Articles

In this Q&A, Joseph S. Nye talks about his advice for the interim and future president of Harvard in the wake of Claudine Gay's resignation, which countries should be highest on our radar to prevent the threat of nuclear war, what role the U.S. should play in the Russia-Ukraine war, the significance of U.S. alliances in the Middle East, and more.

In recent years, a concerted effort has been made to build up and delineate a discipline of applied history. But there has been little discussion about what applied history is, how the discipline navigates a range of epistemological problems, and how applied history is distinct from other disciplines that use historical data and attend to matters of policy—particularly political science. This article considers some of these questions with respect to two common methods of applied history: analogy and genealogy.

Power transitions affect a state’s ability to exercise economic statecraft. As a dominating and a rising power approach parity, they face structural incentives to decouple their economies. This decoupling affects business-state relations: high-value businesses within the dominant power tend to oppose their state’s economic statecraft because of its costs to them, whereas low-value businesses within the rising power tend to cooperate because they gain from it. 

David C. Logan and Robert C. Watts IV respond to Isaac B. Kardon and Wendy Leutert's spring 2022 article, "Pier Competitor: China's Power Position in Global Ports."

This article examines the trilateral relations between Russia, China, and Iran through their engagement in various issues from domestic, regional, and international levels. It explores the practices and coordination between Russia, China, and Iran in the international order, the Iranian Nuclear Program, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, domestic regime security, and economic connectivity. The article concludes that although Russia, China, and Iran have had overlapping interests and approaches in terms of contesting the Western created and dominated international "liberal" order, strengthening domestic regime security, defending authoritarian governance, and supporting de-dollarization, all of which have brought the three sides closer, a Russia–China-Iran axis has not thus far materialized. Rather, due to the lack of regularized and institutionalized mechanisms, the tripartite relationship remains an illusory entente, which is essentially driven by the bilateral ties followed by modest trilateral coordination in ad-hoc situations.

Trump tied American jobs to endless wars in the Middle East. Biden should link them to renewed diplomacy.

Joseph Nye, Jr.'s Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump skillfully examines modern American presidents and ethics.

Horizontal nuclear proliferation presents what is sometimes referred to as the "Nth country problem," or identifying which state could be next to acquire nuclear weapons. Nuclear fuel cycle technologies can contribute to both nuclear power generation and weapons development. Consequently, observers often view civilian nuclear programs with suspicion even as research on nuclear latency and the technological inputs of proliferation has added nuance to these discussions. To contribute to this debate, the author puts forth a simple theoretical proposition: En route to developing a civilian nuclear infrastructure and mastering the fuel cycle, states pass through a proliferation "danger zone."

William James reviews Comparative Grand Strategy: A Framework and Cases edited by Thierry Balzacq,  Peter Dombrowski, and Simon Reich (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Caleb Pomeroy responds to Michael Beckley’s fall 2018 article, “The Power of Nations: Measuring What Matters.”