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Climate Change and Military Power: Hunting for Submarines in the Warming Ocean

Climate Change and Military Power: Hunting for Submarines in the Warming Ocean

Climate change will have significant effects on military power, capabilities, effectiveness, and employment. Yet, scholars have paid little attention to this topic. We address this gap by investigating the effects of changing ocean conditions on anti-submarine…

Speaking Out: Why Retired Flag Officers Participate in Political Discourse 

Speaking Out: Why Retired Flag Officers Participate in Political Discourse 

Recent years have seen retired general and flag officers make a variety of political statements and campaign endorsements, sparking enormous controversy and debate among scholars about the fate of the military’s norm of nonpartisanship. Despite this, we have…

War Is from Mars, AI Is from Venus: Rediscovering the Institutional Context of Military Automation

War Is from Mars, AI Is from Venus: Rediscovering the Institutional Context of Military Automation

For nearly a century, the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has been just over the horizon, and yet that horizon is always receding. Dramatic advances in commercial AI once again inspire great hopes and fears for military AI. Perhaps this time will be…

Alliance Commitment in an Era of Partisan Polarization: A Survey Experiment of U.S. Voters

Alliance Commitment in an Era of Partisan Polarization: A Survey Experiment of U.S. Voters

There is rising apprehension that U.S. partisan polarization is making it harder for the United States to keep its international commitments. This could have profound implications for one of the most critical elements of U.S. foreign policy: its commitment to…

Chinese Politics since Hu Jintao and the Origin of Xi Jinping’s Strongman Rule: A New Hypothesis

Chinese Politics since Hu Jintao and the Origin of Xi Jinping’s Strongman Rule: A New Hypothesis

What is the origin of Xi Jinping’s strongman rule? A “victorious Xi” thesis argues that Xi simply won his fight to gain power. But this raises the question of where Xi found the political support to do so. A “collective support” thesis suggests that…

Rethinking Geopolitics: Geography as an Aid to Statecraft

Rethinking Geopolitics: Geography as an Aid to Statecraft

Geopolitics has become marginalized in modern international relations scholarship despite its foundational role. This essay seeks to bring geopolitics back to the mainstream of international relations through conceptual, historical, and theoretical analyses. I…

Restrained Insurgents: Why Competition Between Armed Groups Doesn’t Always Produce Outbidding

Restrained Insurgents: Why Competition Between Armed Groups Doesn’t Always Produce Outbidding

Contemporary civil wars frequently involve numerous armed groups. How do armed groups compete with rival organizations for popular support? Existing research posits that militant organizations operating in the same conflict will often compete for support by…

The Origins of the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait Reconsidered

The Origins of the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait Reconsidered

For over 30 years, policymakers and scholars have taken for granted that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait simply to seize its oil. That narrative misleadingly suggests that the Iraqi invasion happened to coincide with, but was unrelated to, the dawn of the…

Escalation Management in Ukraine: “Learning by Doing” in Response to the “Threat that Leaves Something to Chance”

Escalation Management in Ukraine: “Learning by Doing” in Response to the “Threat that Leaves Something to Chance”

The article analyses a process of escalation management over time between nuclear states under conditions of radical uncertainty. After Russia invaded Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin manipulated uncertainty to manage escalation and to deter NATO support of…

Why Did the United States Invade Iraq? The Debate at 20 Years

Why Did the United States Invade Iraq? The Debate at 20 Years

Twenty years after the Iraq War began, scholarship on its causes can be usefully divided into the security school and the hegemony school. Security school scholars argue that the main reason the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq was to safeguard the…

Sweden, Finland, and the Meaning of Alliance Membership

Sweden, Finland, and the Meaning of Alliance Membership

Rationalist understandings of military alliances argue that a formal treaty underpinning the security relationship is crucial for deepening and rendering more efficient defense cooperation between countries. However, Sweden’s and Finland’s cooperation with…

Just Like Yesterday? New Critiques of the Nuclear Revolution

Just Like Yesterday? New Critiques of the Nuclear Revolution

Four recent books offer compelling political and strategic explanations for why states pursue expansive nuclear and foreign policies. They provide new insights on an enduring question: What are the implications of nuclear weapons for international competition…