Research

Joseph Nye considers lessons from his own work on preventing the spread of nuclear technology in the 1970s.

Jacqueline L. Hazelton's Bullets not Ballots: Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare (Cornell University Press, 2021)is the subject of a Roundtable Review.

Stephen Walt elaborates on what he is expecting for 2024:  the Israel-Gaza conflict widening, the 75th anniversary of NATO, the possible re-election of Donald Trump, and the election results from other populous democracies, to name a few.

Joseph S. Nye writes that evaluating ethics in international relations is difficult, and Kissinger's legacy is particularly complex. Over his long tenure in government, he had many great successes, including with China and the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Kissinger also had major failures, including in how the Vietnam War ended. But on net, his legacy is positive. In a world haunted by the specter of nuclear war, his decisions made the international order more stable and safer.

This report, by Maxwell Simon (MPP '23) and Jayaram Ravi (MPP '23), explores the drivers of setback and success that China has encountered in the process of developing dual-use and military-dedicated naval installations abroad. It looks at cases where China has considered or actively pursued military-dedicated installations to characterize Beijing’s general approach to overseas naval base acquisition.

Stephen Walt critiques Henry Kissinger's professional life by dividing it into three parts: as an academic at Harvard; as national security advisor and secretary of state; and as an author, pundit, and sage, much of it conducted as the head of Kissinger Associates, the consulting firm he founded after leaving government.

Stephen Walt argues that the true value of more diverse decision-making teams and more open political systems is not that they never make mistakes but rather that they make it more likely that policy blunders will be corrected once it is clear they are not working.

For many, integrating “decarbonization” into public policy, corporate and financial strategies has become a requirement, not an option — yet, what happens when the critical link between climate stability and decarbonization breaks?

Commercial international port terminals owned and operated by Chinese firms provide dual-use capabilities to the People's Liberation Army during peacetime. They enable China to project power into critical regions worldwide by providing military logistics and intelligence networks.

Capital Choices analyzes the creation of different SWFs from a comparative political economy perspective, arguing that different state-society structures at the sectoral level are the drivers for SWF variation. Juergen Braunstein focuses on the early formation period of SWFs, a critical but little understood area given the high levels of political sensitivity and lack of transparency that surround SWF creation. Braunstein’s novel analytical framework provides practical lessons for the business and finance organizations and policymakers of countries that have created, or are planning to create, SWFs.