Articles

The extraordinary complexity of today’s advanced weapons systems has significantly reduced the ability of states to imitate other states’ military technology. Consequently, U.S. rivals such as China will continue to struggle to develop indigenous capabilities that can match those of the United States.

Richard W. Maass and Carla Norrlof respond to Daniel W. Drezner's Summer 2013 International Security article, "Military Primacy Doesn't Pay (Nearly As Much As You Think)."

Through structured interviews and a literature review, we assess which approaches to protection against insider thefts in the casino and pharmaceutical industries could be usefully applied to strengthen protections against insider theft in the nuclear industry, where insider thefts could have very high consequences.

This paper proposes a network-based modeling framework to facilitate the development of stakeholder analysis of China's energy conservation campaign. Given the proposed framework, an illustrative case study is provided to elaborate how to integrate a set of techniques to further develop a quantitative model, as well as to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed framework. The results derived from the case study shows that the proposed framework and the model can be used as analytical tools to improve the government's policymaking process in term of providing a systematic perspective of stakeholder interrelations.

In 1985, researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School published a book called “Hawks, Doves, and Owls,” and gave it an ambitious subtitle: “An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War.” Those scholars gathered again at the School on Monday (May 16) for a seminar on the current challenges in avoiding nuclear war — and to marvel at just how drastically the nuclear threat has morphed in the two decades since the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed.

States use wedge strategies to prevent hostile alliances from forming or to dis­perse those that have formed. These strategies can cause power alignments that are otherwise unlikely to occur, and thus have significant consequences for international politics. How do such strategies work and what conditions promote their success? The wedge strategies that are likely to have significant effects use selective accommodation—concessions, compensations, and other inducements—to detach and neutralize potential adversaries. These kinds of strategies play important roles in the statecraft of both defensive and offensive powers. Defenders use selective accommodation to balance against a primary threat by neutralizing lesser ones that might ally with it. Expansionists use se­lective accommodation to prevent or break up blocking coalitions, isolating opposing states by inducing potential balancers to buck-pass, bandwagon, or hide. Two cases—Great Britain’s defensive attempts to accommodate Italy in the late 1930s and Germany’s offensive efforts to accommodate the Soviet Union in 1939—help to demonstrate these arguments. By paying attention to these dynamics, international relations scholars can better understand how balancing works in specific cases, how it manifests more broadly in interna­tional politics, and why it sometimes fails in situations where it ought to work well.

After World War II, "trading states" seemed to be charting a new path forward. But small was not beautiful. Even great powers found themselves negotiating larger markets through economic associations with others. It's time the United States became such a power.

"For a time, [Chimerica] was a symbiotic relationship that seemed like a marriage made in heaven. Put simply, one half did the saving, the other half the spending. Comparing net national savings as a proportion of Gross National Income, American savings declined from above 5 percent in the mid 1990s to virtually zero by 2005, while Chinese savings surged from below 30 percent to nearly 45 percent. This divergence in saving patterns allowed a tremendous explosion of debt in the United States, for one effect of the Asian "savings glut" was to make it much cheaper for households to borrow money than would otherwise have been the case."