Scholar
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…
Paying the Defense Bill: Financing American and Chinese Geostrategic Competition
In the face of what could be a decades-long competition, the United States and China must consider how they will finance defense spending. Leaders in both states are constrained by an intertemporal dilemma: pay the high political cost of raising taxes today,…
The Organizational Determinants of Military Doctrine: A History of Army Information Operations
For the past four decades, the U.S. Army has made repeated attempts to create an enduring doctrinal framework that describes the role of information in conflict, yet these attempts have been largely unsuccessful. What accounts for this struggle? More broadly,…
The Moral Legitimacy of Drone Strikes: How the Public Forms Its Judgments
Scholars often relate how the public views drone strikes to one of three moral norms: soldiers’ battlefield courage, the protection of soldiers, or preventing civilian casualties. But what explains variation in the public’s perceptions of what constitutes…
Stabilization Lessons from the British Empire
Failures of costly state-building missions in places like South Vietnam and Afghanistan have created a widespread belief that foreign interventions cannot stabilize fragile states. However, a review of the operational principles of British colonialism may…
Correspondence: Fixing the Current System or Moving Toward a Value-Based Globalization?
In this issue’s correspondence section, Mathew Burrows and Robert Manning respond to Aaron Friedberg’s article on the future of globalization, published in Vol 5, Iss 1 of TNSR. Friedberg, in turn, offers his own rebuttal.
Principals with Agency: Assessing Civilian Deference to the Military
When and why do civilian policymakers defer to military expertise? Although scholars agree that civilian deference to military expertise is important to assess the health of civil-military relations, there is much less agreement over the causes of deference,…
What’s Old Is New Again: Cold War Lessons for Countering Disinformation
Hostile foreign states are using weaponized information to attack the United States. Russia and China are disseminating disinformation about domestic U.S. race relations and COVID-19 to undermine and discredit the U.S. government. These information warfare…
Technology Acquisition and Arms Control: Thinking Through the Hypersonic Weapons Debate
Debates in the United States about hypersonic weapons today revolve around acquiring hypersonic missiles and pursuing arms control initiatives, but concern about a hypersonic gap is misplaced and indicates a misunderstanding about the strategic trade-offs and…
Oil for Atoms: The 1970s Energy Crisis and Nuclear Proliferation in the Persian Gulf
The 1970s energy crisis, which rocked global markets and caused oil prices to skyrocket, had a number of far-reaching and unexpected consequences, many of which have become the focus of academic study in recent years. However, one topic that has eluded…
China’s Biomedical Data Hacking Threat: Applying Big Data Isn’t as Easy as It Seems
Concerns have developed in recent years about the acquisition of U.S. biomedical information by Chinese individuals and the Chinese government and how this creates security and economic threats to the United States. And yet, China’s illicit acquisition of…
How Competing Schools of Grand Strategy Shape America’s Nonproliferation Policy Toward Iran
America’s policy toward Iran’s nuclear program has shifted over the past two decades from an exclusive reliance on coercive measures to an emphasis on diplomatic measures and then back again to coercion. What explains the different policies that the United…