Articles

A interview conducted by The Fletcher School Forum with Ambassador Nicholas Burns, Former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

How do great powers decide whether to arm or ally with client states? Great powers face the “patron’s dilemma”: ensuring clients’ security without being drawn into unwanted conflicts. Thus, great powers offer alliances only to states whose interests closely match their own, and arm only states that are relatively weak and therefore unlikely to behave aggressively. U.S. policies toward Israel and Taiwan reveal that the United States engaged in calculation of its rational interests instead of being influenced by domestic politics.

Many energy consumers, and even analysts and policymakers, confront and frame energy and climate risks in a moral vacuum, rarely incorporating broader social justice concerns. Here, to remedy this gap, we investigate how concepts from justice and ethics can inform energy decision-making by reframing five energy problems — nuclear waste, involuntary resettlement, energy pollution, energy poverty and climate change — as pressing justice concerns.

Professor Meghan O'Sullivan was interviewed on November 15th, 2015 for a Wall Street Journal special section on energy, discussing the rapid transformation of the American energy sector in light of low fuel prices, new climate policies and other factors.

Campbell Craig and Benjamin H. Friedman, Brendan Rittenhouse Green, and Justin Logan respond to Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William C. Wohlforth's Winter 2012/2013 International Security article, "Don't Come Home, America: The Case against Retrenchment."

While the threat of "resource wars" over possession of oil reserves is often exaggerated, between one-quarter and one-half of interstate wars since 1973 have been connected to one or more of eight distinct oil-related causal mechanisms. Understanding these mechanisms can help policymakers design grand strategy and allocate military resources.