Sebastian Rosato— The problem of the future is one of both access and reliability. There is simply no way for states to access firsthand information about each other’s future intentions. The reason is that the future does not yet exist. As one author points out, “No man can have in
R.J.B. Bosworth— The far-right party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) evokes the national anthem, written in 1847 as a theme tune of Italy’s unification in the Risorgimento. In October 1946, it replaced the Royal March (Marcia reale) and Fascist anthem, Giovinezza (Youth), which had, until 1943, given the country two national songs
Mark Leopold— From the beginning of my research into the life of the notorious Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, I noticed the frequency with which contemporary commentators (especially but not only British ones) described him as a “buffoon.” So I was interested when, sometime around 2015, the same word became increasingly applied,
Owen Bennett-Jones— At around 1 a.m. on 27 December 2007 Benazir Bhutto was told someone would try to kill her that day. The warning came from no lesser a source than the director general of Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Despite the late hour, Lieutenant General Nadeem
G. John Ikenberry— Liberal internationalism was born in the nineteenth century, and by the century’s end it had begun to crystallize into a recognizable school of thought—a distinctive cluster of ideas and agendas for organizing international relations. The intellectual roots of this tradition trace back to the Enlightenment and the
Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper— Foreign policy elites have reached a near-consensus that the liberal international order led by the United States since World War II is fraying, as its institutions, laws, and norms are growing less effective and its principles of free markets, democracy promotion, constraints on the use
Paola Subacchi— With President Trump at the helm, the United States has been a controversial and divisive leader whose actions have been detrimental for the international order. Indeed, Trump’s presidency has entailed more than the United States retreating from its role as the international leader as it has also become an active force
Kristina Spohr — It is striking that hardly anybody in East or West in the late 1980s foresaw or imagined the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, let alone the demise of the USSR itself. Instead, the public discourse of the time, especially in America, was dominated by predictions of an impending
Pascal Boyer— Nations are often based on ethnicity, but ethnicity itself is a mystery, or it should be. Ethnicity is the notion that a certain group of people share common interests and should unite toward the realization of common goals, by virtue of shared traditions, often language, and in most
John J. Mearsheimer— Many in the West, especially among foreign policy elites, consider liberal hegemony a wise policy that states should axiomatically adopt. Spreading liberal democracy around the world is said to make eminently good sense from both a moral and a strategic perspective. For starters, it is thought to