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Some self-promotion while I'm away
I'll be spending the next few days at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association in Toronto, so posting will be intermittent at best. If I may indulge in some shameless self-promotion, here are a couple of Web links that some of you might find interesting.
The first is a video of a talk I gave a couple of weeks ago to the "Rethinking Strategy" seminar in Washington. This seminar is sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and attendees include a group of DoD and national security professionals, and my talk was a discussion of the grand strategy of "offshore balancing." The questions and comments were terrific, and I learned a lot from the exchange. There are links to a number of other presentations as well.
The second link is to a recent interview with Peer Schouten, who has assembled a interesting website of interviews with a diverse set of contemporary IR scholars. I was flattered that he invited me, as the other participants are pretty impressive company. His questions covered a wide range of topics and I don't think my answers were all that profound -- but some of our conversation may be of interest to IR theory mavens.
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“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Harvard University.
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It may have been shameless
It may have been shameless self-promotion but that "theory talks" site is great, it's another database of interesting interviews to entertain myself with after I exhaust everyone interesting on "conversations with history".
I liked that you gave longer responses to the questions that most anyone else (except your homeboy Bruce Bueno de Mesquita). Two of your answers struck me, for very different reasons. One was your answer about the international political implications of a "globally integrated information system", and a lot of what I'm reading on future military strategy seems to emphasize future strategies based on "informationalized warfare" (to use an awkward Chinese term) with a focus on striking the 3C systems of an enemy, through things like cyberwarfare. This suggests warfare has changed, like how no one uses things like steel production to indicate war making capacity anymore. What kind of statistics will measure ones main military capabilities in a informationalized era the way steel/coal did in an industrial era? Gross national bandwidth? I suppose energy consumption figures of the types Kennedy used in the Rise and Fall are still nice, but they don't really distinguish between a war making and economic capacity, though in the long term that distinction always breaks down I suppose.
The other thing was your answer on whether you thought Obama is a realist or not, and on GPS with Fareed Zakaria he actually struck a very realist note in his interview for the program, saying he particularly admired the pragmatist/realist (can't recall his exact words) policies of Scowcroft and the first Bush administration, for example. So he is somewhat consciously following the realist paradigm, not merely unconsciously (oh, and he was spotted reading "The Post-American World" though that wouldn't have been my first foreign policy literature recommendation to him). But he's so good at being all things for all people that so many liberal supporters identify him with "hope" and "change" and idealistly-evocative terms and rhetoric.