Articles

Current gross indicators such as population and GDP are misleading in terms of a country’s relative power. Power can be calculated more accurately by subtracting a country’s liabilities from its assets.

"For nearly a century, in short, offshore balancing prevented the emergence of dangerous regional hegemons and pre­served a global balance of power that enhanced American security. Tellingly, when U.S. policymakers deviated from that strategy—as they did in Vietnam, where the United States had no vital interests—the result was a costly failure."

"Iran has always been a major power in that region. Under Saddam however, Iran and Iraq were bitter enemies who fought a long war and were strongly opposed to one another. There was almost a rough balance of power between the two countries. By reducing Iraq's power and by allowing the Shia to become the dominant political force in Iraq, the US removed the main country balancing Iran, and helped bring to power a government that has at least some sympathies and links to Iran. So, Iran is by far the main strategic beneficiary of the Iraq War, which made it even more difficult for the US and its allies to deal with the country."

Contrary to conventional accounts, the United States did not immediately adopt a balancing strategy against the Soviet Union after World War II. Rather, the Eisenhower administration sought U.S. withdrawal from Western Europe by pursuing a buck-passing strategy. Only under the Kennedy administration did the United States begin to make permanent commitments to the defense of Europe. A new theory analyzes this shift in policy, defining those who sought to withdraw from Europe as “negative liberals” and those who sought firmer balancing commitments as “positive liberals.”

"This article first considers the ways in which experimental psychology and psychoanalysis hastened the obsolescence of ideas about the so-called 'primitive mind' and, in some cases, served the purposes of overtly anti-colonial politics. It then surveys the history of intelligence testing in the British Empire, which originated in the aftermath of the First World War, expanded in scale after the Second, and ultimately contributed to post-colonial development. Finally, it asks how far the case of psychology puts the very concept of 'colonial science' into question."

"After the collapse of Cold War bipolarity, power in the global information age became distributed in a pattern that resembles a complex three-dimensional chess game. On the top chessboard, military power is largely unipolar, and the United States is likely to retain primacy for quite some time. But on the middle chessboard, economic power has been multi-polar for more than a decade...with the United States, Europe, Japan, and China as the major players, and others gaining in importance. The bottom chessboard is the realm of transnational relations that cross borders outside of government control. It includes nonstate actors as diverse as bankers electronically transferring funds, terrorists transferring weapons, hackers threatening cyber-security, and threats such as pandemics and climate change. On this bottom board, power is widely diffused, and it makes no sense to speak of unipolarity, multipolarity, or hegemony."

"The conventional wisdom among those who looked at the Middle East used to be that you had a choice either of supporting the autocrat or being stuck with the religious extremists. The extraordinary diffusion of information created in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries reveals a strong middle that we weren't fully aware of. What is more, new technologies allow this new middle to coordinate in ways unseen before Twitter, Facebook, and so forth, and this could lead to a very different politics of the Middle East. This introduces a new complexity to our government's dealings with the region."