporate morality into decisions involving the national interest? Moral considerations explain why Truman, who authorized the use of nuclear weapons in Japan during World War II, later refused General MacArthur's request to use them in China during the Korean War. What is contextual intelligence, and how does it explain why Bush 41 is ranked first in foreign policy, but Bush 43 is found wanting? Is it possible for a president to lie in the service of the public interest? In this episode, Professor Joseph S. Nye considers these questions as he explores the role of morality in presidential decision-making from FDR to Trump.

Like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, war with Iran would entail vast economic, budgetary, and environmental costs, argues Linda J. Bilmes. And this is to say nothing of the potential human costs—so why, then, is the United States slipping closer and closer to making the same mistakes it did 16 years ago?

Right now, everything both sides do to strengthen their defenses looks to the other side like preparation for attack.

President Trump’s unconventional foreign policy appeared in disarray amid a series of setbacks around the globe and mounting signs that the president and his advisors were on the verge of losing several risky policy bets.